Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

sea. He is in a huge desert of black sand, a kind of Sahara. Now, you can see that the desert, as well as its black sand, we are suggested by the white sand on the beach. He is lost in the desert, and then he sees a figure approaching, and this figure is holding a shell in his left hand. And in the other hand he has a stone that is also a book. And this man approaches him at a gallop on his camel. Now, naturally you can see how the previous circumstances lay the groundwork, especially for an English mind. There is a relationship between Spain and the Arabs, and this rider on his camel, this rider with his spear, is a transformation of Don Quixote. The rider approaches Wordsworth, who is lost in that black desert. Wordsworth asks him for help, and he moves the shell close to the dreamer’s ear. Wordsworth hears a voice “in an unknown tongue, which yet I understood,” a voice that prophesies the destruction of the earth with a second flood. And then the Arab, with a grave demeanor, tells him that this is how it is, and that it is his mission to save the two capital works of humanity from this flood, this deluge. One is related “with the stars,” “undisturbed by space and time.” And this work is science. Science is represented by a stone, which is also a book. This kind of ambiguity is common in dreams. I have dreamed about someone who sometimes is someone else, or has someone else’s features, and in the dream this did not surprise me; dreams can use that language. Then the Arab shows the stone to Wordsworth, who sees that it is not just a stone, it isEuclid’s
Elements
, and this represents science. As for the shell, the shell is
all
books, all the poetry that has ever been written, is being written, will be written, by man. And he hears the whole poem like a voice, a voice full of despair, joy, passion. The Arab tells him that he has to bury—to save—those two important objects, science and art, represented by the shell and Euclid’s
Elements
. Then the Arab looks out and sees something, then spurs on his camel. Then the dreamer sees something like a great light filling the earth and understands that this great light is the flood. The Arab is riding off. The dreamer runs after the Arab, asking him to save him, and the waters almost reach him just as he awakens.
    De Quincey says that this most sublime dream needs to be read. But De Quincey believed that Wordsworth invented it. Needless to say, we will never know. I think that most likely Wordsworth had a similar dream that he then improved upon. In the dream, when the Arab rides off, Wordsworth follows him with his eyes, and sees that the Arab is sometimes an Arab on his camel and sometimes DonQuixote on his Rocinante. And then when he tells the dream, he says that perhaps he did not really dream it, that perhaps there actually is among the Bedouin tribes—the Arab is Bedouin—some madman thinking that the world will be flooded and he wants to save the sciences and the arts. You will find this passage—I don’t know if it has been translated—in the second book of
The Prelude
, Wordsworth’s long poem. 7
    Now, usually whenever Wordsworth is discussed, one discusses the poem“Intimations of Immortality,” that poem I told you about, the one that mentions the Platonic doctrine. But I think what is special about Wordsworth is, besides a few ballads . . . 8 There’s a poem called“To a Highland Girl.” 9 And this is also the subject of one of the first poemsRilke wrote, that of a girl singing in the countryside, and of the song, and of the melody remembered many years later. Now, in Wordsworth’s poem there is the added detail, mysterious for him, that the girl is singing in Gaelic, in Celtic, which he could not understand. And he wonders what the theme of the song is, and he thinks, “unhappy, far away things, and battles long ago.” That music that filled the valley in waves, that music, continues resounding in his ears. Then we have the series about Lucy Gray, poems about a girl he was in love with. The girl dies, and he thinks that now she is part of the earth and is condemned to spin forever, like the stones and the trees. There is a poem about when the shadow ofNapoleon fell over England, in a manner of speaking, as would fall the shadow of another dictator. This time, England was left alone to fight against Napoleon, much like in the Second World War when it was again left alone. So Wordsworth writes a sonnet saying, “Another year