Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

of a beloved woman, for example. Because he said this was to seek “a foreign splendor,” a splendor foreign to the main subject. Now, it is true that Wordsworth was a man of the eighteenth century, and it is given to no man, no matter how revolutionary, to differ wholly from his era. And so Wordsworth sometimes employs—and this makes some of his pages ridiculous—the same diction he himself censured. In one poem he speaks of a bird, then he doesn’t see it again, and he thinks someone might have killed it. And he wants to say, and says, that the men of the valley might have killed it with their rifles. But instead of saying it directly, he says: “the Dalesmen may have aimed the deadly tube” instead of “rifle.” 3 This was somewhat inevitable.
    Wordsworth wrote some of the most admirable sonnets of English poetry, usually about nature. And there is one famous one that takes place on Westminster Bridge, in London. This poem, like all of Wordsworth’s good poems, is sincere. He had always said that beauty was in the mountains, in the moors; nevertheless, in this poem, he says that he never had such a serene feeling as the one he had that morning when he crossed Westminster Bridge while the city was sleeping. 4 There’s also a quite curious sonnet in which he is in a port, and he sees a ship arrive, and we could say he falls in love with it; he wishes it good luck, as if the ship were a woman. 5
    Now, Wordsworth also planned out two philosophical poems. One of them,
The Prelude
, was autobiographical, that is, the meditations of a solitary walker. And in it is a dream I am going to retell. One critic has observed that Wordsworth must have had dreams of startling clarity, because he has a poem titled“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” which lays out his argument for immortality—based on the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul. The poem is derived from recollections of childhood. In it, he says that when he was young, all things had a certain splendor, a kind of clarity that later became blurred. He says that things had “the freshness and glory of a dream.” 6 And in another poem, he says that something is as “vivid as a dream.” We know that he had hallucinatory experiences. He was in Paris a little before what has been called the Reign of Terror, and from the balcony of his house, a tall house, he saw the sky crimson, and he thought he heard a voice prophesying death. Then, back in England, he had to pass at night through Stonehenge, the circle of stones from before the Celtic era, where the Druids performed sacrifices. And he thought he saw the Druids with their stone knives—flint knives—sacrificing human beings. But now I’ll get back to that dream.
    Someone said that the dream had to have been dreamed by Wordsworth, but I believe—you can form your own judgment, of course—that the dream is too elaborate to really be a dream. Before telling it, Wordsworth tells us about the previous circumstances; the basis of the dream is in these circumstances, which are told with particular vividness. Wordsworth says that he had always been plagued by a fear, a fear that the two greatest works of mankind, the sciences and the arts, could disappear through some cosmic disaster. Nowadays, we have more right to this fear, given the progress of science. But at that time, this idea was very strange, to think that humanity could be erased from the planet, and along with humanity, science, music, poetry, and architecture. In other words, everything essential in mankind’s labor throughout thousands of years and hundreds of generations. And Wordsworth says that he spoke with somebody about this, and that person told him that he shared the same fear, and that the day after that conversation he went to the beach. You will see how these circumstances lay the groundwork for Wordsworth’s dream. Wordsworth arrives at the beach in the morning, and at the beach there is a cave. He seeks shelter from the sun’s rays in the cave, but he can see the beach from it, the golden beach and the sea. Wordsworth sits down to read, and the book he is reading—this is important—is
DonQuixote
. Then the noon hour arrives—
la hora del bochorno
[the sultry hour], as they say in Spain—and he yields to the weight of the hour; the book falls from his hand, and then Wordsworth says, “I passed into a dream.” In the dream he is no longer at the beach, in the cave facing the