This Craft of Verse - Jorge Luis Borges

Source: Poetics, stolen
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One - The Riddle of Poetry 

At the outset, I would like to give you fair warning of what to expect - or rather, of what not to expect - from me. I find that I have made a slip in the very title of my first lecture. The title is, if we are not mistaken, "The Riddle of Poetry," and the stress of course is on the first word, "riddle." So you may think the riddle is all-important. Or, what might be still worse, you may think I have deluded myself into believing that I have somehow discovered the true reading of the riddle. The truth is that I have no revelations to offer. I have spent my life reading, analyzing, writing (or at least trying my hand at writing), and enjoying. I found the last to be the most important thing of all. "Drinking in" poetry, I have come to a final conclusion about it. Indeed, every time I am faced with a blank page, I feel that I have to rediscover literature for myself. But the past is of no avail whatever to me. So, as I have said, I have only my perplexities to offer you. I am nearing seventy. I have given the major part of my lift to literature, and I can offer you only doubts. 

The great English writer and dreamer Thomas De Quincey wrote - in some of the thousands of pages of his fourteen volumes - that to discover a new problem was quite as important as discovering the solution to an old one. But I cannot even offer you that; I can offer you only time-honored perplexities. And yet, why need I worry about this? What is a history of philosophy, but a history of the perplexities of the Hindus, of the Chinese, of the Greeks, of the Schoolmen, of Bishop Berkeley, of Hume, of Schopenhauer, and so on? I merely wish to share the perplexities with you. 

Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars. I mean that they were writing about poetry as if poetry were a task, and not what it really is: a passion and a joy. For example, I have read with great respect Benedetto Croce's book on aesthetics, and I have been handed the definition that poetry and language are an "expression." Now, if we think of an expression of something, then we land back at the old problem of form and matter; and if we think about the expression of nothing in particular,that gives us really nothing. So we respectfully receive that definition, and then we go on to something else. We go on to poetry; we go on to life. And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien - poetry is, as we shall see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment. 

Now, we are apt to fall into a common confusion.We think, for example, that if we study Homer, or the Divine Comedy, of Fray Luis de León, orMacbeth, we are studying poetry. but books are only occasions for poetry. 

I think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cavern which is full of dead men. And those dead men can be reborn, can be brought to life when you open their pages. 

Speaking about Bishop Berkeley (who, may I remind you, was a prophet of the greatness of America), I remember that he wrote that the taste of an apple is neither in the apple itself - the apple cannot taste itself - nor in the mouth of the eater. It requires a contact between them. The same thing happens to a book or to a collection of books, to a library. For what is a book in itself? A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words - or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols - spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word. 

I am reminded now of a poem you all know by heart; but you will never have noticed, perhaps, how strange it is. For perfect things in poetry do not seem strange; they seem inevitable. And so we hardly thank the writer for his pains. I am thinking of a sonnet written more than a hundred years ago by a young man in London (in Hampstead, I think), a young man who died of lung disease, John Keats, and of his famous and perhaps hackneyed sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." What is strange about that poem - and I thought of this only three or four days ago, when I was pondering this lecture - is the fact that it is a poem written about the poetic experience itself. You know it by heart, yet I would like you to hear once more the surge and thunder of its final lines, 

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 

When a new planet swims into his ken; 

Of like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 

He stared at the Pacific - and all his men 

look'd at each other with a wild surmise - 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 

Here we have the poetic experience itself. We have George Chapman, the friend and rival of Shakespeare, being dead and suddenly coming to life when John Keats read his Iliad or his Odyssey. I think it was of George Chapman (but I cannot be sure, as I am not a Shakesperean scholar) that Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote: "Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, / Bound for the prize of all too precious you?" 

There is a word that seems to me very important: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." This "first" may, I think, prove most helpful to us. At the very moment I was going over those mighty lines of Keats', I was thinking that perhaps I was only being loyal to my memory. Perhaps the real thrill I got out of the verses by Keats lay in that distant moment of my childhood in Buenos Aires when I first heard my father reading them aloud. And when the fact that poetry, language, was not only a medium for communication but could also be a passion and a joy - when this was revealed to me, I do not think I understood the words, but I felt that something was happening to me. It was happening not to my mere intelligence but to my whole being, to my flesh and blood. 

Going back to the words, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," I wonder if John Keats felt that thrill after he had gone through the many books of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I think the first reading of a poem is a true one, and after that we delude ourselves into the belief that the sensation, the impression, is repeated. But, as I say, it may be pure loyalty, a mere trick of the memory, a mere confusion between our passion and the passion we once felt. Thus, it might be said that poetry is a new experience every time. Every time I read a poem, the experience happens to occur. And that is poetry. 

I read once that the American painter Whistler was in a cafe in Paris, and people were discussing the way in which heredity, the environment, the political state of the times, and so on, influence the artist. And then Whistler said, "Art happens." That is to say, there is something mysterious about art. I would like to take his words in a new sense. I shall say, Art happens every time we read a poem. Now this may seem to clear away the time-honored notion of the classics, the idea of everlasting books, of books where one may always find beauty. But I hope I am mistaken here. 

Perhaps I may give a brief survey of the history of books. So far as I can remember, the Greeks had no great use for books. It is a fact, indeed, that most of the great teachers of mankind have been not writers but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates, the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates, even as the four evangelists were the dramatists who invented Jesus. This may be going too far, but there is a certain truth in it. In one of the dialogues of Plato, he speaks about books in a rather disparaging way: "What is a book? A book seems, like a picture, to be a living being; and yet if we ask it something, it does not answer. Then we see that it is dead." In order to make the book into a living thing, he invented - happily for us - the Platonic dialogue, which forestalls the reader's doubts and questions. 

But we might say also that Plato was wistful about Socrates. After Socrates' death, he would say to himself, "Now, what would Socrates have said about this particular doubt of mine?" And then, in order to hear once again the voice of the master he loved, he wrote the dialogues. In some of those dialogues, Socrates stands for the truth. In others, Plato has dramatized his many moods. And some of those dialogues come to no conclusion whatever, because Plato was thinking as he wrote them; he did not know the last page when he wrote the first. He was letting his mind wander, and he was dramatizing that mind into many people. I suppose his chief aim was the illusion that, despite the fact that Socrates had drunk the hemlock, Socrates was still with him. I feel this to be true because I have had many masters in my life. I am proud to be a disciple - a good disciple, I hope. And when I think of my father, when I think of the great Jewish-Spanish author Rafael Cansinos-Asséns,* when I think of Macedonio Fernández,** I would also like to hear their voices. And sometimes I train my voice into a trick of imitating their voice, in order that I may think as they would have thought. They are always around me. 

