Anna Akhmatova is one of the best known and most loved Russian poets. Her contemporary, poet Marina Tsvetaeva, dubbed her the “golden-mouthed Anna of All the Russias”, an expression which resonated widely with Akhmatova’s uncanny ability to voice the sentiments of the entire nation. Today, she is one of the acclaimed poets of the Russian Silver Age, a period of prolific creativity that covered the end of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th. But as much as the artistic scene thrived in that period, the rise of Stalin and the state’s violent repression of individual freedoms soon made it a dark and dangerous time for many intellectuals. Akhmatova’s poetry put into words the suffering of millions, offering a tool of invisible resistance to those defending freedom against Stalin’s iron fist.
Born in 1889 in Odesa, Anna Andreevna Gorenko chose to write under a pseudonym after her father, a marine engineer from a modest bourgeois background, forbade her from publishing poetry under his “respectable name”. Her maternal Tatar roots inspired her nom de plume: her great-grandmother claimed to descend from the Khan Akhmat, who had Gengis Khan as an ancestor.
Akhmatova’s life and work are a striking testimony to the horrors of the 20th century. She survived two wars, a revolution, and the siege of Leningrad, as well as the gradual departure, killing, or arrests of her closest friends and family. The repeated detentions and eventual sentence to the gulag of her son Lev deterred her from writing: the fear that her poetry would worsen his fate, coupled with an unofficial ban on her works, silenced her for almost 20 years. Akhmatova’s ability to express this historical tragedy in the first person is what makes her prodigious corpus relatable to this day.
Here is the skull of a man: a man’s thoughts and emotions Have moved under the thin bone vault like clouds Under the blue one: love and desire and pain, Thunderclouds of wrath and white gales of fear Have hung inside here: and sometimes the curious desire of knowing Values and purpose and the causes of things Has coasted like a little observer air-plane over the images That filled this mind: it never discovered much, And now all’s empty, a bone bubble, a blown-out eggshell.
II.
That’s what it’s like: for the egg too has a mind, Doing what our able chemists will never do, Building the body of a hatchling, choosing among the proteins: These for the young wing-muscles, these for the great Crystalline eyes, these for the flighty nerves and brain: Choosing and forming: a limited but superhuman intelligence, Prophetic of the future and aware of the past: The hawk’s egg will make a hawk, and the serpent’s A gliding serpent: but each with a little difference From its ancestors—and slowly, if it works, the race Forms a new race: that also is a part of the plan Within the egg. I believe the first living cell Had echoes of the future in it, and felt Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods, But feels and chooses. And the Galaxy, the firewheel On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dust-grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe Is not blind force, but fulfils its life and intends its courses. “All things are full of God. Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God.”
III.
Thus the thing stands; the labor and the games go on— What for? What for? —Am I a God that I should know? Men live in peace and happiness; men live in horror And die howling. Do you think the blithe sun Is ignorant that black waste and beggarly blindness trail him like hounds, And will have him at last? He will be strangled Among his dead satellites, remembering magnificence.
IV.
I stand on the cliff at Sovranes creek-mouth. Westward beyond the raging water and the bent shoulder of the world The bitter futile war in Korea proceeds, like an idiot Prophesying. It is too hot in mind For anyone, except God perhaps, to see beauty in it. Indeed it is hard to see beauty In any of the acts of man: but that means the acts of a sick microbe On a satellite of a dust-grain twirled in a whirlwind In the world of stars …. Something perhaps may come of him; in any event He can’t last long. —Well: I am short of patience Since my wife died … and this era of spite and hate-filled half-worlds Gets to the bone. I believe that man too is beautiful, But it is hard to see, and wrapped up in falsehoods. Michael Angelo and the Greek sculptors— How they flattered the race! Homer and Shakespeare— How they flattered the race!
V.
One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men; The immense beauty of the world, not the human world. Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful? These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks Stopping the sombre stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean? Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore, With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff wind, And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream— But in the sage-brush desert, all one sun-stricken Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest, Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice—is the earth not beautiful? Nor the great skies over the earth? The beauty of things means virtue and value in them. It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly. It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound, Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it.
Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so. Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then
I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue of any thrillingly dead thing. And you? Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk, thinking of what you never can bring back,
or else you’re off in some fog concerning —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work: to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving, my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,
a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here, entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.
Believe in this. Young apple seeds, In blue skies, radiating young breast, Not in blue-suited insects, Infesting society’s garments.
Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz, Tearing the night into intricate shreds, Putting it back together again, In cool logical patterns, Not in the sick controllers, Who created only the Bomb.
Let the voices of dead poets Ring louder in your ears Than the screechings mouthed In mildewed editorials. Listen to the music of centuries, Rising above the mushroom time.
As you plaited the harvest bow You implicated the mellowed silence in you In wheat that does not rust But brightens as it tightens twist by twist Into a knowable corona, A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent Until your fingers moved somnambulant: I tell and finger it like braille, Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops I see us walk between the railway slopes Into an evening of long grass and midges, Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges, An auction notice on an outhouse wall— You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes Nothing: that original townland Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.
The end of art is peace Could be the motto of this frail device That I have pinned up on our deal dresser— Like a drawn snare Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
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