We now face a slight scholarly embarrassment. How is it that literary history has thus far failed to identify the obvious vernacular “source” of Camões's poetic inspiration in this extraordinary work? Sôbolos rios is a poem about poetry, and also about poets—subjects treated in a fashion at once responsibly traditional and highly original. One of Camões's principal themes is mutability, the decay of matter, the dissolution of hope, the brevity of human happiness, the impermanence and fragility of life itself. The summary statement of the third décima—vi que todos os danos/ se causavam das mudanças/ e as mudanças dos anos)—is a comprehensive lament for the vanity of human wishes. He writes in, from, and about Babylon. But his pessimism is measurably heightened by the exegetical originality of his interpretation of “Zion,” which at least for the moment offers little relief, as it is to be compared, he says, to time past (tempo passado). From the new and very bleak perspective from which the poet begins, even the superficially happy memories (lembranças contentes) of the past are illusory, insubstantial, and fleeting dreams. “I saw that all the past ‘good’ was not pleasure, but pain.”

Now, among the things that pass away are poets and poetry itself. Were there to be a sixth book of the Consolation of Philosophy there would be no poems in it, for “Boethius” would by then have reached the ethical status of his Hercules. The poetry, as Lady Philosophy makes clear, is a kind of alluring garment, a come-on, a sugar-coated pill needed by those who as yet lack the robust moral health to face the naked truth of prose. We speak of certain modern writers as having a “total commitment” to their art. In a world without religious transcendence—the burden or the comfort of the pre-modern Christian poet— art, politics, philosophy, patriotism, and many other things might be regarded as terminal goods. The serious palinode, which we find even in somber theologians like Augustine and which characterizes such great poets as Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Camões himself, is not a frequent topic of modern literature. The commitment of Luís de Camões to his poetry was intense but contingent, as a reading of the poetry in its full corpus will demonstrate.

A very important structural element of Sôbolos rios, long recognized by the scholars who have analyzed it, is its geometrical and numerological organization. Numerology is not on the whole a science congenial to the contemporary taste. It is also something of a rabbit-hole, down which an incautious scholar can too easily disappear. On the other hand, Camões obviously invested a great deal of energy and ingenuity in perfecting his poem's internal harmonies, which resonate with many of its themes, such as music, proportion, and (as in the Conversión of Juan Boscán), an erring narrator's restitution of moral equilibrium. One simply cannot ignore a major aspect of the poem that its maker obviously regarded as of great significance. This is particular true in that the numerical theme in the poem is closely related to the exegetical instinct.

“I lisped in numbers,” wrote Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century, “for the numbers came.” The idea that certain poets were born to poetry, that poetry was in their blood and made its appearance uninvited in their precocious childish scribblings, was by the age of neoclassicism already a “topos” or recurrent literary theme. Most obviously, Pope was offering a creative imitation of a well-known “autobiographical” poem of Ovid (Tristia iv, 10), in which the Roman poet wrote: “I endeavored to write words disengaged from poetic measures. Spontaneously, my lines ran according to befitting numbers, and whatever I tried to express, the same was poetry.” That the fourth book of the Tristia, and this poem within it, have left upon Sôbolos rios a clear impress in its lines concerning recreational poetry will be obvious to anyone familiar with the two poems.

Certain associations that for us may require a focused lexical review were nearly instinctual for Renaissance poets. For the moment it is enough that Ovid reminds us that among our most ancient words for poetry is numbers. For lyric poetry is song—words artificially organized to the accompaniment of a lyre, a stringed instrument cognate with the psaltery. Another word for a poetic composition intended for stringed accompaniment is psalm. In Camões's poem, which derives from the psalm, poetry and music are coterminous.

My subject in this book will be the vernacular poetic commentary made by Luís de Camões upon Psalm 136, Super flumina. Hispanist editors and critics, who have made the poem known under some such title as “Babylon and Jerusalem,” have frequently acknowledged it as one of the great masterpieces of the lyric poetry of the Renaissance. Its status as scriptural exegesis, however, remains largely unexplored by literary scholars. Yet one cannot get beyond the poem's first word without encountering a significant problem directly related to its exegetical tradition. Is the first phrase of the poem Sobre os rios or Sôbolos rios? We find both forms in the printed texts, and they mean the same thing. There is perhaps a rough parallel with the English phrases on top of and atop, with the latter being a more “poetic” or “euphonious” version of the former.

The first known text of Camões's poem is that in the Cancioneiro or poetic anthology that bears the name of a sixteenth-century owner, Cristovão Borges. It begins Sobre os rios. Quite apart from its temporal priority of recording, which may or may not be a trustworthy indication of textual priority, there is a good reason to attribute considerable authority to this version. The reason is that it includes, in the conventional manner of a medieval or Renaissance scriptural commentary, the Latin text of the scripture verses being commented upon. In exegetical terms, it records both “text” and “gloss.” In other words, the scribe of the manuscript from which the Cancioneiro took the poem's text explicitly acknowledged the genre of the piece—scriptural exegesis.