*Rafael Cansinos-Asséns us the Andalusian writer of whose "magnificent memories" Borges never tired of speaking. While in Madrid in the early 1920s, the young Argentine frequented his literary circle. "Meeting him, I seemed to encounter he libraries of the Orient and of the West." Cansinos-Asséns, who boasted that he could salute the stars in fourteen languages (or seventeen, as Borges said on another occasion) - both classical and modern - did translations from French, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew. 

** Macedonio Fernández was a proponent of absolute idealism who exerted a steady fascination upon Borges. He was one of the two authors whom Borges compared to Adam for their sense of beginning (the other was Walt Whitman). This most promising unconventional Argentine declared, "I write only because writing helps me think." He produced a large number of poems and great deal of prose during his lifetime. (1874-1952) 

There is another sentence, in one of the Fathers of the Church. He said that it was as dangerous to put a book into hands of an ignorant man as to put a sword into the hands of children. So books, to the ancients, were mere makeshifts. In one of his many letters, Seneca wrote against large libraries; and long afterwards, Schopenhauer wrote that many people mistook the buying of a book for the buying of the contents of the book. Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I talk walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies - for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry - I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home." 

After the ancients, form the East there came a different idea of the book. There came the idea of Holy Writ, of books written by the Holy Ghost; there came Korans, Bibles, and so on. Following the example of Spengler in his Untergang des Abendlandes - The Decline of the West - I would like to take the Koran as an example. If I am not mistaken, Muslim theologians think of it as being prior to the creation of the word. The Koran is written in Arabic, yet Muslims think of it as being prior to the language. Indeed, I have read that they think of the Koran not as a work of God but as an attribute of God, even as His justice, His mercy, and His wisdom are. 

And thus there came into Europe the idea of Holy Writ - an idea that is, I think, not wholly mistaken. Bernard Shaw (to whom I am always going back) was asked once whether he really thought the Bible was the work of the Holy Ghost. And he said, "I think the Holy Ghost has written not only the Bible, but all books." This is rather hard on the Holy Ghost, of course - but all books are worth reading, I suppose. This, I think, is what Homer meant when he spoke to the muse. And this is what the Hebrews and what Milton meant when they talked of the Holy Ghost whose temple is the upright and pure heart of men. And in our less beautiful mythology, we speak of the "subliminal self," of the "subconscious." Of course, these words are rather uncouth when we compare them to the muses or to the Holy Ghost. Still, we have to put up with the mythology of our time. For the words mean essentially the same thing. 

We come now to the notion of the "classics." I must confess that I think a book is really not an immortal object to picked up and duly worshipped, but rather an occasion for beauty. And it has to be so, for language is shifting all the time. I am very fond of etymologies and would like to recall for you (for I am sure you know much more about these things than I do) some rather curious etymologies. 

For example, we have in English the verb "to tease" - a mischievous word. It means a kind of joke. Yet in Old English tesan meant "to wound with a sword,"even as in French navrer meant "to thrust a sword through somebody." Then to take a different Old English word, preat, you may find out from the very first version of Beowulf that it meant "an angry crowd" - that is to say, the cause of the "threat." And thus we might go on endlessly. 

But now let us consider some particular verses. I take my examples from English, since I have a particular love for English literature - though my knowledge of it is, of course, limited. For example, I don't think the words "quietus" and "bodkin" are especially beautiful; indeed, I would say they are rather uncouth. But if we think of "When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin," we are reminded of the great speech by Hamlet. And thus the context creates poetry for those words - words that no one would ever dare to use nowadays, because they would be mere quotations. 

Then there are other examples, and perhaps simpler ones. Let us take the title of one of the most famous books in the world, Historia del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. The word hidalgo has today a peculiar dignity all its own, yet when Cervantes wrote it, the hidalgo meant "a country gentleman." As for the name "Quixote," it was meant to be a rather ridiculous word, like the names of many of the characters in Dickens: Pickwick, Swiveller, Chuzzlewit, Twist, Squears, Qukop, and so on. And then you have "de la Mancha, which now sounds noble in Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down, he intended it to sould perhaps (I ask the apology of any resident of that city) as if he had written "Don Quixote of Kansas City." You see how these words have changed, how they have been enobled. You see a strange fact: that because the old soldier Miguel de Cervantes poked mild fun at La Mancha, now "La Mancha" is one of the everlasting words of literature. 

Let us take another example of verses that have changed. I am thinking of a sonnet by Rossetti, a sonnet that labors under the not-too-beautiful name "Inclusiveness." The sonnet begins thus: 

What man has bent o'er his son's sleep to brood, 

How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? - 

Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, 

Of what her kiss was, when his father wooed? 

I think that these lines are perhaps more vivid now than when they were written, some eighty years ago, because the cinema has taught us to follow quick sequences of visual images. In the first line, "What man has bent o'er his son's sleep to brood," we have the father bending over the face of the sleeping son. And then in the second line, as in a good film, we have the same image reversed: we see the son bending over the fact of that dead man, his father. And perhaps our recent study of psychology has made us more sensitive to these lines: "Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, / Of what her kiss was, when his father wooed." Here we have, of course, the beauty of the soft English vowels in "brood," "wooed." And the additional beauty of "wooed" being by itself - not "wooed" her" but simply "wooed." The word goes on ringing. 

There is also a different kind of beauty. Let us take an adjective that once was commonplace. I have no Greek, but I think that the Greek is oinopa pontos, and the common English rendering is "the wine-dark sea." I suppose the word "dark" is slipped in to make things easier for the reader. Perhaps it would be "the winy sea," or something of the kind. I am sure that when Homer (or the many Greeks who recorded Homer) wrote it, they were simply thinking of the sea; the adjective was straightforward. But nowadays, if I or any of you, after trying more fancy adjectives, write in a poem "the wine-dark sea," this is not a mere repetition of what the Greeks wrote. Rather, it is a going back to tradition. When we speak of "the wine-dark sea," we think of Homer and of the many centuries that lie between us and him. So that although the words may be much the same, when we write "the wine-dark sea" we are really writing something quite different from what Homer was writing. 

