[In the following excerpt, Stabbs examines Borges's early poetry.]

Borges became famous as a writer through his prose rather than through his poetry. Today he is usually thought of first as the creator of fictional labyrinths, then as the writer of erudite short essays, often on arcane subjects, and only last as a poet. Yet he began as a poet and has worked more or less continuously in this genre. Most important, he reveals more of himself in his verse than in any other kind of writing. The capriciousness and learned frivolity of much of his prose are rarely found in his poetry. By contrast, we see in it the other Borges—the sincere and ardent youth of the twenties or the contemplative and nostalgic writer of the sixties and seventies. For many this is an unknown Borges; perhaps it is the real Borges.

Borges's career as a poet and writer began when he was in his late teens. His travels in Europe and contact with the Spanish avant-garde have already been noted. Like most young literary rebels, the members of the circle with whom he first became associated, the ultraístas, craved innovation and were repelled by the tastes of their fathers. The poetic movement against which they were reacting was modernismo, a rich and complex style of writing that drew heavily on the French fin de sìecle poets: Valéry, Rimbaud, Leconte de Lisle, and others. Led by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and in Argentina by Leopoldo Lugones, modernismo dominated Hispanic letters—in Spain as well as the New World—through the 1890s and well into the twentieth century. It would be impossible to characterize the movement adequately here. It is sufficient to say that on the formal level, the modernistas endeavored to revitalize the poetic lexicon by replacing the tired adjectives of romanticism with new and unusual ones; they experimented with long-forgotten metrical schemes as well as with innovative ones; and perhaps most interestingly, they sought to blend, confuse, and interchange the distinct sensory realms in their poetry. Following the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud, they attempted to establish “correspondences” between sound and color. Taking what the Parnassians had done in their poetry as a point of departure, they tried to create verbal statuary in which the precise tactile and visual terms replaced the romantic's overt egocentrism and emotive vocabulary. From Verlaine they acquired the notion that words possess an inherent musical quality which might be the very essence of poetry. The content of modernista poetry, like its form, differed substantially from the literature that preceded it. The newer poets preferred the artificial, whereas the romantics glorified the world of nature. They held to theories of detachment and objectivity, whereas the romantics exalted the ego and cultivated literary confessionalism. The poets of the 1890s shunned overt political or social involvement, whereas many of their predecessors had been activists and reformers. The modernistas, like the romantics, enjoyed decorating their poetry with the trappings of a distant age, but when they sought escape into the past their favorite periods were the Renaissance and the classical age in contrast to the romantic's love of the medieval. Finally, the typical modernista tried hard to avoid the romantic's penchant for the picturesque: hence he did not concern himself with the Indian, the fatherland, or local color. Instead he wrote of the court of Versailles or of the sensuous refinement of ancient Greece. Though the Spanish American modernistas imitated their European mentors to a great extent, their poetry—particularly the best pieces of the leading writers—had much originality.

It would be inaccurate to claim that Borges's poetry, even that of the early ultraísta period, was merely a reaction to modernismo. It is true that he wished to purge his poetry of certain specific modernista techniques and mannerisms, but like all good poets his objective was to affirm his own poetic values rather than to refute those of his predecessors. Borges admits that he never adhered to the position sketched out in his “Ultraist Manifesto” of 1921. The points he emphasized are nonetheless worth enumerating: the reduction of lyricism to metaphor; the combining of several images in one; and the elimination of adornments, sermonizing, and all forms of poetic filler. A corollary to his view that poetry must be purged of unnecessary embellishments was his conviction that rhyme and meter contributed little to the value of a poem.¹

Borges was less explicit about the thematic materials that ultraísmo was to employ, but in general he favored contemporary rather than antique poetic furnishings. He even proclaimed that the poets of his generation preferred the beauties of a transatlantic liner or of a modern locomotive to the magnificence of Versailles or the cities of Renaissance Italy. This statement is only half-serious: what he meant was that the here and now—the immediate environment—is the logical point of departure for creating genuine lyricism and that the overuse of highly decorative trappings typical of modernista poetry detracted from true lyrical expression and impeded the poetic process.

