Posted by: mezzosoprano | January 23, 2008

The art of poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.
To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness–such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing. 

(Jorge Luis Borges)


Responses

  1. I love this poem, I know I’ve commented on it before on one of the other sites, it’s so beautiful. There is a quote about art which I think was made by Matthew Arnold, I read it once on the back of an album cover and have never found it again, it goes something like ‘Art is that moment in whose presence our hearts first opened’ I’ll have to keep searching for it……

  2. The Ithaca in the Heart always beckons, but it seems so rarely we arrive, finally. Maybe it’s always the other side of this life that we seek, working always to deserve that lovely vision. Beautiful poem, Borges inner life was so very beautiful & unique, like yours.


Leave a response

Your response:

Categories