Thus, the language is shifting; the Latins knew all about that. And the reader is shifting also. This brings us back to the old metaphor of the Greeks - the metaphor, or rather the truth, about no man stepping twice into the same river. And there is, I think, an element of fear here. At first we are apt to think of the river as flowing. We think, "Of course, the river goes on but the water is changing." Then, with an emerging sense of awe, we feel that we too are changing - that we are as shifting and evanescent as the river is. 

However, we need not worry too much about the fate of the classics, because beauty is always with us. Here I would like to quote another verse, by Browning, perhaps a now-forgotten poet. He says: 

Just when we're safest, there's a sunset touch, 

A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 

A chorus-ending from Euripides. 

Yet the first line is enough: "Just when we're safest . . ." That is to say, beauty is lurking all about us. It may come to us in the name of a film; it may come to us in some popular lyric; we may even find it in the pages of a great or famous writer. 

And since I have spoken of a dead master of mine, Rafael Cansinos-Asséns*, (maybe this is the second time you've heard his name; I don't quite know why he is forgotten), I remember that Cansinos Asséns wrote a very fine prose poem wherein he asked God to defend him, to save him from beauty, because, he says, "there is too much beauty in the world." He thought that beauty was overwhelming it. Although I do not know if I have been a particularly happy man (I hope I am going to be happy at the ripe age of sixty-seven), I still think there is beauty all around us. 

*Borges poem "To Rafael Cansinos-Asséns runs thus: 

Long and final passage over the breathtaking height of the trestle's span. 

At our feet the wind gropes for sails and the stars throb intensely. 

We relish the taste of the night, transfixed by 

darkness-night become now, again, a habit of our flesh. 

The final night of our talking before the sea-miles part us. 

Still ours is the silence 

where, like meadows, the voices glitter. 

Dawn is still a bird lost in the most distant vileness of the world. 

This last night of all, sheltered from the great wind of absence. 

The inwardness of Good-bye is tragic, 

like that of every event in which Time is manifest. 

It is bitter to realize that we shall not even have the stars in common. 

When evening is quietness in my patio, 

from your pages morning will rise. 

Your winter will be the shadow of my summer, 

and your light the glory of my shadow 

Still we persist together. 

Still our two voices achieve understanding 

like the intensity and tenderness of sundown. 

translated by Robert Fitzgerald. 

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line does me no good, bicause, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless. 

I spoke of the "wine-dark sea," and since my hobby is Old English (I am afraid that, if you have the courage or the patience to come back to some of my lectures, you may have more Old English inflicted on you), I would like to recall some lines that I think beautiful. I will say them first in English, and then in the stark and voweled Old English of the ninth century. 

It snowed from the north; 

rime bound the fields; 

hail fell on earth, 

the coldest of seeds.. 

Norban sniwde 

hrim hrusan bond 

haegl feol on eorpan 

corna caldast. 

This takes us back to what I said about Homer: when the poet wrote these lines, he was merely recording things that had happened. This was of course very strange in he ninth century, when people thought in terms mythology, allegorical images, and so on. He was merely telling very commonplace things. But nowadays when we read 

It snowed from the north; 

rime bound the fields; 

hail fell on earth, 

the coldest of seeds . . . 

there is an added poetry. There is the poetry of a nameless Saxon having written those lines by the shores of the North Sea - in Northumberland, I think; and of those lines coming to us so straightforward, so plain, and so pathetic through the centuries. So we have both cases: the case (I hardly need dwell upon it) when time debases a poem, when the words lose their beauty; and also the case when time enriches rather than debases a poem. 

I talked at the beginning about definitions. To end up, I would like to say that we make a very common mistake when we think that we're ignorant of something because we are unable to define it. It we are in a Chestertonian mood (one of the very best moods to be in, I think), we might say that we can define something only when we know nothing about it. 

For example, if I have to define poetry, and I feel rather shaky about it, if I'm not too sure about it, I say something like: "Poetry is the expression of the beautiful through the medium of words artfully woven together." This definition may be good enough for a dictionary or a textbook, but we all feel that it is rather feeble. There is something far more important - something that may encourage us to go on not only trying our hand at writing poetry, but enjoying it and knowing that we know all about it. 

This is that we know what poetry is. We know it so well that we cannot define it in other words, even as we cannot define the taste of coffee, the color red or yellow, or the meaning of anger, of live, of hatred, of the sunrise, of the sunset, or of our love for our country. These things are so deep in us that they can be expressed only by those common symbols that we share. So why should we need other words? 

You may not agree with the examples I have chosen. Perhaps tomorrow I may think of better examples, may think I might have quoted other lines. But as you can pick and choose your own examples, it is not needful that you care greatly about Homer, or about the Anglo-Saxon poets, or about Rossetti. Because everyone knows where to find poetry. And when it comes, one feels the touch of poetry, that particular tingling of poetry. 

To end with, I have a question from Saint Augustine which comes in very fitly, I think. He said, "What is time?" If people do not ask me what time is, I know. If they ask me what it is, then I do not know." I feel the same way about poetry. 

One is hardly troubled by definitions. This time I am rather at sea, because I am no good at all at abstract thinking. But in the following lectures - if you are good enough to put up with me - we will take more concrete examples. I will speak about the metaphor, about word-music, about the possibility or impossibility of verse translation, and about the telling of a tale - that is to say, about epic poetry, the oldest and perhaps the bravest kind of poetry. And I will end with something that I can hardly divine now. I will end with a lecture called "The Poet's Creed," wherein I will try to justify my own life and the confidence some of you may have in me, despite this rather awkward and fumbling first lecture of mine. 

Two - The Metaphor 

As the subject of today's talk is the metaphor, I shall begin with a metaphor. This first of the many metaphors I shall try to recall comes from the Far East, from China. If I am not mistaken, the Chinese call the world "the ten thousand things," or - and this depends on the taste and fancy of the translator - "the ten thousand beings." 