At first glance, the forty-five short pieces of free verse in Borges's first collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires (Fervor of Buenos Aires, 1923), seem to be little more than a group of vignettes describing familiar scenes in and around his native city. A few, however, present exotic scenes: “Benarés” describes the Indian city of the same name; “Judería” (“Ghetto”), the Jewish quarter of an unspecified but obviously European city. One poem, “Rosas,” takes as its point of departure the figure of Argentina's tyrannical nineteenth-century dictator. A limited number of poems are purely introspective and as such they do not describe any specific external reality. The poems vary from seven or eight lines to as many as fifty, with fifteen to twenty lines being about the average. In keeping with ultraísta precepts, neither regular meter, rhyme, nor regularized strophes are in evidence. The absence of traditional forms does not mean that these poems have no structure: like other writers of free verse, Borges does incorporate formal devices into his poetry. The effectiveness of these devices will be better appreciated after his poetry is examined in greater detail.

The mood of the Fervor de Buenos Aires is established in the opening lines of the first poem, “Las calles” (“Streets”):

The streets of Buenos Aires
have become the core of my being.
Not the energetic streets
troubled by haste and agitation,
but the gentle neighborhood street
softened by trees and twilight …
Las calles de Buenos Aires
ya son la entraña de mi alma.
No las calles enérgicas
molestadas de prisas y ajetreos,
sino la dulce calle de arrabal
enternecida de árboles y ocaso …

(Obre Poetica, 1923–1962; [herafter referred to asOP 64, 17)²

Despite the word Fervor in the collection's title, the reader soon becomes aware that this is a restrained fervor, a reflective passion directed toward an internalization of all that surrounds the poet. This goal is best achieved by selecting that portion of reality which is most easily assimilated: not the bustling downtown streets, but the passive, tree-shaded streets of the old suburbs. It may be a valid generalization to say that in much of his early poetry Borges sought out the passive and manageable facets of reality in order to facilitate the creation of his own internal world. A random sampling of the modifiers used in the Fervor bears out the point. For instance, he writes of “trees which barely mutter (their) being” (“árboles que balbucean apenas el ser”; OP 64, 23); of the “easy tranquillity of (the) benches” (“el fácil sosiego de los bancos”; OP 64, 26); of the “fragile new moon” (“la frágil luna nueva”; OP 64, 43); of “withered torches” (“macilentos faroles”; OP 64, 47); of “the obscure friendship of a vestibule” (“la amistad oscura de un zaguán”; OP 64, 30); of the ray of light which “subdues senile easy chairs” (“humilla las seniles butacas”; OP 64, 34) in an old parlor; and of “streets which, languidly submissive, accompany my solitude” (“calles que, laciamente sumisas, acompañan mi soledad”; OP 64, 57). Borges's frequent use of the late afternoon as a poetic setting may have a similar function. Aside from the obvious fact that the beauty of sunsets and the coming of night have always appealed to writers, the dulling of reality's edges at this time of day gives the poet a special advantage in his task of shaping the external world.

One cannot help wondering why the young Borges felt a need to infuse reality with these qualities of passivity and submissiveness. Perhaps his innate shyness coupled with the experience of foreign travel and subsequent return to the half-familiar, half-alien scenes of his childhood led him to view the world with trepidation and a sense of insecurity. His vocabulary throughout the Fervor is revealing. It clearly indicates that he is seeking tranquillity, familial solidarity, and a kind of serenity that can only be associated with parental protectiveness. Examples are abundant. In “Las calles” he speaks of the neighborhood streets as providing “a promise of happiness / for under their protection so many lives are joined in brotherly love” (“una promesa de ventura / pues a su amparo hermánanse tantas vidas”; OP 64, 17); in “Cercanías” (“Environs”) he writes of “neighborhoods built of quietness and tranquillity” (“arrabales hechos de acallamiento y sosiego”; OP 64, 62); and in the beautifully understated final verses of “Un patio” he sums up the peace and serenity of the traditional Latin residence by exclaiming “How nice to live in the friendly darkness / of a vestibule, a climbing vine, of a cistern” (“Lindo es vivir en la amistad oscura / de un zaguán, de una parra y de un aljibe”; OP 64, 30).

