Music Box
Music Box - meaning Summary
Transience Summoned by Tiny Music
Borges’ short poem listens to a small Japanese music box and treats its repeating, droplet-like sounds as a fragile bridge between past and present. The speaker imagines mysterious origins—shrines, mountains, distant seas—and feels each tinkling might be the last. The music summons memory and longing, making the speaker intensely present while also exposing mortality and dissolution. The closing lines assert existence and desire even as the self seems to fade: I am. I want to be. I bleed away.
The poem links miniature sound to vast time and private melancholy.
Music of Japan. Parsimoniously from the water clock the drops unfold in lazy honey or ethereal gold that over time reiterates a weave eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright. I fear that every one will be the last. They are a yesterday come from the past. But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight garden, what vigils by an unknown sea, and from what modest melancholy, from what lost and rediscovered afternoon do they arrive at their far future: me? Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play I am. I want to be. I bleed away.
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