We may accept, I suppose, the very conservative estimate of ten thousand. Surely, there are more than ten thousand ants, ten thousand men, ten thousand hopes, fears, or nightmares in the world. But if we accept the number ten thousand, and if we think that all metaphors are made by linking two different things together, then, had we time enough, we might work otu an almost unbelievable sum of possible metaphors. I have forgotten my algebra, but I think that the sum would be 10,000 multiplied by 9,9999, multiplied by 9,998, and so on. Of course the sum of possible combinations is not endless, but it staggers the imagination. So we might be led to think: Why on earth should poets all over the world, and all through time, be using the same stock metaphors, when there are so many possible combinations? 

The Argentine poet Lugones* way back in the year 1909, worte that he thought poets were always using the same metaphors, and that he would try his hand at discovering new metaphors for the moon. And if fact he concocted many hundreds of them. He also said in the foreward to a book calledLunario sentimental, that every word is a dead metaphor. This statement is, of course, a metaphor. 

*Leopoldo Lugones (187401938), a major Argentie writer of the early twentieth century, was initially a modernist. Hie Lunario sentimental(Sentimental Moonery) is an eclectic volume of poetry, short stories and plays that revolve around the theme of the moon; it caused quite a scandal when it came out, both for breaking with the already established highbrow modernismo and for mocking the audiences of this trend. 

Yet I think we all feel the difference between dead and living metaphors. If we take any good etymological dictionary and if we look up any word, we are sure to find a metaphor tucked away somewhere. 

For example - and you can find tins in the very first lines of Beowulf - the word preat meant "an angry mob," but now the word is given to the effect and not to the cause. Then we have the word "king." "King" was originally cyning, which meant "a man who stands for the kin - for the people." So, etymologically, "king," "kinsman," and "gentleman" are the same word. Yet if I say, 

"The king sat in his counting house, counting out his money," we don't think of the word "king" as being a metaphor. In fact, if we go in for abstract thinking, we have to forget that words were metaphors. We have to forget, for example, that in the word "consider" there is a suggestion of astrology - "consider" originally meaning "being with the stars," "making a horoscope." 

What is important about the metaphor, I should say, is the fact of its being felt by the reader or the hearer as a metaphor. I will confine this talk to metaphors that are felt as metaphors by the reader. Not such words as "king," or "threat" - and we might go on, perhaps forever. 

First, I would like to take some stock patterns of metaphor. I use the word "pattern" because the metaphors I will quote will be to the imagination quite different, yet to the logical thinker they would be almost the same. So that we might speak of them as equations. Let us take the first that comes to my mind. Let us take the stock comparison, the time-honored comparison, of eyes and stars, or conversely of stars and eyes. The first example I remember comes from the Greek anthology, and I think Plato is supposed to have written it. The lines (I have no Greek) run more or less as follows: "I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes." Here, of course, what we feel is the tenderness of the lover; we feel his wish to be able to see his beloved from many points at once. We feel the tenderness behind these lines. 

Now let us take another, less illustrious example: "The stars look down." If we take logical thinking seriously, we have the same metaphor here. Yet the effect on our imagination is quite different. "The stars look down" does not make us think of tenderness; rather, it gives the idea of generations and generations of men toiling on and of the stars looking down with a kind of lofty indifference. 

Let me take a different example - one of the stanzas that have most struck me. The lines come from a poem by Chesterton called "A Second Childhood": 

But I shall not grow too old to see enormous night arise, 

A clould that is larger than the world 

and a monster made of eyes. 

Not a monster full of eyes (we know those monsters from the Revelations of Saint John) but - and this is far more awful - a monster made of eyes, as if those eyes were the living tissue of him. 

We have looked at three images which can all be traced back to the same pattern. But the point I would like to emphasize - and this is really one of the two important points in my talk - is that although the pattern is essentially the same, in the first case, the Greek example "I wish I were the night," what the poet makes us feel is his tenderness, his anxiety; in the second, we feel a kind of divine indifference to things human; and in the third, the familiar becomes a nightmare. 

Let us now take a different pattern: let us take the idea of time flowing - flowing as a river does. The first example comes from a poem that Tennyson wote when he was, I think, thirteen or fourteen. He destroyed it; but, happily for us, one line survived. I think you will find it in Tennyson's biography written by Andrew Lang. The line is: "Time flowing in the middle of the night." I think Tennyson has chosen his time very wisely. In the night all things are silent, men are sleeping yet time is flowing noiselessly on. This is one example. 

There is also a novel (I'm sure you're thinking of it) called simply Of Time and the River. The mere putting together of the two words suggests the metaphor: time and the river,they both flow on. And then there is the famous sentence of the Greek philosopher: "No man steps twice into the same river." Here we have the beginning of terror, because at first we think of the river as flowing on, of the drops of water as being different. And then we are made to feel that we are the river, that we are as fugitive as the river. 

We also have those lines by Manrique: 

Our lives are the rivers 

that flow into the sea 

which is death. 

This statement is not too impressive in English; I wish I could remember how Longfellow translated it in his "Coplas de Manrique." * 

*Longfellows translation runs: 

Our lives are rivers, gliding free 

To that unfathomed, boundless sea, 

The silent grave! 

Thither all earthly pomp and boast 

Roll, to be swallowed up and lost 

In one dark wave. 

But of course (and we shall go into this question in another lecture) behind the stock metaphor we have the grave music of the words: 

Neustras vidas son los rios 

que van a dar en la mar 

qu'es el morir, 

alli van los senorios 

derechos a se acabar 

e consumir . . . 

Yet the metaphor is exactly the same in all these cases. 

And now we will go on to something very trite, something that may cause you to smile: the comparison of women to flowers, and also of flowers to women. Here, of course, there are far too many easy examples. But there is one I would like to recall (perhaps it may not be familiar to you) from that unfinished masterwork, Robert Louis Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston. Stevenson tells of his hero going into a church, in Scotland, where he sees a girl - a lovely girl, we are made to feel. And one feels that he is about to fall in love with her. Because he looks at her, and then he wonders whether there is an immortal soul within that beautiful frame, or whether she is a mere animal the color of flowers. and the brutality of the word "animal" is of course destroyed by "the color of flowers." I don't think we need any other examples of this pattern, which can be found in all ages, in all tongues, in all literatures. 