Closely related to Borges's poetic transmutation of “hard” reality into a pliable, manageable reality is his recourse to a certain philosophical notion that comes to occupy a central position in all his work. In “Caminata” (“Stroll”), one of the less anthologized poems of Fervor he writes: “I am the only viewer of this street, / if I would stop looking at it, it would perish” (“Yo soy el único espectador de esta calle, / si dejara de verla se moriría”; OP 64, 58). In “Benarés,” superficially one of the least typical pieces in the collection, Borges describes in considerable detail a place he has never seen. He admits in the opening lines that the city is “False and dense / like a garden traced on a mirror” (Falsa y tupida / como un jardín calcado en un espejo”; OP 64, 53). Yet at the very end of the poem he seems amazed that the real Benares exists: “And to think / that while I toy with uncertain metaphors, / the city of which I sing persists” (“Y pensar / que mientras juego con inciertas metáforas, / la cuidad que canto persiste”; OP 64, 54). In a better known poem, inspired by the Recoleta cemetery, he observes that when life is extinguished “at the same time, space, time, and death are extinguished” (“juntamente se apagan el espacio, el tiempo, la muerte”; OP 64, 20). What Borges is driving at in these poems is made explicit in another piece, “Amanecer” (“Daybreak”). The poem is set in the dead of night, just before daylight appears: with “the threat of dawn” (“la amenaza del alba”), the poet exclaims,

I sensed the dreadful conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
that declares the world
an activity of the mind,
a mere dream of beings,
without basis, purpose or volume.
Resentí la tremenda conjetura
de Schopenhauer y de Berkeley
que declara que el mundo
es una actividad de la mente,
un sueño de las almas,
sin base ni propósito ni volumen.

(OP 64, 47)

In the rest of the poem, Borges follows out the logic of Berkeleyan idealism. There is a brief moment, he writes, when “only a few nightowls maintain / and only in an ashen, sketched-out form / the vision of the streets / which later they will, with others, define” (“sólo algunos trasnochadores conservan / cenicienta y apenas bosquejada / la visión de las calles / que definirán después con los otros”; OP 64, 48). In this moment in which few or no mortals are maintaining the universe, “it would be easy for God / to destroy completely his works” (“le sería fácil a Dios / matar del todo su obra!”; OP, 48). Berkeley, as a corollary to his idealism, posited God as the maintainer of the universe—if and when there were no human beings available to perceive and hence to guarantee its existence. But Borges injects another thought into the poem, and one that is alien to Berkeleyan philosophy. He suggests that there is some danger that God might choose to take advantage of this brief period when the universe hangs by a thread. The implication here is that a capricious, vindictive, or negligent God may actually wish to destroy the world. Rather than in Berkeley, the source for this notion is to be found in Gnosticism, a philosophical current that has shaped much of Borges's thought. “Amanecer,” at any rate, ends on an optimistic note: dawn comes, people awake, God has not chosen to destroy the world, and “annulled night / has remained only in the eyes of the blind” (“la noche abolida / se ha quedado en los ojos de los ciegos”; OP 64, 49).

Two of Borges's best-known essays, written years after the poetry of the Fervor, are intriguingly titled “Historía de la eternidad” (A history of eternity, 1936) and “Nueva refutación del tiempo” (A new refutation of time, 1947). In both these pieces, as well as in many other essays, stories, and poems, Borges's preoccupation with time is most apparent. This very human desire to halt the flow of time persisted through the last years of Borges's career, as we shall note when the poetry of the seventies and eighties is examined. Certain words and phrases that crop up in Fervor illustrate this intense desire. The verb remansar (to dam up, to create a backwater or eddy) and its related adjective remansado are not particularly common terms in the Spanish poetic lexicon though they appear several times in the Fervor and occasionally in later collections. Borges writes of an “afternoon which had been damned up into a plaza” (“la tarde toda se había remansado en la plaza”; OP 64, 25); of a dark, old-fashioned bedroom where a mirror is “like a backwater in the shadows” (“como un remanso en la sombra”; OP 64, 62); of doomlike solitude “dammed-up around the town” (“La soledad … se ha remansado alrededor del pueblo”; OP 64, 67). The significance is obvious: if time is a river, then the poet is seeking the quiet backwaters where time's flow is halted. Though Borges's fascination with time has often been interpreted as an example of a purely intellectual exercise, the very personal sources of this interest should not be overlooked. The traumatic return to Buenos Aires as well as the essential inwardness of his personality clearly help account for the emphasis on this theme in his early work.

