Grants.

EMBARKING on the STUDY of ANGLO-SAXON GRAMMAR

I, after fifty generations

(Time opens such gulfs out to us all)

Return to the far bank of a mighty river

The Norsemen's longships never reached,

To the harsh, hard-wrought words

Which, with a tongue now long gone to dust,

I used in the days of Northumbria and Mercia

Before becoming Haslam1 or Borges.

Last Saturday, we read how Julius Cæsar

Was the first to come from Romeburg to unveil Britain;

Before the grapes grow back, I shall have heard

The nightingale of the riddle

And the elegy spoken by the twelve

Warriors round their king's burial mound.

To me, these words seem symbols of other symbols,

Variants of German or English-to-be,

But they were once images of the actual

Used by a man to proclaim a sword or the sea;

Tomorrow they will come alive again,

Tomorrow, fyr will not be fire, but rather that lot

Of tamed and changeling god

Whom none can face without feeling an ancient fear.

Glory be to the unending weft

Of cause and effect

Which, before showing me the mirror

In which I shall see no one or some other,

Grants me this perfect contemplation

Of a language at its dawn.

Jorge Luis Borges,