Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

was published and brought Rossetti glory. For that reason, Rossetti is included in the curriculum of the study of English literature in South America, and that is why we are studying him.
    As for his argument with Buchanan, Buchanan published an anonymous article titled “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” to which Rossetti answered with a pamphlet titled “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” which the other could not answer.
    Rossetti’s erotic sonnets are among the most beautiful of English literature. And now they don’t seem to us to be too erotic, as they could have seemed during the Victorian era. I have an edition of Rossetti published in 1903, and I have looked through it in vain for one of his most admirable sonnets, titled “Nuptial Sleep,” which refers to a wedding night. We will return to it later.
    Rossetti dies in 1882, at that country estate where there was a small zoological garden with kangaroos and other strange animals. It was a small zoo, and all the animals were small. And then Rossetti dies suddenly. Rossetti became addicted to chloral, and he dies from an overdose. According to all indications, he repeated the suicide of his wife. That is, both their deaths justify the painting “How They Met Themselves,” painted in Paris many years before, because Elizabeth Siddal died young. Hence, we are looking at a tragic destiny. Some have attributed this destiny to his Italian blood, but it seems absurd to me that Italian blood necessarily leads to a tragic life, or that an Italian is necessarily more passionate than an Englishman.
    And now let us read some of Rossetti’s work. We are going to begin with this sonnet I spoke to you about, “Nuptial Sleep.” I do not remember all the details, but I do remember the plot. 19 It begins by saying, “
Al fin su largo beso se separó
” [“At length their kiss severed”], and they separated. And then he compares the two lovers with a branch that forks, and says “their lips” separated after an act of love, but their lips were still close. And then it says that just as after the rain, the last drops of water fall from the roof tiles—here he is alluding to something else, of course—in the same way, each of their hearts continued beating separately. The two tired lovers fall asleep, but Rossetti, with a beautiful metaphor, says: “Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams.” “
El sueño los hundió más abajo de la marea de los sueños
.” The night passes, and the dawn awakens them, and then their souls, which were under sleep, wake up. And they slowly emerge from sleep as if it were water. But he is referring here, not to the woman’s soul, but rather to the man’s. And then he says that among the drowned remnants of the day—he sees marvels of new forests and streams—he awoke. That is, he had had a marvelous dream, he had dreamed of an unknown, splendid land, because his soul was full of the splendors of love. “
Él se despertó y se maravilló aún más porque ahí estaba ella
.” That is, the fact of waking up, of returning from a fantasy world, returning to reality, and seeing that the reality is there—the woman he loved and worshipped for so long—and seeing her sleeping by his side, in his arms, is even more wonderful than the dream. “He woke and wondered more: for there she lay.” You can see in these lines by a poet of Italian origins that all the words are Germanic and simple. I don’t think Rossetti was looking for this effect, because if he had, it would seem artificial to us, and it is not.
    And now I want to recall the beginning of another sonnet by Rossetti, for today I will not have time to talk about his great poems. This is a poem in which there is something cinematic, something playful, with a cinematic vision, even though it was written around 1850, in an era when cinematography was not even imagined. And he says, “
¿Qué hombre se ha inclinado sobre el rostro de su hijo, para pensar cómo esa cara, ese rostro / se inclinará sobre él cuando esté muerto?”
“What man has bent to his son’s face and brood, / How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?” 20 And here we have, as I have said, a play of images we would call cinematic. First, we have the face of the father who bends anxiously over the face of the son, and then the two images change places because he thinks of a certain future, when his face is the one that is lying down, dead, and it will be the face of the son who is