In addition to the remanso motif, the Fervor contains other fine examples of Borges's reaction to the rush of time. He begins the poem “Vanilocuencia” (“Empty talk”) by stating “the city is inside me like a poem / which I have not succeeded in stopping with words.” (“La ciudad está en mí como un poema / que no he logrado detener en palabras” OP 64, 32). Although words, especially in the form of poetry, seemingly “freeze” or “pin down” the flow of time, Borges is aware of the crushing fact that the objects of the world are “disdainful of verbal symbols” (“desdeñosas de símbolos verbales”; OP 64, 32) and that despite his poetry every morning he will awake to see a new and changed world. The futility of trying to check the flow of time by literary creations, by recalling the past, or by surrounding oneself with old things appears clearly in the Fervor and subsequently became a dominant theme in all of Borges's writing. His attitude is ambivalent and leads to a poetic tension for he knows that time—in the brutally real, everyday sense—flows on, that the world will change, that he will grow old, and that the past is forever gone. Yet he is reluctant to give in without a struggle, though he knows his efforts are futile. And so the rich and plastic descriptions of antique furniture, of old photographs, and of timeless streets are usually undermined by a word or phrase suggesting that their solidity and apparent timelessness are merely illusory. For example, the old daguerreotypes in “Sala vacía” (“Empty Drawing Room”) are deceiving by “their false nearness” (“su falsa cercanía”), for under close examination they “slip away / like useless dates / of blurred anniversaries” (“se escurren / como fechas inútiles / de aniversarios borrosos”; OP 64, 33). Another possible way of deceiving oneself about time, of “refuting” time, as Borges would later say, is found in the realm of ritualistic activity. The point is well exemplified in “El truco” (“The trick”), a poem whose thematic material is a card game, but whose message is that in playing games—essentially participating in a ritual—“normal” time is displaced. He writes, “At the edges of the card table / ordinary life is halted” (“En los lindes de la mesa / el vivir común se detiene”; OP 64, 27). Within the confines of the table—a magical zone—an ancient, timeless struggle is again waged, and the “players in their present ardor / copy the tricks of a remote age” (“los jugadores en fervor presente / copian remotas bazas”; OP 64, 28). Borges concludes the poem with the thought that this kind of activity “just barely” immortalizes the dead comrades whose struggles are relived. For a brief moment in the heat of the game, past and present are fused. The mythical kings, queens, and princes whose faces decorate the “cardboard amulets” become comrades-in-arms of the twentieth-century Argentine country folk seated about the table.

Borges's poetry, if examined with an objective eye, reveals surprisingly sentimental, affectionate qualities. There are, for example, some touching love poems in Fervor: among these “Ausencia” (“Absence”), “Sábados” (“Saturdays”), and “Trofeo” (“Trophy”) are especially noteworthy. And when Borges writes of his favorite streets, of patios and suburban gardens, he adopts a tone of filial devotion that suggests the warmest of personal relationships. He displays a mood of frankness and sincerity which those who know his work only superficially do not usually associate with him. Indeed, some of the material in the first edition (omitted in later editions) is almost confessional in tone.³ It seems as if the Borges of 1923 were at a crossroads. Had he been a man of different temperament, it is quite possible that he would have yielded to the temptation of creating a literature of unrestrained personal catharsis. Instead, he chose to deny the emotive side of life in his art. At least he promised that he would do this in his poetry. As he writes in one of the last poems of the Fervor: “I must enclose my twilight tears / within the hard diamond of a poem. / It matters not that one's soul may wander naked like the wind and alone …” (“He de encerrar el llanto de las tardes / en el duro diamante del poema. / Nada importa que el alma / ande sola y desnuda como el viento …”; OP 64, 64).