Now let us go on to another of the essential patterns of metaphor: the pattern of life's being a dream - the feeling that comes over us that life is a dream. The evident example which occurs to us is: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." Now, this may sound like blasphemy - I love Shakespeare too much to care - but I think that here, if we look at it (and I don't think we should look at it too closely; we should rather be grateful to Shakespeare for this and his many other gifts), there is a very slight contradiction between the fact that our lives are dreamlike or have a dreamlike essence in them, and the rather sweeping statement, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." Because if we are real in dreams, or if we are merely dreamers of dreams, then I wonder if we can make such sweeping statements. This sentence of Shakespeare's belongs rather to philosophy or to metaphysics than to poetry - though of course it is heightened, it is lifted up into poetry, by the context. 

Another example of the same pattern comes from a great German poet - a minor poet beside Shakespeare (but I suppose all poets are minor beside him, except two or three). It is a very famous piece by Walther von der Vogelweide. I suppose I should say it thus (I wonder how good my Middle German is - you will have to forgive me): "Ist mir mîn leben getroumet, oder is es war?" "Have I dreamt my life, or was it a true one?" I think this comes nearer to what the poet is trying to say, because instead of a sweeping affirmation we have a question. The poet is wondering. This has happened to all of us, but we have not worded it as Walter von der Vogelweide did. He is asking himself, "Have I dreamt my life, or was it a true one?" and this hesitation gives us that dreamlike essence of life, I think. 

I don't remember whether in my last lecture (because this is a sentence I often quote over and over again, and have quoted all through my life) I gave ou this quotation from the Chinese philosopher Chuan Tzu. He dreamt that he was a butterfly, and, on waking up, he did not know whether he was a man who had had a dream he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was now dreaming he was a man. This metaphor is, I think, the finest of all. First because it begins with a dream, so afterwards, when he awakens, his life has still something dreamlike about it. And second because, with a kind of almost miraculous happiness, he has chosen the right animal. Had he said, "Chuan Tzu had a dream that he was a tiger," then there would be nothing in it. A butterfly has something delicate and evanescent about it. If we are dreams, the true way to suggest this is with a butterfly and not a tiger. If Chuan Tzu had a dream that he was a typewriter, it would be no good at all. Or a whale - that would do him no good either. I think he has chosen just the right word for what he is trying to say. 

Let us try to follow another pattern - the very common one that links up the ideas of sleeping and dying. This is quite common in everday speech also; yet if we look for examples, we shall find that they are very different. I think that somewherer in Homer he speaks of the "iron sleep of death." Here he gives us two opposite ideas: death is a kind of sleep, yet that kind of sleep is made of a hard, ruthless, and cruel metal - iron. It is a kind of sleep that is unbroken and unbreakable. Of course, we have Heine hererr also: "Der Tod das ist die frühe Nacht." And since we are north of Boston, I think we must remember those perhaps too-well known lines by Robert Frost - The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep. 

These lines are so perfect that hardly think of a trick. Yet, unhappily, all literature is made of tricks, and those tricks get - in the long run - found out. And the reader tires of them. But in this case the trick is so unobtrusive that I feel rather ashamed of myself for calling it a trick (I call it this merely for want of a better word). Because Frost has attempted something very daring here. We have the same line repeated word for word, twice over, yet the sense is different. "And miles to go before I sleep": this is merely physical - the miles are miles in space, in New England, and "sleep" means just that - "go to sleep." The second time, we are made to feel that the miles are not only in space but in time, and that "sleep" means "die" or "rest." Had the poet said so in so many words, he would have been far less effective. Because, as I understand it, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down. Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement. Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody. They convince nobody because they are presented as arguments. Then we look at them, we weigh them over, and we decide against them. 

But when something is merely said or - better still - hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it. I remember reading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin Buber - I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then, when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book by a friend of mine, Dujovne, and I found in its pages, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments. I think that somewhere in Walt Whitman the same idea can be found: the idea of reasons being unconvincing. I think he says somewhere that he finds the night air, the large few stars, far more convincing than mere arguments. 

We may think of other patterns of metaphor. Let us now take this example (this is not as common as the other ones) of a battle and a fire. In the Iliad,we find the image of a battle blazing like a fire. We have the same idea in the heroic fragment of Finnesburg. In that fragment we are told of the Danes fighting the Frisians, of the glitter of the weapons, the shields and swords, and so on. Then the writer says that it seemed as if all Finnesburg, as if the whole castle of Finn, were on fire. 

I suppose I have left out some quite common patterns. We have so far taken up eyes and stars, women and flowers, time and rivers, life and dream, death and sleeping, fire and battles. Had we time and learning enough, we might find a half a dozen other patterns, and perhaps those might give us most of the metaphors in literature. 

What is really important is the fact not that there are a few patterns, but that those patterns are capable of almost endless varietions. The reader who cares for poetry and not for the theory of poetry might read, for example, "I wish I were the night," and then afterwards "A monster made of eyes" or "The stars looked down," and never stop to think that these can be traced back to a single pattern. If I were a daring thinker (but I am not; I am a very timid thinker, I am groping my way along), I could of course say that only a dozen or so patterns exist and that all other metaphors are mere arbitrary games. This would amount to the statement tht among the "ten thousand things" of the Chinese definition, only some twelve essential affinities may be found. Because, of course, you can find other affinities that are merely astonishing, and astonishment hardly lasts more than a moment. 

I remember that I have forgotten quite a good example of the dream-and-life equation. But I think I can recall it now: it is by the American poet Cummings. There are four lines. I must apologize for the first. Evidently it was written by a young man, writing for young men, and I can no longer claim the privilege - I am far too old for that kind of game. But the stanza should be quoted in full. The first line is: "god's terrible face, brighter than a spoon." I am rather sorry aout the spoon, because of course one feels that he thought at first of a sword, or of a candle, or of the sun, or of a shield, or of something traditionally shining; and then he said, "No - after all, I'm modern, so I'll work in a spoon." And so he got his spoon. But we may forgive him that for what comes afterwards: "god's terrible face, brighter than a spoon, / collects the image of one fatal word." This second line is better, I think. And as my friend Murchison said to me, in a spoon we often have many images collected. I had never thought of that, because I had been taken aback by the spoon and did not want to think much about it. 

god's terrible face, brighter than a spoon, 

collects the image of one fatal word, 

so that my life (which liked the sun and the moon) 

resembles something that has not occurred. 

