On His Blindness
On His Blindness - context Summary
Poet's Progressive Blindness
This sonnet addresses Borges’s progressive, genetic blindness and how it reshapes perception and poetic purpose. Framed by the loss of sight that left him blind by the mid-1950s, the speaker describes the visible world collapsing into a uniform, colourless mist and expresses a lonely wish to see a human face. The poem does not stay purely lamenting; it contrasts the ordinary possession of sight by others with the speaker’s half-dark
, and presents loss as the condition in which the demanding work of poetry continues.
In the fullness of the years, like it or not, a luminous mist surrounds me, unvarying, that breaks things down into a single thing, colourless, formless. Almost into thought. The elemental, vast night and the day teeming with people have become the fog of constant, tentative light that does not flag, and lies in wait at dawn. I longed to see just once a human face. Unknown to me the closed encyclopaedia, the sweet play in volumes I can do no more than hold, the tiny soaring birds, the moons of gold. Others have the world, for better or worse; I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.
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