But Borges was not yet ready to sacrifice life and passion to art. Thus he states in the prologue to his second collection, Luna de enfrente (Moon across the way, 1925), that “Our daily existence is a dialogue of death and life. … There is a great deal of nonlife in us, and chess, meetings, lectures, daily tasks are often mere representations of life, ways of being dead.”⁴ He states that he wishes to avoid these “mere representations” of life in his poetry, that he prefers to write of things that affect him emotionally, of “heavenly blue neighborhood garden walls,” for example. It is understandable, then, that among the twenty-eight compositions of Luna de enfrente, poems of deep personal involvement should predominate over pieces of a more detached and formalistic nature. A feeling of intimacy pervades the Luna: a third of the poems are in the second-person familiar form and the bulk of the remainder are in the first person. By contrast, the earlier Fervor contains only a few pieces directed to the familiar “you” (tú), while the majority are in the relatively impersonal third person. A further indication of the greater degree of intimacy of Luna de enfrente is seen in Borges's tendency to personify such inanimate things as the pampa, city streets, and the city itself. Finally, a substantial number of the compositions in the 1925 collection are love poems, among which are such memorable pieces as the “Antelación de amor” (“Anticipation of Love”) and the “Dualidá en una despedida” (“Duality on Saying Farewell”).

Several typically Borgesian themes that appeared in Fervor are again seen in Luna de enfrente. The same tendency to soften or undermine exterior reality is evident in Borges's frequent use of the hazy light of twilight or dawn. This technique is well illustrated in such pieces as “Calle con almacén rosado” (“Street with a pink store”), “Dualidá en una despedida,” “Montevideo,” and “Ultimo sol en Villa Ortúzar” (“Sunset Over Villa Ortuzar”). Of even greater interest in the Luna is the poet's preoccupation with time. In this collection Borges's emphasis is on the relationship between time and memory rather than on the simple desire to halt time's flow. More precisely, memory becomes the remanso, the quiet backwater in which time's onward rush is checked. This relationship is very clear in “Montevideo,” a poem in which Borges states that the more old-fashioned, less bustling Montevideo helps recreate the Buenos Aires of his early memories. Of the Uruguayan city he writes: “Like the memory of a frank friendship you are a clear and calm millpond in the twilight” (“Eres remansada y clara en la tarde como el recuerdo de una lisa amistad”).⁵ A somewhat similar verse appears in the magnificent “Anticipation of Love,” when the poet describes his beloved asleep as “calm and resplendent like a bit of happiness in memory's selection” (“quieta y resplandeciente como una dicha en la selección del recuerdo”; OP 64, 77). In these and other poems memory performs the important function of preserving past experience against the onslaught of time. But, Borges implies, memory is also a storehouse, a kind of infinite filing cabinet, the contents of which we cannot always control. We may indeed remember too much. In “Los llanos” (“The plains”) he writes, “It is sad that memory includes everything / and especially if memories are unpleasant” (“Es triste que el recuerdo incluya todo / y más aún si es bochornoso el recuerdo”; OP 64, 76). Perhaps these lines prefigure Borges's bizarre account—to be written some twenty years later—of “Funes el memorioso,” the man who remembered everything.

Some two years before Borges published Luna de enfrente he was asked to answer a series of questions for a magazine survey of young writers. In answer to a question about his age, he wrote “I have already wearied twenty-two years.”⁶ The choice of words here is significant, for there is the curious tone of the world-weary old man even in his work of the mid-1920s. This tone, contrasting markedly with the passionate lyricism of several pieces in the Luna de enfrente, takes the form of the poet's proclaiming that he has already lived a good deal of his life and that he will do nothing new in the future. The theme is very clear in “Mi vida entera” (“My Whole Life”):

I have crossed the sea.
I have lived in many lands; I have seen one woman and two or three men
… I have savored many words.
I profoundly believe that this is all and that I will neither see nor
do any new things.
He atravesado el mar.
He practicado muchas tierras; he visto una mujer y dos otros hombres.
… He paladeado numerosas palabras.
Creo profundamente que eso es todo y que ni veré ni ejecutaré
cosas nuevas.

(OP 64, 98).

