Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

legend about an English captain, a captain condemned to sail forever without ever reaching shore, near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The second is the legend of the Wandering Jew. I don’t know if any of you, when you read Chaucer, read the story of “The Pardoner’s Tale.” In that, there also appears an old man who strikes the earth with a staff looking for a tomb, and this old man might be a reference to the Wandering Jew, condemned to roam the earth until the day of the Final Judgment. 12 And surely Coleridge also knew the various Dutch legends that inspired the musical drama byWagner, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and the story of the Wandering Jew. 13
    And now we come to a no less famous poem by Coleridge called “Kubla Khan.” Kublai Khan was the famous emperor who received in his court the famous Venetian traveler, Marco Polo. He was one of those who revealed the Orient to the West. The story of the composition of this poem—written in 1798 and which Coleridge could not complete; it was included in
Lyrical Ballads
—is quite curious. There is a book by an American professor named LivingstonLowes about the sources of “Kubla Khan.” 14 The library ofSouthey, a Lake poet and author of a famous biography ofNelson, has been preserved. And in this library are the books that Coleridge was reading at that time, and there are passages he has marked. In this way, Livingston Lowes reached the conclusion that, although “Kubla Khan” is one of the most original compositions in all of English poetry, there is virtually no single line that has not been derived from a book. In other words, there are hundreds of sources for “Kubla Khan,” even though at the same time, the poem is, I repeat, original and incomparable.
    Coleridge says that he was sick, and the doctor recommended he take a dose of laudanum, that is, opium. In any case, taking opium was very common at that time. (Later, if there is time, I will say a few words about a distinguished poetic prose writer of the time, one of Coleridge’s disciples, Thomas DeQuincey, whose
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
was partially rendered into French byBaudelaire under the title
Les Paradís Artificiels, Artificial Paradises
.) Coleridge says that at the time he was living on a farm, and was reading a book byPurchas, a writer from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, I think, and in it, he read a passage about Emperor Kublai Khan, who is the Kubla Khan of his poem. 15 The passage has been found and is quite short. It says that the emperor ordered trees to be cut down in a forested area through which a river ran, and there he constructed a palace or a hunting pavilion, and he built a high wall around it. This is what Coleridge read. Then, still under the influence of his readings, and undoubtedly also under the influence of opium, Coleridge had a dream.
    Now, this dream was sad. It was a visual dream, because Coleridge dreamt, he saw, the construction of the Chinese emperor’s palace. At the same time, he heard music, and he knew—the way we know things in dreams, intuitively, inexplicably—that the music was building the palace, that the music was the architect of the palace. There is, moreover, a Greek tradition that says that the City of Thebes was built by music. Coleridge, who could have said as didMallarmé, “I have read every book,” could not have been unaware of this. So, Coleridge, in the dream, watched the palace being built, heard music he had never heard before—and now comes the extraordinary part—he heard a voice that recited the poem, a poem of a few hundred lines. Then he awoke, and remembered the poem he had heard in his dreams, the way the verses had been given to him—as had happened to his ancestor, Caedmon, the Anglo-Saxon shepherd—and he sat down and wrote the poem.
    He wrote about seventy lines, and then a man from the neighboring farm of Porlock came to visit him, a man who has since been cursed by all lovers of English literature. This man talked to him of issues of rural life. The visit lasted a couple of hours, and by the time Coleridge managed to free himself and pick up where he had left off writing down the poem given to him in his dream, he found that he had forgotten it. Now, for a long time it was believed that Coleridge began the poem, that he did not know how to end it—as happened to him with “Christabel”—and then he invented this fantastic story about a triple—an architectural, musical,