I thought I knew all about words, all about language (when one is a child, one feels that one knows many things), but those words came as a revelation to me. Of course, I did not understand them. How could I understand those lines about birds’—about animals’—being somehow eternal, timeless, because they live in the present? We are mortal because we live in the past and in the future—because we remember a time when we did not exist, and foresee a time when we shall be dead. Those verses came to me through their music. I had thought of language as being a way of saying things, of uttering complaints, of saying that one was glad, or sad, and so on. Yet when I heard those lines (and I have been hearing them, in a sense, ever since), I knew that language could also be a music and a passion. And thus poetry was revealed to me.
JORGE LUIS BORGES This Craft of Verse.
Cambridge, MASS : HarvardUP, 2000. p98-9.
