Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

that she is condemned, we could say, to heaven, as he will be condemned to hell when he dies, for his sin. And she herself seems to feel this, because in the last stanza she leans over the gold bar of heaven. And she wept; and the stanza ends “
y lloró
,” “and wept.” And then, in parentheses, words that belong to the lover’s conscience, “
Yo oí sus lágrimas
,” “I heard her tears.”
    Dr. MaxNordau, in a book that was famous at the beginning of this century, titled
Degeneration
, took this poem as proof that Rossetti was a degenerate. 2 He says that the poem is incoherent, that the poet has already stated that time passes more quickly in heaven, and many years have passed, but the look of astonishment in the damsel’s eyes is still there, so she will have only to wait one or two days at the most before she meets her lover. That is, Dr. Nordau read and analyzed the poem and did not understand that the lover would never come, and that this was the theme of the poem: the misfortune of a soul in heaven because it lacks the happiness it had on Earth. The poem—according to him—is full of circumstantial details. For example, the girl is leaning over a gold bar of heaven until—Rossetti tell us—her breasts must have warmed the metal of the barrier. And there are other similar details: at first everything is wondrous and then we have details like the one that says: “
de ese árbol en cuya hondura se siente la paloma,
” [“that … tree within whose secret growth the Dove is sometimes felt to be”]. In other words, it is whatChesterton said, “delight bordering on the edges of nightmare.” There is the suggestion of a nightmare in the whole poem, and in the final stanzas we feel that even if paradise is beautiful, it is horrible for the damsel because her lover is not there, that he will never come, he will not be forgiven as she was. Now, I don’t know if any of you would like to read out loud some of the stanzas in English, so that you hear the music. Does anybody dare?
    [
A female student volunteers
.]
    Let’s read the poem from the beginning. Read it slowly, because perhaps your classmates are not “blessed” and won’t understand very much. 3
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
    In this first stanza we have what is called a visual rhyme. For example,
heaven
“rhymes” with
even
because they are written the same; it is understood to be a rhyme. HenceByron says, for example, in one of his lines, “like the
cry
of some strong swimmer in his agony,” “
como el grito de un fuerte nadador en su agonía
.” 4 And I remember that as a child I pronounced agony as “agonay” to make it rhyme with “cry,” and my father explained to me that no, it was a “visual rhyme,” that first I had to pronounce
cry
and then
agony
, because that orthographic convention was acceptable in poetry, and it was even considered a rich element. For example, “come,” rhymes with “home,” because both words end with o-m-e. And this is not considered a defect, but rather a way of alleviating, we could say, the weight of the rhyme. It is as if in England they had not fully grown accustomed to rhymes, and without realizing it they felt some kind of nostalgia for ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry, counted in assonants. But let us read it from the beginning, and I promise to behave myself and not interrupt the stanzas.
    [
The student reads the first stanza again, then continues
.]
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.
    That’s a beautiful detail, where he compares her hair to corn.
Herseemed she scarce had been a day
One of God’s choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers;
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.
    “Herseemed” is a slightly archaic way of saying “seemed to her”: it seemed to her that only a day had passed. “Choristers” should be translated into Spanish as
coristas
, not a very noble word, but that is the exact translation. Rossetti, given his Italian heritage, tended to make his words stressed on the last syllable. We see here “choristers” rhyming with “hers,” which doesn’t normally happen. It is one of his