Was there a Garden or was the Garden a
dream?
Amid the fleeting light I have slowed
myself and queried...
Adam, having been cast out of the Garden of Eden, is beginning to wonder whether there ever was a garden at all, or whether he merely dreamed it. Its beauty seems to him to be something that could only be created and experienced within a dream. He is also using the Garden as a symbol of love. He is pondering the fleeting nature of love, and the way in which it seems to have been too beautiful to comprehend after it has left. He wonders later on in the poem whether having love for even just one day is worth it, if it means being cast out forever, never being able to experience it again, and concludes that it is.
Adam is also wondering whether he really was in love or whether he dreamed the intensity of his feelings. Did he really experience living in the Garden of Eden or was it a reverie? He is unsure, and this is also making him unsure how to interpret his experience, because he does not know if he is interpreting his experiences or a dream.
Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive,
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar....
This poem is a seemingly innocuous ode to a house pet, in this case, a cat; however, thematically, it also adheres to one of the central themes and motifs that are evident throughout Borges' work. There is mysticism around the identity of the cat, and the way in which it appears to the speaker, blurring the line between what he is seeing and what he believes he is seeing. In this way it also blurs the line between dreams and reality.
In this quote from the poem, he is musing about the cat, a creature which, like a mirror, we see a great deal, but which we have to interpret for ourselves. The cat seems secretive because it keeps to itself; the speaker is far more interested in the cat than the cat is in him. The speaker also observes that at night everything looks different; things appear to be further away than they are, and they usually seem larger too. The cat appears to be a panther in the dark of the night, rather than the domestic moggy he actually is. He also appears to be more closely related to his big-cat ancestors than he does during the day. Throughout his poetry Borges is fascinated by things that are not what they appear to be, and the cat is a good example of this.
It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books....
The "other tiger" to which the poet refers is the one that he has constructed in his own mind from the snippets of information about tigers that he has picked up over the years. When the speaker thinks of a tiger, he imagines him similar to the "tiger, tiger, burning bright" glorified in the Blake poem. He is magnificent, mighty, and noble, yet brutal and bloodthirsty, as nature intended him to be. He has a magical symmetry about him which also doubles as a camouflage.
However, in Stanza 2, the speaker realizes that he is not thinking about an actual tiger that he has seen first-hand. He is imagining a tiger seen through the eyes of others. The makes it difficult for him to truly seek out the tiger as he envisions it, but he remains determined to see the tiger for himself one day. This is another example of Borges' wanting to experience things for himself and see them as they really are rather than interpreting things as others explain them or say that they should be.