On the other hand, the Cancioneiro text is radically deficient in one regard. It has only about half the text of the whole poem of the earliest printed editions, ending with a few strophes of commentary on the first five verses of the nineverse psalm. (The fifth and sixth verses are combined in the “textus” apparatus in the Cancioneiro.) There is no plausible way that this could be described as an “early version” of the finished poem of the 1597 edition of Camões's poems, in which the incipit is Sôbolos rios. We are not wont to speak of the first movement of a symphony as an “early version” of the whole work. That is what we have here. The evidence is inconclusive.

George Herbert, a great religious poet and a near contemporary of Luís de Camões, wrote a well-known poem called “The Altar,” the typography for which, when artistically presented on the printed page, actually looks rather like an altar. It is, of course, not Herbert's spatial manipulation of his material that makes it such a good poem. “The Altar” has to earn its readers’ appreciation as all other poems do, on the basis of its intellectual aptness and its verbal felicity. But it can be said that the cleverness with which the poet has handled an external aspect of his construction, linking the form with the intellectual content, makes a good poem even better.

The “numerical” aspects of the construction of Sôbolos rios do not make it a good poem, but they nonetheless magnify its greatness. No one who reads Graça Moura and accepts even half of his claims will doubt that the poet expended a very great deal of thought and ingenuity on his plan, submitting to formal limitations and constraints as well as enabling certain desired possibilities as he did so. He exemplified that ancient Christian aesthetic idea that the human artist could, and so far as possible, should, imitate the creation of the Divine Artificer. Camões structured his poem in such a way as to allow the persistent reader intimations of a higher, an ideal, and permanent stability capable of redeeming the disasters and mudanças of all human life. What is the poem's spiritual trajectory, and what vivid realities do its shadows foreshadow?

Among the striking themes of Sôbolos rios is authorial regret, linked with an expression of emended intention. Viewed from the psycho-theological point of view, which is unquestionably one of the poem's perspectives, the theme is penance. From a secular and literary point of view, the posture is that of the palinode. As with so many aspects of this poem, Camões approaches the subject in a fashion that combines brilliant originality with deference to long-established tradition. In this chapter I propose to examine the aspect of palinode in Sôbolos rios from several points of view.

PAUL's letter to the Romans provided one foundation for medieval theories about secular power. God had established the terrestrial powers that ruled on earth. He had delegated a part of his power to kings and other secular rulers so that they might guide His people to do right, and punish them for their transgressions. Dudo of Saint Quentin developed this idea of divinely delegated authority further with the intention of legitimizing the rule of the dukes of the Normans. He had Rollo chosen by God to establish a dynasty to rule over Normandy. His foundation of a principality based on Rouen was the fulfilment of a divine plan. If God's will were to continue to be done, then the rule of members of Rollo's line had to be maintained. Nonetheless, even when there was a clear heir, Dudo of Saint-Quentin suggested that an assembly might take the lead in demanding the designation of a successor, even if the right to nominate belonged to the duke, and even if the principes always accepted that nomination, and that might have kept the idea of an elective principle alive in the duchy until at least the end of the tenth century.

For the reasons discussed above, William of Jumièges amended Dudo's story in a way that allowed him to dispense with much of Dudo's myth-making, while joining with him in emphasizing the right of Rollo's heirs to rule the duchy. The Christian God is largely absent from his account. Instead, he had Rollo chosen by lot (sorte eligentes) after the arrival of the Viking army at Rouen. According to Rimbert's Life of St Anskar, Danes and Swedes used lots to seek the opinion of the gods on particular matters, but it does not seem to be the case that Jumièges intended his readers to understand that the Norse gods had selected a leader from among the Viking chiefs. Rather, he stated explicitly that this was how those chiefs themselves had chosen or elected Rollo as their leader, adding later that he had been ‘appointed’ as such. The manner of Rollo's election as leader is important, not just because it removed any sense that Rollo and his successors ruled as the result of divine appointment and emphasized the sense of community and cooperation that bound the Normans together.

Introduction

Mary's home was located several miles north of Mbale, a modest town in eastern Uganda that is nestled on the western slopes of Mt. Elgon. Even at ninety-two, Mary had a liveliness in her voice, and she warmly invited me into her house—a tidy, homely, four-room concrete structure whose exterior was a freshly painted yellow. It was not an extravagant house, but it was clean and well swept; things were in their place. Jerrycans arranged according to size and color stood along one of the walls of the dining room, which we could see from her living room, where we sat. I asked her about how she kept her home. She responded:

For Mary, who converted to Balokole Christianity in 1945, being a Mulokole meant that she had to organize her life and her home around new values, values that came from God-given knowledge. She was saved, but her salvation did not seem to be concerned simply—or maybe even primarily—with eternal life.