Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

He could be referring here to
The Wood Beyond the World
(1894) or
The Well at the World’s End
(1896).
27. The title is
A Dream of John Ball
. It was published in
The Commonwealth
between November 1886 and January 1887, and for the first time as a book in April 1888.
28. John Ball was an English priest who from an early age preached against the nobles, the clergy, and the pope, arguing that all men are equal. In 1381, he joined the uprising in Kent, where a group of serfs and farmers led by Wat Tyler violently rebelled against the establishment. Ball gave sermons and urged on the rebels, using a well-known popular ditty: “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the Gentleman?” After the death of Tyler, Ball took over the leadership of the rebellion, which was finally subdued. Defeated, Ball surrendered to Richard II. He was condemned to death and in the same year, 1381, was hung and quartered in Saint Albans.
29. Published in 1890.
30. Shortly before Morris died in 1896, at sixty-two-years old, one of his doctors came up with the following diagnosis: he asserted that the writer suffered from the affliction of “simply being
William Morris
, and having done more work than most
ten men
.”
31. Morris’s close friends called him this because his unruly hair reminded them of the character Topsy in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
32. He wrote
The Earthly Paradise
in 1868 or 1869.
33. Here and for the rest of the class, Borges is discussing the long poem “The Defence of Guenevere,” the first of the pieces in the book of the same title, published in 1858. As in the previous classes, the reading of the poem in English, removed from the original transcription, has been put back here to give the context for Borges’s comments and in order to better evoke the general atmosphere of the class.
    CLASS 23

1. This poem is the nineteenth in the book.
2. The fifteenth poem in
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.
3. He is talking about the first section of the Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Phoenix,” which contains a description of
neorxnawang
or “earthly paradise.” Borges briefly describes this poem in Class 7.
4. “... the world is wide / For you I say,—for me a narrow space / Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.”
The Earthly Paradise
, “Prologue: The Wanderers.”
5. “Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king / Shall be remembered but by this one thing, / That on the morn before ye crossed the sea / Ye gave and took in common talk with me; / But with this ring keep memory of the morn, / O Breton, and thou North- man, by this horn / Remember me, who am of Odin’s blood ...”
6. Borges is referring here to the already mentioned Varangian Guard. See Class 4, note 9.
7. “Of heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, / I cannot ease the burden of your fears, / Or make quick-coming death a little thing, / Or bring again the pleasure of past years, / Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears, / Or hope again for aught that I can say, / The idle singer of an empty day.”
The Earthly Paradise
, “An Apology.”
8. "Oh Master, O thou great of heart and tongue,
Thou well mayst ask me why I wander here,
In raiment rent of stories oft besung!
But of thy gentleness draw thou anear,
And then the heart of one who held thee dear
Mayst thou behold! So near as that I lay
Unto the singer of an empty day.”
9. Borges translates these lines in “A King of Fire and His Steed” [
Un rey de fuego y su caballo
] in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 688.
10. Published in 1867.
11. “In Thessaly, beside the tumbling sea,
Once dwelt a folk, men called the Minyæ;
For, coming from Orchomenus the old,
Bearing their wives and children, beasts and gold,
Through many a league of land they took their way,
And stopped at last, where in a sunny bay
The green Anaurus cleaves the white sea-sand,
And eastward inland doth Mount Pelion stand,
Where bears and wolves the centaurs’ arrows find ...”
The Life and Death of Jason
, Book 1, lines 1–10.
12. “There shall the quick-eyed centaurs be they friends.”
The Life and Death of Jason
, Book 1, line 87.
13. “But ‘mid his noise the listening man could hear
The sound of hoofs, whereat a little fear
He felt within his heart, and heeded nought
The struggling of the child, who ever sought
To gain the horn all glittering of bright gold,
Wrought by the cunning Dædalus of old.
But louder still the noise he hearkened grew,
Until at last in sight the Centaur