Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature Read Free

manuscript in the convent. There are other codices:
TheAnglo-Saxon Chronicle
, a translation of Boethius, one of Orosius, laws, and
Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn
. 6 And that is all. Then come the epic poems. The famous
Beowulf
, a composition of a little fewer than 3,200 lines, suggests, perhaps, that there were other epic poems that vanished. But they are all completely hypothetical. Moreover, considering that the epic poem appears after the proliferation of short cantos and arises from them, it is also reasonable to believe that that one is unique.
    In every instance, poetry comes before prose. It seems that man sings before he speaks. But there are other very important reasons for this. A verse, once composed, serves as a model. It is repeated over and over again, and then we have a poem. Prose, on the other hand, is much more complex, and requires a greater effort. Moreover, we must not forget the mnemonic value of verse. Thus, in India, the codices are written in verse. 7 I assume they must have some poetic value; this is not why they were written in verse, but rather because in that form it was easier to remember them.
    We must look closely at what we mean by “verse.” This word has a very elastic meaning. It is not the same concept for all peoples in all eras. For example, we think of rhymed and isosyllabic verse; the Greeks thought of sung verse, noted for its parallel structures, for its phrases that balanced one another. Germanic verse is nothing like this. It was difficult to discover the rules that determine how these verses were constructed, because in the codices the lines aren’t written—as are ours—one under the other, but rather continuously. Moreover, they have no punctuation. But finally, it was discovered that each line has three words whose first syllables are stressed and that they are alliterated. Rhymes have also been found, but these are accidental: those who listened to this poetry probably didn’t hear them. And I say those who listened because these poems were meant to be read or sung, accompanied by a harp. There is a Germanist who says that alliterated verse has the advantage of forming a unit. But we must mention here its disadvantage, which is that it does not allow for stanzas. Indeed, if we hear a rhyme in Spanish, we are led to expect a conclusion; that is, if a four-line stanza’s first line ends in -
ía
, followed by two verses ending in -
aba
, we expect the fourth line to also end in -
ía
. But this does not happen with alliteration. After several verses, the sound of the first one, for example, has vanished from our minds, and hence the sensation of the stanza disappears. Rhyming allows for lines to be grouped together.
    Later, the Germanic poets discovered the refrain and used it infrequently. But poetry had developed another hierarchical poetic instrument: that is,kennings—descriptive, crystallized metaphors. 8 Because poets were always talking about the same things, always dealing with the same themes—that is: spears, kings, swords, the earth, the sun—and as these were words that did not begin with the same letter, they had to find a solution. The only poetry that existed, as I have said, was epic poetry. (There was no erotic poetry. Love poetry would appear much later, in the ninth century, with the Anglo-Saxon elegiac poems.) For this poetry, which was only epic, they formed compound words to denote things whose names did not begin with the requisite letter. These kinds of formations are quite possible, and normal, in the Germanic languages. They realized that these compound words could very well be used as metaphors. In this way, they began to call the sea “whale-road,” “sail-road,” or “fish-bath”; they called the ship “sea-stallion” or “sea-stag” or “sea-boar,” always using the names of animals; as a general rule, they thought of the ship as a living being. The king was called “the people’s shepherd” and also—this surely for the