Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

an ancient title for the nobility and is written with a final “e.” The line is taken from Shakespeare; it is also the name of a ballad that has been lost. 2 And it is perhaps the strangest of all of Browning’s poems. The great American poet CarlSandburg has written a poem titled“Manitoba Childe Roland.” 3 It tells how he read that poem to a boy on a farm in Minnesota, and how the child did not understand anything—perhaps the person reading also did not really understand it—but how both of them were carried away, fascinated by the mystery of the poem that has never been explained. 4 It is full of magical details. It apparently takes place in the Middle Ages. Not in an historic Middle Ages, but rather the Middle Ages of books about knights errant, of the books in Don Quixote’s library.
    And now, before talking about
The Ring and the Book
, I would like to mention, a bit randomly, a few other poems by Browning. There is one titled “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” 5 The protagonist of this poem is a medium, a fake medium who takes a lot of money from an American millionaire who is in despair over the recent death of his wife. Mr. Sludge has put the widower in communication with the spirit of the dead woman. And then he is found out, by the American millionaire himself, and he says he is going to report him to the police as an imposter, but finally he says that he will not on the condition that Mr. Sludge, the fake medium, tell him the true story of his career, a career built on deception. And the other says that he heard about spiritualism and thought that he could take advantage of it, for it is not difficult to deceive people who want to be deceived. That, in fact, those who have been deceived by him—not excluding the angry gentleman who is threatening him—have been his accomplices, have closed their eyes when confronting clumsy lies. He tells about how at first he showed his victims texts he said were written inHomer’s handwriting, and as he did not know the Greek alphabet, the Greek words were represented with circles and dots “
antes que encontrara el libro útil que sabe
” [“before I found the useful book that knows”]. Then he grows more confident and in some way exalts in himself and then, suddenly, he becomes desolate. Then he tries to recover his victim’s trust. He asks him if he hears at that moment the voice of his beloved wife, of that woman he himself has learned to love through the man’s love of her, and through the dialogue with her spirit. The other then threatens him with physical violence. Mr. Sludge continues confessing the truth and then we reach the end of the poem. It is a long poem, because Browning had studied the subject very well, the subject of fake mediums. And then we come to the end, to a conclusion that is wholly unexpected by the reader and for those who have been following the story of Mr. Sludge’s deceptions and the way he worked them. In the end, the medium, whom the other is on the verge of attacking, of physically assaulting, says that everything he has told him
has been
the truth, that he has not been deceiving him. That he was carrying the dead woman’s letters hidden in the sleeves of his jacket. “Nevertheless,” he adds, in spite of all his tricks, “I do believe there is something in spiritualism, I do believe in the other world.” That is, the protagonist admits that he has been an imposter, but that does not mean that there is no other world, that there are no spirits. One can see how Browning liked ambiguous situations and souls. For example, in this case, the imposter is also a believer.
    There is a short poem titled“Memorabilia,” “things worth remembering” in Latin. 6 I think the title is taken from some interspersed scenes in the work of the great Swedish mysticSwedenborg. It is about two gentlemen who are conversing, and it turns out that one of them met the well-known atheist poetShelley, that poet who had so much influence on young people. And the other says to him, “What, did you talk to Shelley? Did you see him, he talked to you, and you answered him? How strange that all is, and yet it is true!” And he says, once he had to cross a moor, a moor that had a name and undoubtedly had some use, some purpose, some destiny in the world. But he has forgotten everything. Everything else—all the blank miles—have been erased. What he remembers is an eagle feather. There, he saw and picked up and placed in his breast the eagle