In Praise of Darkness

“In Praise of Darkness” is a free verse poem with one stanza that contains 46 lines. The lines, and their meter, vary widely. Furthermore, different translations have different meters. Some lines are three words long, such as “days and nights” (Line 35). These lines leave a large amount of white space on the page’s margins. Other lines cover nearly the entire page, such as “Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think” (Line 15), which leaves little white space and covers the page with dark ink—a visual representation of the encroaching darkness that matches the description of the philosopher blinding himself.

The long and erratic lines show how Walt Whitman influenced Borges. Borges clarifies this connection in his essay on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that is included in On Writing. In it, Borges calls Whitman’s epic democratic and “plural” (47). While Borges is talking about the multiple faces of Whitman’s hero, this idea can also be applied to the wide variety of line lengths in Whitman’s and Borges’s poetry, which on a formal level, could be considered plural.