"Resembles something that has not occurred": this line carries a kind of strange simplicity. I think it gives us the dreamlike essence of life better than those more famous poets, Shakespeare and Walther von der Vogelweide. 

Of course, I have chosen only a few examples. I am sure your memories are full of metaphors that you have treasured up - metaphors that you may be hoping I will qoute. I know that after this lecture I shall feel remorse coming over me, thinking of the many beautiful metaphors I have missed. And of course you will say to me, in an aside, "But why did you omit that wonderful metaphor by So-and-So?" And then I will have to fumble and apologize. 

But now, I think, we might go on to metaphors that seem to stand outside the old patterns. And since I have spoken of the moon, I will take a Persian metaphor I read somewhere in Brown's history of Persian literature. Let us say it came from Farid-al-Din Attar or Omar Khayyám, or Hafiz, or another of the great Persian poets. He speaks of the moon, calling it "the mirror of time." I suppose that, from the point of view of astronomy, the idea of the moon being a mirror is as it should be - but this is quite irrelevant from the poetic point of view. Whether in fact the moon is or is not a mirror has no importance whatever, since poetry speaks to the imagination. Let us look at the moon as a mirror of time. I think this is a very fine metaphor - first, because the idea of a mirror gives us the brightness andd the fragility of the moon, and, second, because the idea of time makes us suddenly remember that that very clear moon we are looking at is very ancient, is full of poetry and mythology, is as old as time. 

Since I've used the phrase "as old as time," I must quote another line - one that perhaps is bubbling up in your memory. I can't recall the name of the author. I found it quoted by Kipling in a not-too-memorable book of his called From Sea to Sea: "A rose-red city, half as old as Time." Had the poet written "A rose-red city, as old as Time," he would have written nothing at all. But "half as old as Time" gives it a kind of magic precision - the same kind of magic precision that is achieved by that strange and common English phrase, "I will love you forever and a day." "Forever" means "a very long time," but it is too abstract to appeal to the imagination. 

We have the same kind of trick (I apologize for the use of this word) in the name of that famous book, the Thousand and One Nights. For "the thousand nights" means to the imagination "the many nights," even as "forty" used to mean "many" in the seventeenth century. "When forty winters shall bisiege thy brow," writes Shakespeare," and I think of the common English expression "forty winks" for "a nap." For "forty" means "many." And heere you have the "thousand nights and a night" - like "a rose-red city" and the fanciful precision of "half as old as Time," which of course makes time seem even longer. 

In order to consider different metaphors, I will now go back - inevitably, you might say - to my favorite Anglo-Saxons. I remember now that very common kenning which calls the sea "the whale road." I wonder whether the unknown Saxon who first coined that kenning knew how fine it was. (A kenning is a multi-noun paraphrase used in place of a single noun, common in Old Germanic verse, especially in skaldic poetry, and to a lesser extent in Eddic literature. Borges discussed such phrases in an essay included in The History of Eternity, 1936.) I wonder whether he felt (though this need hardly concern us) that the hugeness of the whale suggested and emphasized the hugeness of the sea. 

There is another metaphor - a Norse one, about blood. The common kenning for blood is "the water of the serpent" In this metaphor, you have the notion - which we find also among the Saxons - of a sword as an essentially evil being, a being that lapped up the blood of men as if it were water. 

Then we have the metaphors for battle. Some of them are quite trite - for example, "meeting of men." Here, perhaps, there is something quite fine: the idea of men meeting to kill each other (as if no other "meetings" were possible). But we also have "the meeting of swords," "the dance of swords," "the clash of armor," "the clash of shields." All of them may be found in the "Ode" of Brunanburh. And there is another fine one: porn aeneoht, "a meeting of anger." Here the metaphor is impressive perhaps because, when we think of meeting, we think of fellowship, of friendship; and then there comes the contrast, the meeting of anger. 

But these metaphors are nothing. I should say, compared to a very fine Norse and - strangely enough - Irish metaphor about the battle. It calls the battle "the web of men." The word "web" is really wonderful here, for in the idea of a web we get the pattern of a medieval battle: we have the swords, the shields, the crossing of the weapons. Also, there is the nightmare touch of a web being made of living beings. "A web of men": a web of men who are dying and killing each other. 

There suddenly comes to my mind a metaphor from Góngora that is rather like the "web of men." He is speaking or a traveler who comes to a "bárbara aldea" - to a "barbarous village"; and then that village weaves a rope of dogs around him. 

Como suele tejer 

Bárbara aldea 

Soga de perros 

Contra forastero. 

So, strangely enough, we have the same image: the idea of a rope or web made of living beings. Yet even in those cases that seem to be synonyms, there is quite a difference. A rope of dogs is somehow baroque an grotesque, while "web of men" has something terrible, something awful about it. 

To end up, I will take a metaphor, or a comparison (after all, I am not a professor and the difference need hardly worry me), by the now-forgotten Byron. I read the poem when I was a boy - I suppose you all read it at a very tender age. Yet two or three days ago I suddenly discovered that that metaphor was a very complex one. I had never thought of Byron as being especially complex. You all know the words: "She walks in beauty, like the night." The line is so perfect that we take it for granted. We think, "Well, we could have written that, had we cared to." But only Byron cared to write it. 

I come now to the hidden and secret complexity of the line. I suppose you have already found out what I am now going to reveal to you. (Because this always happens with surprises, no?) It happens to us when we're reading a detective novel.) "She walks in beauty, like the night.": at the beginning we have a lovely woman; then we are told that she walks in beauty. This somehow suggests the French language - something like "vous êtes en beauté," and so on. But: "She walks in beauty, like the night." We have, in the first instance, a lovely woman, a lovely lady, likened to the night. But in order to understand the line, we have to think of the night as a woman also; if not, the line is meaningless. So within those very simple words, we have a double metaphor: a woman is likened to the night, but the night is likened to a woman. I do not know and I do not care whether Byron knew this. I think if hehad known it, the verse would hardly be as good as it is. Perhaps before he died he found it out or somebody pointed it out to him. 

Now we are led to the two obvious and major conclusions of this lecture. The first is, of course, that though there are hundreds and indeed thousands of metaphors to be found, they may all be traced back to a few simple patterns. But this need not trouble us, since each metaphor is different: every time the pattern is used, the variations are different. And the second conclusion is that there are metaphors - for example, "web of men," or "whale road" - that may not be traced back to definite patterns. 

