Jorge Luis Borges

Susana Soca

Susana Soca - meaning Summary

Yearning for Artful Distance

Borges depicts Susana Soca as a spectator of beauty who prefers the safe, ambiguous grays of contemplation to bold, primal action. She delights in complex, lyrical life from afar but lacks the courage to enter its dangerous labyrinth. Like a mirrored observer, she watches forms and tumult without intervening. Deprived of divine aid, her refusal to engage leads to a grim outcome signaled by the poem’s final image of consuming fire.

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With lingering love she gazed at the dispersed Colors of dusk. It pleased her utterly To lose herself in the complex melody Or in the cunous life to be found in verse. lt was not the primal red but rather grays That spun the fine thread of her destiny, For the nicest distinctions and all spent In waverings, ambiguities, delays. Lacking the nerve to tread this treacherous Labyrinth, she looked in on, whom without, The shapes, the turbulence, the striving rout, (Like the other lady of the looking glass.) The gods that dwell too far away for prayer Abandoned her to the final tiger, Fire.

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