The Compass
The Compass - meaning Summary
Language as Fragile Map
The poem argues that human life and history are mostly made of words and accidental identities, a Babel of meaningless dialects that mask a deeper, nameless reality. The speaker describes feeling a sudden, delicate perception—likened to a blue compass needle—that points beyond ordinary language toward something distant and intimate. The compass image suggests a brief, lucid orientation toward a hidden truth or direction beyond speech and historical contingency.
Read Complete AnalysesAll things are really only words in a tongue of endless gobbledegook that someone or something is writing in a book that is the history of the world. In herds, you, I, everyone, Carthage, Rome travel, and my unfathomable life too, and this stigma of having been an accident, a cipher, an enigma, of being all the unmelodious dialects of Babel. But behind every name is what has no name. Today, I felt its shadow flicker and take aim in the blue compass needle, lucid and light, that points far away across seas that gleam, something like a timepiece glimpsed in a dream, or the stirring of a bird in the middle of the night.
Translated from Spanish by Paul Weinfield
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