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Jorge Luis Borges - Browning Decides To Be A Poet
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In these red labyrinths of London
	I find that I have chosen
	the strangest of all callings,
	save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
	Like the alchemist
	who sought the philosopher`s stone
	in quicksilver,
	I shall make everyday words—
	the gambler`s marked cards, the common coin—
	give off the magic that was their
	when Thor was both the god and the din,
	the thunderclap and the prayer.
	In today`s dialect
	I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
	I shall try to be worthy
	of the great echo of Byron.
	This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
	If a woman shares my love
	my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
	if a woman turns my love aside
	I will make of my sadness a music,
	a full river to resound through time.
	I shall live by forgetting myself.
	I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
	I shall be Judas who takes on
	the divine mission of being a betrayer,
	I shall be Caliban in his bog,
	I shall be a mercenary who dies
	without fear and without faith,
	I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
	upon the seal returned by fate.
	I will be the friend who hates me.
	The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
	Masks, agonies, resurrections
	will weave and unweave my life,
	and in time I shall be Robert Browning.
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