Text 33

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,

That you were gone, not to return again

Read from the back-page of a paper, say,

Held by a neighbor in a subway train,

How at the corner of this avenue

And such a street (so are the papers filled)

A hurrying man who happened to be you

At noon to-day had happened to be killed,

I should not cry aloud, I could not cry

Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place

I should but watch the station lights rush by

With a more careful interest on my face,

Or raise my eyes and read with greater care

Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

So subtly are the fumes of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn with pity, let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber not a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

The first sonnet in the above selection seems to be the writing of an extremely calm, cool and collected lady who knows what it takes – to be with someone else. No denying that, she looks a jot too level-headed and cold when straightening things out, and makes it all quite plain for a random partner. But it is something casual, isn't it? The second sonnet might be treated in a different set of attitudes. Do you find any idea worth sharing?

3.7 The silver summits of the age…

The sonnet has been used in Russian poetry for centuries. The earliest examples of sonnet writing in Russia date back to the 1730s, and the first products were translations from French and German. The century and a half that followed saw fluctuating interest in sonnetry. The form flourished at the turn of the 20^th century. The poets of the Symbolic Movement rediscovered the potential of the sonnet. All the greatest poetsof the day – Balmont, Annensky, Bryusov, Ivanov, Voloshin, and Blok – experimented with sonnets. This literary form turned out to be instrumental in expressing a very wide range of themes, from intimate revelations to political rethoric.

In many ways, poetry, especially sonnet writing, was a vocation. To many, it was very much like priesthood. The musical Russian sonnets are still there, on the Silvery Summits of 20^th century Russian poetry.

The present writer is partial to the sonnets written by Ivan Bunin. These are deceptively simple, completely unadorned; the style is Spartan. But thus the message gets through easier, and is intensified. One hundred years are just like a day for a perfect sonnet. That's where its magic lies. And this magic only reveals itself to the reader with sense and sensibility. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as well as in the ability to read creatively. Let learn to do it again (Text 34).