A somewhat similar tone is present in some of the poems describing the pampas: in “Los llanos,” for example, Borges tries to infuse the plains with a feeling of tiredness and resignation suggestive of his own mood. It is difficult to determine what lies behind this pose of bored world-weariness. Is Borges retreating from life or is he simply stating what has become a cornerstone of his esthetic edifice: that there is nothing new under the sun; that changes, progress, novelty, and history are simply a reshuffling of a limited number of preexisting elements? Perhaps this is the philosophy he intends to set forth in the cryptic line that ends his poem “Manuscrito hallado en un libro de Joseph Conrad” (“Manuscript Found in a Book of Joseph Conrad”): “River, the first river. Man, the first man” (“El río, el primer río. El hombre, el primer hombre”; OP 64, 88).

Although history may be nothing more than the recurrence or the reshuffling of what has always been, Borges is nonetheless fascinated by historical events and personalities. Several of the pieces in the Luna show this interest. The dramatic death of the nineteenth-century gaucho leader Quiroga is very effectively commemorated in “El General Quiroga va en coche al muere” (“General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage”); the death of his own ancestor, Colonel Francisco Borges, provides the subject matter of another piece; and “Dulcia linquimus arva” evokes the early days of settlement on the pampas. Of the three, the poem to Quiroga is the most interesting for several reasons. First, the night scene of Quiroga's coach rocking across the moonlit pampa has a dramatic, almost romantic, feeling of movement uncommon in much of Borges's poetry. Second, though he is here still more or less faithful to the free verse tenets of his youth, Borges sees fit to place the poem within a fairly regular structure—rhythmic lines of about fourteen syllables arranged in quatrains having considerable assonance. The effect of this form is striking; it suggests the beat of the horses' hooves and the rocking of the coach racing on toward its encounter with destiny:

The coach swayed back and forth rumbling the hills:
An emphatic, enormous funeral galley.
Four death-black horses in the darkness
Pulled six fearful and one watchful brave man
That sly, trouble-making Córdoba rabble
(thought Quiroga), what power have they over me?
Here am I firm in the stirrup of life
Like a stake driven deep in the heart of the pampa. …
(El coche se hamacaba rezongando la altura:
un galerón enfático, enorme, funerario.
Cuatro tapaos con pinta de muerte en la negrura
tironeaban seis miedos y un valor desvelado.
Esa cordobesada bochinchera y ladina
[meditaba Quiroga] ¿qué ha de poder con mi alma?
Aquí estoy afianzado y metido en la vida
como la estaca pampa bien metida en la pampa;

(OP 64, 80)

It is to Borges's credit as a poet that despite his mild adherence to the restrictive poetic tenets of ultráismo he sensed the rightness of a more traditional form for this particular poem.

In “El General Quiroga va en coche al muere” Borges provides an insight into the kind of historical characters and events that were to dominate much of his later work, especially his prose. What fascinates him are those moments in which an individual—soldier, bandit, or similar man of action—reaches a crucial point in his life, a dramatic juncture where a turn of fate, a sudden decision, or a dazzling revelation cause a man to follow one path rather than another. Such events are delicate points of balance that determine whether a man shall become a hero or traitor, a martyr or coward. Borges was especially intrigued by them since they often provided a glimpse of an alternative track for history. What would have been the course of Argentine history if Rosas had not killed Facundo or if (as in one of his later poems) King Charles of England had not been beheaded? “General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage” is also significant in that it reveals another important side of Borges's interests. Though he may have been a shy and retiring bibliophile, he did have an undeniable affection for men of action. Gunmen, pirates, compadres (a kind of Buenos Aires neighborhood tough), ancient warriors, and modern spies fill the pages of his poetry, essays, and fiction.

The last group of early poems Borges chose to publish as a collection, Cuaderno San Martín (San Martin Notebook, 1929), contains only twelve pieces, one of which, “Arrabal en que pesa el campo” (“Suburb in which the country lies heavily”), has been omitted from more recent editions. Two themes dominate these poems: nostalgia for the past, and death. Often the two blend in a mood of elegiac evocation. Thus in the most memorable poems of the book Borges writes of the “mythical” founding of Buenos Aires; of his beloved Palermo district as it was at the close of the nineteenth century; of his grandfather Isidoro Acevedo; of the final resting place of his ancestors, the Recoleta cemetary; and of the suicide of his friend and fellow poet Francisco López Merino.

