To A Woman Poem by Antero Tarquinio de Quental

You have been born for sadness and for pains:
Fate could have placed your narrow baby-bed
In palace, by the royal couch, instead
Of leaving you to grow on sandy plains;

And taken flowers the gay rich girl obtains,
To put across your breast and on your head:
To make you… Fortune always does, it's said.
You'd always be the sort that Fate restrains.

You must be so. Your eyes, fixed in a stare
Are not of this world, and in them I read
An infinite, sad mystery without borne,
And your strange voice, vague and forgotten air

All tell me what I feel and must concede:
That for these things alone you have been born!