Borges & Stevens

Jorge Borges poem Break of Day, as well as his short story The Circular Ruins are glimpses into Jorge’s obsession with the dream. In both of these works the dream is the foundation of the story. Break of Day talks of the idea of the world, and all it consists of, being nothing more than a combined collection of peoples dreams. In The Circular Ruins Borges tells of a man who devotes two or more years to sleeping around twenty hours a day. In his slumber his dreams manifest a son that becomes real and with a twist in the end the old man realizes he too is but a dream of someone. This obsession with dreams is a basic struggle of man to explain what life is really all about. No different than Wallace Stevens’ Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain. His epic mountain saga is a typical metaphor to see, understand, or explain what this life is all about.