What the poet preserves in his memory in a sense lives; only what is gone and forgotten is really dead. In “Elegía de los portones” (“Elegy to gates”), for example, Borges describes the act of forgetting as “a minuscule death” (“una muerte chica”; OP 64, 107). Yet he is perfectly aware that death—real death—is undeniable: he knows that his attempts to negate its reality through memory and through poetry will be frustrated. He is haunted by the song of the wandering slum-minstrel in the poem to the Chacarita cemetery: “Death is life already lived. / Life is approaching death.” (“La muerte es vida vivida, / la vida es muerte que viene”). It even haunts him when he writes, in the same piece, that he doesn’t believe in the cemetery's decrepitude and that “the fullness of only one rose is greater than all your tombstones” (“la plenitud de una sola rosa es más que tus mármoles”; OP 64, 122).

One of the most interesting pieces in the collection is on the death of Borges's ancestor, Isidoro Acevedo. Aside from its intrinsic value, this poem is noteworthy because in it Borges gives a clear hint of the kind of literature he would produce in the decade to follow. This “prefiguring”—to use one of his own favorite terms—of his future prose occurs in the description of Acevedo's last day. The old man lying on his deathbed in a state of feverish delirium plans a complete military compaign in his mind. Though Acevedo only mutters a few fragmentary phrases, Borges uses these as a point of departure to recreate the very concrete fantasy he assumes his moribund grandfather was in effect experiencing:

He dreamt of two armies
that were going into the shadows of battle;
he enumerated each commanding officer, the banners, each unit
He surveyed the pampa
noted the rough country that the infantry might seize
and the smooth plain in which a cavalry strike would be invincible.
He made a final survey,
he gathered together the thousands of faces that man unknowingly
knows after
                    many years:
bearded faces that are probably fading away in daguerreotypes,
faces that lived near his own in Puente Alsina and Cepeda.
He gathered an army of Buenos Aires' ghosts
He died in the military service of his faith in the patria.
Soñó con dos ejércitos
que entraban en la sombra de una batalla;
enumeró los comandos, las banderas, las unidades.
Hizo leva de pampa:
vió terreno quebrado para que pudiera aferrarse la infantería
y llanura resuelta para que el tirón de la caballería
fuera invencible.
Hizo una leva última,
congregó los miles de rostros que el hombre sabe sin saber después
de los años:
caras de barba que se estarán desvaneciendo en daguerrotipos,
caras que vivieron junto a la suya en el Puente Alsina y Cepeda.
juntó un ejército de sombras porteñas
murió en milicia de su convicción por la patria.

(OP 64, 113–14)

Those who are familiar with Borges's fiction may appreciate the similarity of this poem to such short stories as the “Ruinas circulares” (“The Circular Ruins”). There are only a few steps between describing the disturbing concreteness of dreams and suggesting that what we call the real world may actually be the product of some unknown being's dream.

Borges continued to write poetry after 1929, though his output of verse, particularly during the thirties and forties, was not very great. There may be some significance to the fact that between the summer of 1929 and the spring of 1931 he published nothing. This hiatus may have been due to the extremely unsettled political and economic conditions of the period: a similar pattern can be observed in the literary activity of other Argentine writers during the same two years. When Borges resumed publishing, he devoted himself chiefly to essays and literary criticism, genres in which he had been working steadily throughout the twenties. It was not until 1934 that he again began writing poetry. Oddly enough, he broke his poetic silence with two pieces composed in English. These were followed by “Insomnio” (“Insomnia,” 1936), “La noche cíclica” (“The Cyclical Night,” 1940), “Del infierno y del cielo” (“Of heaven and hell,” 1942), “Poema conjectural” (“Conjectural poem,” 1943), and “Poema del cuarto elemento” (“Poem of the fourth element,” 1944). Between March 1944 and April 1953 Borges wrote no poetry; at least he published none. Yet it was during this period that he produced his most celebrated stories and a number of important essays. The seven poems that Borges published between 1934 and 1944 are, at first glance, quite dissimilar in both form and content. The “Two English Poems,” for example, are amorous in theme and are cast in extremely free verse, so much so that they could be regarded as poetic prose:

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men; the ghosts
that living men have honoured in marble:
my father's father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
—just twenty-four—heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.”

