Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

poetic—dream. This is what Coleridge’s contemporaries thought. Coleridge dies in the year 1834, and ten or twenty years later a translation is published, I don’t know if Russian or German, of a universal story, the work of a Persian historian. That is, a book that Coleridge could not have possibly read. And in that book, we read something as marvelous as the poem. We read that Emperor Kublai Khan had built a palace that the centuries would destroy, and that he built it according to plans that had been revealed to him in a dream. Here, the philosophy of [Alfred North]Whitehead comes to mind, which says that time is continually bringing lucre to eternal things, Platonic archetypes. So we can think about a Platonic idea—a palace that wants to exist not only in eternity but also in time—and that through dreams, it is revealed to a Chinese medieval emperor and then, centuries later, to an English poet at the end of the eighteenth century. The event, of course, is unusual, and we can even imagine how the dream continues: we don’t know what other form the palace will look for to fully exist. As architecture, it has disappeared, and poetically, it exists only in an unfinished poem. Who knows how the palace will define itself a third time, if there ever is a third time?
    Now let us look at the poem. The poem mentions a sacred river, the Alph. This might correspond to the Alpheus River of classical antiquity. And it begins like this:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
    Here we have the alliteration that Coleridge used in “TheAncient Mariner,” when he said: “The furrow followed free; / We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea.” (The
f
and then the
s
.) In other words, in Xanadu—which could be an ancient name for Peking—Kubla Khan decreed—ordered—the construction of a large pleasure pavilion or hunting pavilion where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns that men could not measure, to a sunless sea, to a deep and underground sea.
    Then Coleridge imagines a vast cavern the sacred river runs through, where he says there are blocks of ice. And then he mentions how odd the garden is, that garden surrounded by green forests, all of it constructed over an abyss. Now, this is why it has been said that this poem is about paradise, for this could be a transposition of God, whose first work, as FrancisBacon reminds us, was a garden, Eden. So we can think about the universe being built on emptiness. And Coleridge, in the poem, says that the emperor leaned over the black cavern of underground water, and there he heard voices that prophesied war. And then the poem moves from this dream to another one. Coleridge says that in the dream, he remembered another dream, and in that dream, there was an Abyssinian maiden on a mountain who sang and played the laud. He knows that if he could remember this maiden’s music, he could rebuild the palace. Then he says that everyone would look at him in horror, everyone would realize that he had been bewitched.
    The poem ends with those four enigmatic lines that I will first say in Spanish, then in English: “
Tejí a su alrededor un triple círculo, / y miradlo y contempladlo con horror sagrado, / porque él se ha alimentado de hidromiel, / y ha bebido la leche del Paraíso
.” “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes” . . . No . . . “Tejed
a su alrededor un triple círculo y cerrad vuestros ojos con horror sagrado
.” . . . Nobody can look at him. . . . “And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed . . . ” “
Porque él se ha alimentado del rocío de la miel
.” “And drunk the milk of Paradise.” A lesser poet might have spoken of “the wine of Paradise,” which would be terrible; but no less terrible is it to speak, as in this poem, of “the milk of Paradise.”
    These poems, of course, cannot be read in translation. In translation all that remains is the plot, but you can easily read them in English, especially the second one, “Kubla Khan,” whose music has never since been equaled. It is about seventy lines long. We don’t know, we cannot even imagine, a possible ending to this poem.
    Finally, I would like to emphasize how marvelous, how almost miraculous it is that in the last decade of that reasonable, that very admirable eighteenth century, a poem was composed that is totally