Matt Roth [ to JM's quotation: “If a man could pass through Paradise
in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had
really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye!
and what then?" ( "Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge" (1895) edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 282) ]: Very
interesting find, Jansy! I immediately heard in the “If… And if” rhetorical
pattern these lines, also by Shade:
If on some nameless
island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little
later, Captain Smith
Brings back a new skin, that island is no
myth. (759-762)
JM: Marvellous example. Its clarity helps one to
conjecture that VN had really read Coleridge's essay, instead of
finding his inspiration in H.G.Wells'a depressing future. Borges places
Well's novel in a long literary tradition about prophesizing future events.
He mentions the biblical Isaiah, Virgil's Aeneas and the seer from the Edda
Saemundi, who predicted the return of the gods who, after a cyclical battle in
which the Earth disappears, discover their abandoned chess-pieces lying on the
lawn of a new prairie.
After the lines you recovered in connection to Coleridge's flower, Shade
writes (763-766):
Our fountain was a
signpost and a mark
Objectively
enduring in the dark,
Strong as a bone, substantial as a tooth,
And almost vulgar in its robust truth!
I hadn't realized until now that the
alteration of Captain Schmidth's name to Captain Smith
already pre-announces the misprint "mountain-fountain" before Shade
has discovered Jim Coates's mistake. He'll conjecture
about the playfulness of chess-playing gods and plans
to emulate them.
The irony of affirming that the
fountain is "objectively enduring"..."strong as a bone"..." will
gain another edge because, although Shade knew about the misprint at
the time he penned his poem, in his chronological rendering of his
experience he chooses to reiterate what seems to him as the
relative importance of the way in which particular names and words are
rendered or distorted, and how, in a poem, travelling in time,
foreseeing the future or visiting paradise, is an ever
present possibility.