In Praise of Darkness

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1969

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“In Praise of Darkness” is a free verse poem with one stanza that contains 46 lines. The lines, and their meter, vary widely. Furthermore, different translations have different meters. Some lines are three words long, such as “days and nights” (Line 35). These lines leave a large amount of white space on the page’s margins. Other lines cover nearly the entire page, such as “Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think” (Line 15), which leaves little white space and covers the page with dark ink—a visual representation of the encroaching darkness that matches the description of the philosopher blinding himself.

The long and erratic lines show how Walt Whitman influenced Borges. Borges clarifies this connection in his essay on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that is included in On Writing. In it, Borges calls Whitman’s epic democratic and “plural” (47). While Borges is talking about the multiple faces of Whitman’s hero, this idea can also be applied to the wide variety of line lengths in Whitman’s and Borges’s poetry, which on a formal level, could be considered plural.

Pronouns

In the poem, the use of pronouns becomes a literary device. The speaker uses the personal and possessive pronouns “I” and “my,” which is fitting since he explores his personal identity—the one at “my secret center” (Line 32), which is also called simply “my center” (Line 43). The first-person pronoun “my” indicates that the center belongs to the speaker. He also refers to his own life, specifically his own experience of going blind, with the pronoun “my” (Lines 14, 16).

This personal identity stands in contrast to how the speaker explores his national identity. He discusses various neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, such as the “Recoleta, the Retiro” (Line 10), and the decrepit houses that are in the part of the city that “we still call the South” (Line 13). The pronoun “we” here includes various residents of Buenos Aires, a collective experience that the speaker is part of. In the poem, pronoun usage thus positions Borges’s home city as a place of belonging and inclusion. The plural pronoun also describes a period of time, when Borges writes that old age “can be the time of our greatest bliss” (Line 2). Growing old is something that many people experience, making it an even more universal experience than being a citizen of Argentina.

Metaphors and Similes

Borges uses a number of direct and indirect comparisons. Democritus, the philosopher who blinded himself, is metaphorically connected to time: Just as the philosopher blinded himself, so does “Old age” (Line 1) blind the poem’s speaker, thus making him another Democritus. The allusion to Democritus makes this metaphor a direct comparison between blindness and time, assigning to impersonal temporality the same kind of agency and purpose that is ascribed to the ancient Greek thinker. The comparison is also a metaphor in the Aristotelian sense, following “from the observer intuiting a correspondence between dissimilar phenomena,” as Borges paraphrased Aristotle in the essay “On Metaphor,” from his book On Writing (Page 42). Time and Democritus are dissimilar—one is a dimension and the other is a historical figure.

A little later in the poem, Borges blends a metaphor with a simile. Rather than including an allusion, Borges includes water imagery: “This penumbra [...] / flows down a gentle slope, / resembling eternity” (Lines 17-19). The first, indirect, comparison in this passage is between the growing darkness and water as it runs down a small hill. The second comparison between the penumbra and eternity uses the comparative word “resembling,” making this figure a simile instead of a metaphor. Robert Mezey translates the line as “like eternity,” which emphasizes this as an even more classic example of a simile as a comparison that follows the word “like” or “as.”