Poetry: El oro de los tigres

Overview
Published in 1972, El oro de los tigres gathers Borges’s late lyrical voice into a compact, lucid book where metaphysical speculation and personal remembrance meet. The poems revisit lifelong obsessions, time, identity, fate, and the shadowy border between dream and waking, while adopting the tempered tone of a man who writes from blindness, age, and distilled experience. The result is a collection at once austere and intimate, where erudition serves a meditative clarity and the everyday is illuminated by philosophical intensity.

The title and its emblem
The title image, the gold of the tigers, condenses several Bor­ge­sian threads: splendor and mortality, the glitter of a beauty that cannot be grasped, and the paradox of abundance that remains inaccessible. Tigers, recurring beasts in his work, embody energy, violence, and a radiant order of nature. Gold suggests preciousness and the treacherous lure of memory. For the aging, nearly blind poet, both tiger and gold become something remembered rather than seen, transmuted from sensory immediacy into the abstract coin of language. The title thus points to a late style where memory outshines perception and where the wealth one keeps is the wealth of names, myths, and recollections.

Themes and preoccupations
Time is the secret protagonist: circular, recursive, and indifferent. Borges contemplates the self as a series of mirrors, an echo of prior selves and ancestral lives, and measures the present against the long durations of history and literature. Blindness is not lamented; it becomes an instrument of ascetic knowledge, a way of subtracting the world so that essentials emerge. Love appears as a belated, fragile grace and as a metaphysical ordeal, felt with reticence, shadowed by the awareness of the transient. Death is treated without melodrama, as a certainty that gives form to days. Memory and forgetting barter constantly; what remains of a life, the book suggests, is a handful of emblematic images and words.

Form, voice, and method
The collection alternates between sonnets anchored in classical Spanish meters and supple, pared-down free verse. The language is stripped of ornament yet charged with resonance; common nouns carry the weight of allegory. Borges’s signature devices recur: enumerations that trace the edges of infinity, logical paradoxes treated as emotional facts, and modest autobiographical notes that open onto metaphysical vistas. Allusion functions less as display than as a tool of thinking: Dante, the Hebrew scriptures, Norse sagas, and Anglo-Saxon echoes appear not as citations but as living companions in the poet’s inner library.

Places, lineages, and identities
Buenos Aires, its patios, suburbs, and quiet corners, enters as a remembered city rather than a reported one. Knifemen and compadritos, street corners and twilight courtyards become tokens of an Argentine destiny as much imagined as lived. Alongside the local stands a genealogy that links the poet to soldiers and immigrants, to the languages of the North and the Latin South, to labyrinths of books and bloodlines. The self that speaks is both singular and plural: an Argentinian in Palermo, a reader among the dead, a man approaching his own vanishing point.

Tone and philosophical drift
The poems carry a stoic serenity, patient with limits and skeptical of grand consolations. Fate is accepted as form; chance is granted dignity. The recurrent sensations are gratitude, regret without self-pity, and the lucid sorrow of knowing that what we love is lent. The gold of the tigers is finally the sparkle of meaning itself, brief, untouchable, yet sufficient to justify the craft of naming.

Place in Borges’s work
El oro de los tigres stands as a mature synthesis after earlier volumes like Elogio de la sombra, continuing the exploration of blindness and late style while softening the baroque riddles of his youth into a transparent, reflective diction. It shows Borges arriving at a spare equilibrium where metaphysics and memoir are no longer separate genres but alternating breaths of the same poem, leaving a book that reads like the calm after a long intellectual voyage.