Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

winter, the storms, the perils of a sailor’s life. And at that time those perils would have been tremendous in the tremendous North Sea in those small and fragile boats. Then he says that little can be known of these hardships by those who enjoy the pleasures of life in the cities, in the modest cities of the time. He talks about the summer—the summer was the preferred time for sailing, for at other times the ice floes blocked the sea. And then he says, “The guardian of summer sings . . . ”—I think this is the cuckoo—“boding bitter sorrows,” “
singeð sumeres weard
,
sorge beodeð / bitter in breosthord
,”
breosthord
is “the treasure of the chest,” in other words, the heart. This kenning here, “the treasure of the chest,” was clearly a well-known phrase when the poet used it. Saying “treasure of the chest” was like saying “heart.”
    The poet talks about the storms, and just when we think that this poem is simply about these hardships, there is a surprise, because the poet is talking not only about the hardships but also—we will encounter this theme in Swinburne, inKipling, and in others—about his fascination with the sea. And this is a particularly English theme. And this is only natural, for if we look on a globe at England—so important in the history of the world—we see that it is a small island torn off the western- and northern-most reaches of Europe. What I mean is that if you showed a globe to a person who was ignorant of history, this person would never think that such a slip of an island torn by the sea—that slip of an island, penetrated by the sea on all sides—would become the center of an empire. But that’s just what happened. There is a common saying in English, “to run away to the sea,” referring to those who run away from their families to take their chances in the dangerous North Sea.
    So there are a few lines that come as a total surprise to the reader that speak about those who feel their vocation is the sea. They speak about a man who is a seafarer by nature. And the verses say, “He has no spirit for the harp, nor for the passing out of rings”—remember that the kings passed out rings in their halls—“nor for the pleasure of women, nor for the pomp of this world. He only seeks the high and salty currents.” These contrary sentiments combine in the elegy of the seafarer: there are the dangers, the storms, and also this affinity for the sea.
    Now, there are those who have interpreted the entire poem as allegorical. They say that the sea symbolizes life with its storms and perils, and that an affinity with the sea means an affinity with life. We should not forget that people in the Middle Ages possessed the ability to read a poem on two different levels. In other words, those who read this poem thought about the sea, about the seafarer, and they also thought that the sea could be an allegory or a symbol for life. There is a much later text, written many centuries later (though it is a medieval text as well),Dante’s epistle to Cangrande della Scala, in which Dante tells him that he wrote his poem, the greatest poem of all of literature,
The Divine Comedy
, to be read in four different ways. 3 It could be read as the portrayal of the life of a sinner, a penitent, an adventurer, a just man. Even more, it can be read as a description of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Later, we will read a poem byLangland that has caused contemporary readers more than a little perplexity; they read the parts as if they were consecutive, but apparently the poem is instead a series of visions. 4 These visions become facets of the same thing. In our day, we have poets likeGeorge or Pound, who do not want their poems to be read consecutively—difficult as this is to honor in our era—but rather for the reader to have patience and to read them as different facets of one poetic object. 5 Apparently the ability to do this, which we have now lost or almost lost, was very common during the Middle Ages. Readers or listeners felt they could interpret a text in different ways. And jumping ahead now to what will come much later, we can say thatChesterton’s detective stories are written to be read as fantasy stories, but also as parables. And this is, in fact, what is going on in the seafarer’s elegy. At the end of the elegy, the poem is strictly, explicitly, symbolic. And this clearly did not present any difficulty in the ninth century. We must not assume, then, that we