This said, he shook my hands with all the force of his enormous gratitude, said goodbye and left. I was left alone, with the Panegyric, and what its pages brought back to me is worth a chapter or more. Before that, however—and because I too had my Panegyric—I will tell the story of a sonnet that I never wrote; it was when I was at the seminary, and the first line is as follows:
“Oh, flower of heaven! Oh! flower chaste and pure!”
How and why this line came into my head, I do not know; it came just like that, as I lay in bed, like an isolated exclamation, and, when I realized that it scanned like a line of poetry, it occurred to me to compose something with it, a sonnet. Insomnia, that muse with staring eyes, stopped me sleeping for an hour or two; it was an itch that needed scratching, and I scratched enthusiastically. I didn’t make up my mind on a sonnet right away; at first I thought of other forms, whether in blank verse or rhyme, but in the end I stuck to the sonnet. It was a short, serviceable poem. As for the idea to be expressed, this first line wasn’t yet an idea, merely an exclamation; the idea would come later. So in my bed, wrapped in my sheets, I tried to compose a poem. I was as excited as a mother who feels her child, her first child about to be born. I was going to be a poet, and compete with that monk from Bahia who had only recently been discovered, and was then in fashion; I, a seminarist, would tell of my woes in verse, as he had spoken of his sufferings in the cloister. I got the line by heart, and repeated it to the sheets, under my breath; frankly, I thought it was beautiful, and still now I don’t think it’s bad:
“Oh, flower of heaven! Oh! flower chaste and pure!”
Who was the flower? Capitu, of course; but it could be virtue, poetry, religion, any other concept that would fit the metaphor of flower, and flower of heaven. I waited for the rest, reciting the line over and over, lying now on my left side, now on my right; finally, I lay on my back, with my eyes on the ceiling; even so, nothing more came. Then I remarked that the most lauded sonnets were those that ended with a “golden key,” that is, with one of those lines that sum everything up, in their meaning and their form. I thought of inventing one of these lines, thinking that the final line, if it were composed in order, after the thirteen previous ones, would be unlikely to display such perfection; I imagined that such keys were made before the lock. Thus it was that I decided to compose the last line of the sonnet, and after a great deal of sweating, out came this:
“Though life be lost, the battle still is won!”
Without boasting, and speaking as if someone else had composed it, it was a magnificent line. Sonorous, without a doubt. And there was an idea behind it—victory won at the cost of life itself—which was exalted and noble. It may be that it was not very original, but neither was it commonplace; and still today I cannot explain by what mysterious means it entered into such a young head. At that moment I thought it sublime. I recited the golden key over and over again; then I repeated the two lines consecutively, and set about linking them by the twelve central ones. In the light of the last line, I thought it better that the subject should not be Capitu; it would be justice. It was more appropriate to say that, in the struggle for justice, one might lose one’s life, but the battle was still won. It also occurred to me to take “battle” in the literal sense, and turn it into the battle for one’s country, for example; in that case, the flower of heaven would be freedom. This meaning, however, since the poet was a seminarist, might not be as suitable as the first, and I spent some minutes hesitating between them. I thought that justice was better, but in the end finally chose another idea, that of charity. I then recited the two lines, each in the manner suited to them, the first languorously:
“Oh, flower of heaven! Oh! flower chaste and pure!”
and the second with vigor:
“Though life be lost, the battle still is won!”
The sensation I had was that a perfect sonnet was going to emerge. It was no small thing to have a good beginning and end. To give myself a bath of inspiration, I thought of some famous sonnets, and noticed that most of them had a great ease about them; the lines emanated from each other, like the idea itself, so that you couldn’t work out if the idea had created the verses, or the verses had generated the idea. Then I went back to my sonnet and once more repeated the first line and waited for the second; the second didn’t come, nor the third, nor the fourth: none came. Rage swelled up in me, and more than once I thought of getting out of bed and getting ink and paper. Maybe if I wrote things down, the lines would come, but…
Tired of waiting, I thought of altering the meaning of the last line by turning it round, in the following manner:
“The battle may be lost, but life is won!”
The sense was exactly the opposite, but perhaps this might just bring the inspiration. In this case, the meaning would be ironic: if you do not practise charity, you may win in life, but lose the battle for heaven. I summoned up more strength and waited. I had no window: if I had, I might have gone to ask for an idea from the night sky. Who knows if the fireflies, shining here below, might not have acted as echoes of the stars, and this living metaphor might have given me the elusive lines, with the appropriate rhymes and meanings?
I toiled in vain, searched, scoured, waited, but the lines did not come. Later on in life I wrote some pages in prose, and now I am composing this narrative: I find that there is nothing as difficult as writing, well or ill. Well, gentlemen, nothing consoles me for the loss of that sonnet I never wrote. But, since I believe that sonnets exist ready made, like odes and dramas and other works of art, for such are the laws of metaphysics, I give these two lines to the first person with time on his hands who comes along. Some Sunday, if it’s raining, out in the country, or at any moment of leisure, he can try and see if the sonnet comes out. The whole point is to provide it with an idea and fill the missing middle.