(OP 64, 142)

“Insomnio” is also written in free verse, but unlike the “Two English Poems” its lines are generally shorter and its appearance on the printed page is more traditional. “La noche cíclica,” in sharp contrast to most of the poetry Borges had published previously, is written in neat quatrains rhymed in the cuarteto pattern (abba). In the next two poems of this group, “Del infierno y del cielo” and “Conjectural Poem,” Borges reverted to a rather free unrhymed form, only to use the cuarteto again in 1944 in his “Poema del cuarto elemento.” The significance of these formal shifts should not be overestimated: they only indicate that Borges would from this point on be bound neither by the orthodoxy of his free-verse ultraísta years nor by the orthodoxy of traditional forms.

Why Borges chose to write the “Two English Poems” in the language of his paternal grandmother is a matter neither he nor his commentators have discussed. Perhaps these compositions are merely a tour de force or perhaps they indicate a feeling of alienation from the not too pleasant surroundings of Buenos Aires in the early thirties. Certain details in the poems suggest the latter possibility. Borges reveals an ennui and desperation in these pieces that are clearly lacking in the earlier poetry. The opening lines of the first poem are indicative of this mood: “The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street corner.” A bit later he speaks of the night as having left him “some hated friends to chat / with, music for dreams, and the smoking of / bitter ashes. The things that my hungry heart / has no use for.” The piece ends on a note of great intensity summed up in some of Borges's finest lines. At daybreak, the poet says, “The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.” The “lazily and incessantly beautiful” woman to whom the poem is addressed is gone. The poet is left with only memories of the encounter and with a desperate longing: “I must get at you, somehow: I put away those / illustrious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile—that lonely, / mocking smile your cool mirror knows” (OP 64, 140–41). The same tone of desperation pervades the second English poem when the poet asks his beloved:

What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.

Throughout the remainder of the piece—as quotable as any Borges has written—he continues to enumerate what he can “offer.” The last lines reinforce and climax the entire poem: “I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the / hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you / with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat” (OP 64, 142–43). The details of these give a picture of almost surrealistic disintegration: lean streets, shattering dawn, jagged suburbs. These are not typically Borgesian adjectives. And in “Insomnio,” a poem whose intent is admittedly quite different from that of the English pieces, the poet's restlessness is aggravated by visions of “shattered tenements” (“despedazado arrabal”), “leagues of obscene garbagestrewn pampa” (“leguas de pampa basurera y obscena”, and similar scenes (OP 64, 138).

The references to insomnia, to loneliness, to bitterness, and the use of adjectives suggestive of disintegration have little in common with the often ardent, though seldom desperate, poems of the earlier collections. The unusual character of his verse of the thirties points to the fact that he was undergoing a period of transition in his literary career. Borges seems, moreover, to have suffered some kind of personal crisis, aggravated, perhaps, by a political and economic environment distasteful to him. An examination of his prose of the mid-1930s supports this view. It is especially significant that the genesis of his distinctive fiction—a literature of evasion, his critics might say—comes precisely at this time.

Notes

1. Borges, “Ultraísmo,” 466–71.

2. This poem does not appear in later editions of the Obra poética.

3. An interesting example of the poetry suppressed in later editions is “Llamarada.” The piece is actually a prose poem, quite confessional, and even a bit erotic. Note the line, “deseando … perdernos en las culminaciones carnales.”

4. Jorge Luis Borges, Luna de enfrente (Buenos Aires: Proa, 1925), 7.

5. Jorge Luis Borges, Poemas: 1923–1958 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1958), 82. Although it appears in the original and in this 1958 collection, “Monterideo” is omitted from later editions of the Obra poética.

6. Jorge Luis Borges, “Contestación a la encuesta sobre la nueva generación literaria,” Nosotros 168 (May 1923): 16–17.