So I think that the outlook - even after my lecture - is quite good for the metaphor. Because, if we like, we may try out hand at new variations of the major trends. The variations would be very beautiful, and only a few critics like myself would take the trouble to say, "Well, there you have eyes and stars and there you have time and the river over and over again." The metaphors will strike the imagination. But it may also be given to us - and why not hope for this as well? - it may also be given to us to invent metaphors that do not belong, or that do not yet belong, to accepted patterns. 

Three - The Telling of the Tale 

Verbal distinctions should be valued, since they stand for mental - intellectual - distinctions. Yet one feels it is somehow a pity that the word "poet" should have been split asunder. For nowadays when we speak of a poet, we think only of the utterer of such lyric, birdlike notes as "With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh, / Like stars in heaven" (Wordsworth), or "Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly? / Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy." Whereas the ancients, when they spoke of a poet - a "maker" - thought of him not only as the utterer of those high lyric notes, but also as the teller of a tale. A tale wherein all the voices of mankind might be found - not only the lyric, the wistful, the melancholy, but also the voices of courage and of hope. This means that I am speaking of what I suppose is the oldest form of poetry: the epic. Let us consider a few of them. 

Perhaps the first which comes to mind is the one that Andrew Lang, who so finely translated it, called The Tale of Troy. We will look into it for that very ancient telling of a tale. In the very first line, we have something like: "Tell me, muse, of the anger of Achilles." Or as Professor Rouse, I think, has translated it: "An angry man - that is my subject." Perhaps Homer, or the man we call Homer (for that is an old question, of course), thought he was writing his poem about an angry man, and this somehow disconnects us. For we think of anger as the Latins did: "ira furor brevis" - anger is a brief madness, a fit of madness. The plot of the Iliad is really, in itself, not a charming one - the idea of the hero sulking in his tent, feeling that the king has dealt unjustly with him, and then taking up the war as a private feud because his friend has been killed, and afterwards selling the dead man he has killed to the man's father. 

But perhaps (I may have said this before; I am sure I have), perhaps the intentions of the poet are not that important. What is important nowadays is that although Homer might have thought he was telling that story, he was actually telling something far finer: the story of a man, a hero, who knows he will die before it falls; and the still more stirring tale of men defending a city whose doom is already known to them, a city that is already in flames. I think this is the real subject of the Iliad. And, in fact, men have always felt that the Trojans were the real heroes. We think of Virgil, but we many also think of Snorri Sturluson, who, in his younger era, wrote that Odin - the Odin of the Saxons, the god - was the son of Priam and the brother of Hector. Men have sought kinship with the defeated Trojans, and not with the victorious Greeks. This is perhaps because there is a dignity in defeat that hardly belongs to victory. 

Let us take a second epic, the Odyssey. The Odyssey may be read in two ways. I suppose the man (or the woman, as Samuel Butler thought) who had written it felt that there were really two stories: the homecoming of Ulysses, and the marvels and perils of the sea. If we take the Odyssey in the first sense, then we have the idea of homecoming, the idea that we are in banishment, that our true home is in the past or in heaven or somewhere else, that we are never at home. But of course the searfaring and the homecoming had to be made interesting. so the many marvels were worked in. And already, when we come to the Arabian Nights, we find tha the Arabian version of the Odyssey, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, is not a story of homecoming ut a story of adventure; and I think we read it thus. When we read the Odyssey, I think that what we feel is the glamour, the magic of the sea; what we feel is what we find in the seafarer. For example, he has no heart for the harp, nor for the giving of rings, nor for the delight of a woman, nor for the greatness of the world. He thinks only of the long sea salt streams. So that we have both stories in one: we can read it as a homecoming, and we can read it as a tale of adventure - perhaps the finest that has ever been written or sung. 

We come now to a third "poem" that looms farr above them: the four Gospels. the Gospels may also be read in two ways. By the believer, they are read as the strange story of a man, of a god, who atones for the sins of mankind. A god who condescends to suffering - to death on the "bitter cross," as Shakespeare has it. There is a still stranger interpretation, which I found in Langland: the idea that God wanted to know all about human suffering, and that it was not enough for Him to know it intellectually, as a god might; he wanted to suffer as a man, and with the limitations of a man. However, if you are an unbeliever (many of us are) then you can read the story in a different way. You can think of a man of genius, of a man who thought he was a god and who at the end found out that he was merely a man, and that god - his god - had foresaken him. 

It might be said that for many centuries, those three stories - the tale of Troy, the tale of Ulysses, the tale of Jesus - have been sufficient for mankind. People have been telling and retelling them over and over again; they have been set to music; they have been painted. People have told them many times over, yet the stories are still there, illimitable. You might think of somebody, in a thousand years of ten thousand years, writing them over again. But in the case of the Gospels, there is a difference: the story of Christ, I think, cannot be told better. It has been told many times over, yet I think the few verses where we read, for example, of Christ being tempted by Satan are stronger than all four books of Paradise Regained. One feels that Milton perhaps had no inkling as to what kind of a man Christ was. 

Well, we have these stories and we have the fact that men did not need many stories. I don't suppose Chaucer ever thought of inventing a story. I don't think people were less inventive in those days than they are today. I think they felt that the new shadings brought into the story - the fine shadings brought into it - were enough. Besides, it made things easier for the poet. His hearers or his readers knew what he was going to say. And so they could take in all the differences. 

Now, in the epic - and we might think of the Gospels as a kind of divine epic - all things could be found. But poetry, as I said, has fallen asunder; or rather, on the one hand we have the lyrical poem and the elegy, and on the other we have the telling of a tale - we have the novel. One is almost tempted to think of the novel as a degeneration of the epic, in spite of such writers as Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville. For the novel goes back to the dignity of the epic. 

If we think about the novel and the epic, we are tempted to fall into thinking that the chief difference lies in the difference between verse and prose, in the difference between singing something and stating something. But I think there is a greater difference. The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero - a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character. 

The brings us to another question: What do we think of happiness? What do we think of defeat, and of victory? Nowadays when people talk of a happy ending, they think of it as a mere pandering to the public, or they think of it as a commercial device; they think of it as artificial. Yet for centuries men could very sincerely believe in happiness and in victory, though they felt the essential dignity of defeat. For example, when people wrote about the Golden Fleece (one of the ancient stories of mankind), readers and hearers werer made to feel from the beginning that the treasure would be found at the end. 

