Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

not to think of what I needs must feel, / But to be still and patient, all I can; / And haply by abstruse research to steal / From my own nature all the natural man— / This was my sole resource, my only plan: / Till that which suits a part infects the whole, / And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.”
4. There is no book about Coleridge with this title; the book Borges is remembering is undoubtedly George Wilson Knight,
The Starlit Dome
(London: Oxford University Press, 1941).
The Starlit Dome
includes a chapter titled “Coleridge’s Divine Comedy,” in which the author asserts that
Christabel, The Ancient Mariner
, and
Kubla Khan
can be seen together as a Divine Comedy, exploring successively hell, purgatory, and heaven.
5. Jacopo Alighieri (c. 1291–1348)
6. Cangrande della Scala (1291–1329), Italian nobleman, known as the leading patron of Dante Aligheri.
7. “The Turn of the Screw” appeared in
Collier’s Weekly
in 1898 and for the first time in a book in
The Two Magics
, published the same year.
8. The two versions of this poem appear on facing pages in
Coleridge, Selected Poetry and Prose
, ed. Stephen Potter (London: Nonesuch Press and New York: Random House, 1962).
9. The second version of the poem begins as follows: “It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three. / ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? / The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, / And I am next of kin; / The guests are met, the feast is set: / May’st hear the merry din.’ / He holds him with his skinny hand, / ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he. / ‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’ / Eftsoons his hand dropt he.”
10. Borges quotes from the fourth stanza: “He holds him with his glittering eye— / The Wedding-Guest stood still, / And listens like a three years’ child: / The Mariner hath his will.”
11.
Arbaleses
does not appear in any of the large dictionaries of the Spanish language, however its etymology corresponds to the French
arabletes
, the Latin
arcus
, “arc,” and
ballista
, “crossbow.”
12. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale” from The
Canterbury Tales
, lines 265– 68: “Ne deeth, allas! ne wol nat han my lyf / Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf, / And on the ground, which is my moodres gate, / I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late.”
13.
The Flying Dutchman
, an opera in three acts, words and music by Richard Wagner, debuted in 1843.
14. John Livingston Lowes,
The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Way of the Imagination
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).
15. Samuel Purchas (1575–1626), English writer and priest. The book was
Purchas, his Pilgrimage
, published in 1625.
    CLASS 15

1. Borges included
Poesía completa
, Pablo Mañé Garzón’s translation of Blake, as volume 62 in his
Biblioteca personal
. In the prologue, Borges offers a brief biography of the English poet.
2. Denis Saurat, (Paris: La Colombe, 1954).
3. For example, in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(ca. 1790).
4. The poems included in
Songs of Experience
were written between 1789 and 1794. The poem “The Tyger,” which Borges continually refers to, was then corrected twice by Blake and published separately.
5. See Class 9, note 10.
6. Saint Irenaeus (ca.130–202), bishop of Lyon. In his
Adversus haereses
, he describes Gnostic ideas in detail in order to refute them.
7. He is quoting from the poem “Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research),” written in 1913 and included in the book
The South Seas
. The text is as follows:
Not with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun,
We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered by-way of the air,
Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find
Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there
Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.
8. The quote, from Blake, is, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” Huxley’s book, mentioned here by Borges, is
The Doors of Perception
(New York: Harper, 1954). A review of this book, written by