If I obeyed reason
Sara Carvalho
This poem should not have been forgotten because it is a brief, melodic ascertainment of the kind of truth which everyone has already experienced and probably experiences every day – the mind does not live without a body and the latter lays down its will often. Camões would honestly and openly sing about “expecting a body from the one whose soul you take”, and this poem seems to endorse such statement. Reason is not denied, neither is the soul, but it is also true that one cannot perpetually obey reason as that is against nature itself (“…is to deny the sensuality,/in which the heart lives entire.”).
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