The Lusiad
Vasco da Gama's voyage to India as Portugal's national epic, in Mickle's couplets.
What this poem is
Os Lusíadas (Portuguese pronunciation: [uʒ luˈzi.ɐðɐʃ]), usually translated as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem written by Luís Vaz de Camões (c. 1524/5 – 1580) and first published in 1572. It is widely regarded as the most important work of Portuguese-language literature and is frequently compared to Virgil's Aeneid (1st c. BC). The work celebrates the discovery of a sea route to India by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (1469–1524). The ten cantos of the poem are in ottava rima and total 1,102 stanzas.
Written in Homeric fashion, the poem focuses mainly on a fantastic interpretation of the Portuguese voyages of discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries. Os Lusíadas is often regarded as Portugal's national epic, much as Virgil's Aeneid was for the Ancient Romans, or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the Ancient Greeks. It was written when Camões was an exile in Macau and was first printed in 1572, three years after the author returned from the Indies.
The poem consists of ten cantos, each with a different number of stanzas (1102 in total). It is written in the decasyllabic ottava rima, which has the rhyme scheme ABABABCC, and contains a total of 8816 lines of verse.
The poem is made up of four sections:
Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Os Lusíadas” (revision 1373303120), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Laurel's own notes and measurements are not from Wikipedia.
Measured across the book
Across its 9,104 lines, 97% of stressed syllables fall on the beat (95% interval 97% to 97%). Alliteration runs at 0.92 times what shuffling the words would give (0.32 observed against 0.35 expected). 4% of the lines have a feminine ending.
Baselines and intervals are described in the methods.
Contents
About this text
Public domain. Text from The Lusiad, Project Gutenberg ebook #32528. Free to read, print, copy and reuse.