The Poetry Corner

Sonnet XXVI.

By Fernando Antnio Nogueira Pessoa

The world is woven all of dream and error And but one sureness in our truth may lie-- That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror We know it not by knowing it thereby. For but one side of things the mirror knows, And knows it colded from its solidness. A double lie its truth is; what it shows By true show's false and nowhere by true place. Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet Never from strangeness more than that it's strange Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get But the words' sense from words--knowledge, truth, change. We know the world is false, not what is true. Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.