Well, nowadays if an adventure is attempted, we know that it will end in failure. When we read - I think of an example I admire - The Aspern Papers,we know that the papers will never be found. When we read Franz Kafka's The Castle, we know that the man will never get inside the castle. That is to say, we cannot really believe in happiness and success. And this may be one of the poverties of our time. I suppose Kafka felt much the same when he wanted his books to be destroyed: he really wanted to write a happy and victorious book, and he felt that he could not do it. He might have written it, of course, but people would have felt that he was not telling the truth. Not truth of facts but the truth of his dreams. 

At the end of the eighteenth of the beginning of the nineteenth century, let's say (we need hardly go into a discussion of dates), man began to invent stories. Perhaps one might say that the attempt began with Hawthorne and with Edgar Allan Poe, but of course there are always forerunners. As Rubén Darío has pointed out, nobody is the literary Adam. Still, it was Poe who wrote that a story should be written for the sake of the last sentence, and a poem for the sake of the last line. This degenerated into the trick story, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries people have invented all kinds of plots. Those plots are sometimes very clever. Those plots, if merely told, are cleverer that the plots of the epics. Yet somehow we feel that there is something artificial about them - or rather, that there is something trivial about them. If we take two cases - let us suppose the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, then a novel or a film like Psycho - perhaps the plot of the second is cleverer, but we feel that there is something more behind Stevenson's plot. 

Regarding the idea I spoke about in the beginning, the idea about there being only a few plots: perhaps we should mention those books where the interest lies not in the plot but in the shifting, in the changing, of many plots. I am thinking of the Arabian Nights, of Orlando Furioso, and so on. One might also add the idea of an evil treasure. we get that in the Völsunga Saga, and perhaps at the end of Beowulf - the idea of a treasure bringing evil to the people who find it. Here we may come to the idea that I tried to work out in my last lecture, on metaphor - the idea that perhaps all plots belong to only a few patterns. Of course, nowadays people are inventing so many plots that we are blinded by them. But perhaps this fit of inventiveness may flicker, and then we may find that those many plots are but appearances of a few essential plots. This, however, is not for me to discuss. 

There is another fact to be noticed: poets seem to forget that, at one time, the telling of a tale was essential, and the telling of the tale and the uttering of the verse were not thought of as different things. A man told a tale; he sang it; and his hearers did not think of him as a man attempting two tasks, but rather as a man attempting one task that had two sides to it. Or perhaps they did not feel that there were two sides to it, but rather thought of the whole thing as one essential thing. 

We come now to our own time, and we find this very strange circumstance: we have had two world wars, yet somehow no epic has come from them - except perhaps the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I find many epic qualities. But the book is hampered by the fact that the hero is the teller, and so sometimes he has to belittle himself, he has to make himself human, he has to make himself far too believable. In fact, he has to fall into the trickery of a novelist. 

There is another book, quite forgotten now, which I read, I think, in 1915 - a novel called Le Feu, byg Henri Barbusse. "The author was a pacifist; it was a book written against war. Yet somehow epic thrust itself through the book (I remember a very fine bayonet charge in it). Another writer who had the epic sense was Kipling. We get this in such a wonderful story as "A Sahib's War." But in the same way that Kipling never attempted the sonnet, because he thought that this might estrange him from his readers, he never attempted the epic, though he might have done it. I am also reminded of Chesterton who wrote "The Ballad of the White Horse," a poem about King Alfred's wars with the Danes. Therein we find very strange metaphors (I wonder how I forgot to quote them last time!) - for example, "marble like solid moonlight," "gold like frozen fire," where marble and gold are compared to two things thtaty are even more elementary. They are compared to moonlight and to fire - and not to fire itself, but to a magic frozen fire. 

In a way, people are hungering and thirsting for epic. I feel that epic is one of the things that men need. Of all places (and this may come as a kind of anticlimax, but the fact is there), it has been Hollywood that has furnished epic to the world. All over the globe, when people see a Western - beholding the mythology of a rider, and the desert, and justice, and the sherriff, and the shooting, and so on - I think they get the epic feeling from it, whether they know it or not. After all, knowing the thing is not important. 

Now, I do not want to prophesy, because such things are dangerous (though they may come true in the long run), but I think that if the telling of a tale and the singing of a verse could come together again, then a very important thing might happen. Perhaps this will come from America - since, as you all know, America has an ethical sense of a thing being right or wrong. It may be felt in other countries, but I do not think it can be found in such an obvious way as I find it here. If this could be achieved, if we could go back to the epic, then something very great would have been accomplished. When Chesterton wrote "The Ballad of the White Horse," it got good reviews and so on, but readers did not take kindly to it. In fact, when we think of Chesterton, we think of the Father Brown saga and not of that poem. 

I have been thinking about the subject only rather late in life; and besides, I do not think I could attempt the epic (though I might have worked in two or three lines of epic). This is for younger men to do. And I hope they will do it, because of course we all feel that the novel is somehow breaking down. Think of the chief novels of our time - say, Joyce's Ulysses. We are told thousands of things about the two characters, yet we do not know them. We have a better knowledge of characters in Dante or Shakespeare, who come to us - who live and die - in a few sentences. We do not know thousands of circumstances about them, but we know them intimately. That, of course, is far more important. 

I think that the novel is breaking down. I think that all those very daring and interesting experiments with the novel - for example, the idea of shifting time, the idea of the story being told by different characters - all those are leading to the moment when we shall feel that the novel is no longer with us. 

But there is something about a tale, a story, that will always be going on. I do not believe men will ever tire of telling or hearing stories. And if along with the pleasure of being told a story we get the additional pleasure of the dignity of verse, then something great will have happened. Maybe I am an old-fashioned man from the nineteenth century, but I have optimism, I have hope; and as the future holds many things - as the future, perhaps, holds all things - I think the epic will come back to us. I believe that the poet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell a story and he will also sing it. And we will not think of those two things as different, even as we do not thing they are different in Homer or in Virgil. 

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The complete text can be found at Poetics, Stolen site 
The complete sound file can be dounf at UBU WEB