Sleepytime, Alfonsina

I'm going to sleep. I appreciate how sleepy this poem actually is. The language is languid and calm, and the punctuation kind of allows the poem to trail off like a sleepy person, not quite completing thoughts, or starting them halfway through. Does a nice job at that, too. I thought, at first, that the comparison between the mundane concept of sleep and the comparatively profound concept of death was unfitting, just that it didn't do justice to the complex nature of death. Upon further inspection, however, it seems the poem actually presents death as a sort of cosmic version of sleep. The first stanza presents death as sleeping, interred in the earth, and i feel like the Teeth of flowers and Hair of dew are a reference to decomposition, becoming one with the natural world. Death is the only way this connection can be accomplished.

Jorge Luis Borges

I'm reading, for my final project, some short stories by Borges, and I really appreciate some of the connections that I've seen with his writing and some of the older works that we've read. His story, The Aleph, really captures the idea of an entirely ineffable universe beyond human understanding, as many poets have talked about. In the story, the narrator comes across a point in space from which one can see everything in the universe simultaneously. He describes the resulting experience as totally inexplicable and is unable to translate it into literary form. He compares it to a Persian Diety, an Avian god who is somehow all birds. The thought makes no logical sense, but appeals to a greater sense of intrigue, which I found really interesting. Borges also makes fantastic use of diction in this story, really stretching language to its limits. One of the main characters of the story is a pretentious poet whose use of excessively complicated or archaic word choices express his desire to define a universe which is simply unable to be expressed by the English; or even human language. We came across that a lot, oui?

Modern Poetry

Fatality

It's weird to see this perspective on life; the preference to feeling nothing at all rather than the pain of existence. There's almost a suicidal quality to the poem, Darío most likely was not a suicidal man, but this poem is certainly something of a buzzkill. The poem also gives me a sense of maybe the...opposite of masochism, I guess; that feeling anything is the worst thing possible. I also realize everyone made the connection to Eden, but i just didn't see it. I realize Darío is all about the allusions, but the happy tree and then cool grapes really just seemed like more reasons why feeling is worse than being numb. This poem seemed very out of Darío's style in that sense, not being riddles with unnecessary allusions. I feel like I could actually read this poem without having the encylopedia Mythica open in front of me.