That One - Analysis

A self-portrait that calls itself a nuisance

The poem’s central move is brutally simple: it treats a whole life as an itemized burden, and then adds one more weight at the end—the poem itself. The speaker opens with Oh days devoted to the useless burden of trying to forget the biography of a minor poet from the Southern Hemisphere. That phrase is both comic and corrosive: it shrinks the self into a footnote, as if the only honest way to speak about one’s life is to dismiss it. Yet the very energy of the inventory suggests the opposite. If it were truly forgettable, it wouldn’t need so much careful, sensuous listing.

Fate’s “gifts”: a body, a cell, a countdown

Early on, the poem frames identity as something handed down by forces that don’t care—the fates or perhaps the stars. What they give is not romantic destiny but a sequence of confinements: a body that will leave no child behind, blindness described as semi-darkness and jail, and old age as the dawn of death. Even the metaphors tighten the screws: dawn is usually a beginning, but here it’s the light that reveals an ending. The tone is resigned, but not soft; the language keeps turning the screws with cool precision, as if the speaker is determined not to sentimentalize what hurts.

Fame, verse, and the embarrassment of making art

In the middle of all this, the poem drops a line that sounds like a moral verdict and also like self-defense: fame, which absolutely nobody deserves. It’s a democratic claim that doubles as a personal refusal—if nobody deserves fame, then any fame attached to this minor poet can be treated as accidental, even indecent. Right beside that comes the practice of weaving hendecasyllables, which makes writing sound like a fussy craft habit, something almost archaic. The tension here is sharp: the speaker is plainly a person of intense literary discipline, and yet he portrays that discipline as one more useless obligation, one more way of filling the day with a task that cannot justify itself.

Catalog of obsessions: maps, Latin, and a mind built of references

As the list grows, the poem begins to feel like a tour through the speaker’s private museum. He loves encyclopedias, fine handmade maps, and smooth ivory—objects of order, classification, and polished surfaces. He admits an incurable nostalgia for the Latin, not a mild preference but a chronic ache for an older language-world. Then come place-names—Edinburgh and Geneva—paired immediately with the loss of memory of names and dates. That pairing matters: the mind can hold whole cities as symbols, while it can’t hold onto the small factual pins that keep a life securely labeled. The poem’s speaker seems to live in reference and recollection while also experiencing memory as something frayed, a library that misfiles its own catalog cards.

The East, the Anglo-Saxon, and the hunger for otherness

Another contradiction surfaces in the line about the cult of the East, which the poem dryly notes the varied peoples of that teeming East do not themselves share. The speaker catches himself in a very specific kind of self-deception: loving an imagined East more than any actual place. Immediately after, he turns to the iron of Anglo-Saxon syllables, a phrase that makes language itself feel like metal—hard, weighty, almost weapon-like. These are not casual tastes; they are compulsions toward elsewhere. The tone here is slyly self-accusing: the speaker is both proud of these devotions and embarrassed by their distance from lived reality.

Buenos Aires as the worst habit

The poem’s most personal jab may also be its funniest: that worse of all bad habits, Buenos Aires. A city becomes an addiction, something the speaker can’t quit even if he wanted to. That line changes the temperature of the poem. Up to this point the burdens could be framed as fate’s allotment—blindness, aging, childlessness—but here the burden is belonging, the sticky attachment to a particular place. It suggests an inner argument: the speaker longs for encyclopedias, maps, Latin, Edinburgh, Geneva, the East—yet he is still caught in the daily gravity of his own streets. The city is not simply home; it is the habit that undoes the fantasy of being purely cosmopolitan.

The sensual crumbs that refuse to be “useless”

Just when the poem has made life sound like a ledger of afflictions and eccentricities, it slips in pleasures so physical they nearly rebel against the speaker’s disdain: the subtle flavor of water, the taste of grapes, chocolate as a Mexican delicacy. These are not grand themes; they are immediate, bodily enjoyments. Their presence complicates the opening claim that these days are useless. The speaker can call his life a burden, but his palate and attention keep testifying otherwise. Even the humble props—a few coins and an old hourglass—feel lovingly chosen, as if the mind can’t help arranging its small treasures, even while mocking the act of treasuring.

A sharp question the poem won’t let go of

If fame is undeserved and biography is a useless burden, why does the speaker keep collecting the self so meticulously—down to smooth ivory and the moon that always catches us by surprise? The poem seems to suggest that self-knowledge is both vanity and necessity: you condemn it, and then you do it again, because the mind can’t stop inventorying what it has been.

The final turn: the evening spent on these lines

The closing is the poem’s quiet hinge. After all the accumulated clauses, the speaker adds one more: and that an evening, like so many others, be given over to these lines of verse. The poem that complained about the burden of biography becomes part of the biography it mocked. The tone here is not triumphant; it’s rueful, almost tender in its fatigue. A life is passing—marked by an old hourglass, by evening trembling with hope or expectation—and the speaker keeps doing what he does: turning his obsessions, limitations, and pleasures into language. If this is a self-portrait (and Borges’s well-known blindness and Argentine life make the details ring with unmistakable self-reference), it is a self-portrait that refuses to flatter. It insists that the self is made of constraints, fixations, and passing tastes—and that poetry is both the most useless part of that bundle and the one thing that can hold it together long enough to be seen.