Winter Night -- Boris Pasternak

Guest poem sent in by Anuraj

(Poem #45) Winter Night It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned. As during summer midges swarm To beat their wings against a flame Out in the yard the snowflakes swarmed To beat against the window pane The blizzard sculptured on the glass Designs of arrows and of whorls. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned. Distorted shadows fell Upon the lighted ceiling: Shadows of crossed arms,of crossed legs- Of crossed destiny. Two tiny shoes fell to the floor And thudded. A candle on a nightstand shed wax tears Upon a dress. All things vanished within The snowy murk-white,hoary. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned. A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow It snowed hard throughout the month Of February, and almost constantly A candle burned on the table; A candle burned. -- Boris Pasternak

     (Excerpt from Dr.Zhivago)
     (Translated into english by Bernard Guilbert Guerney)

    The whole world knows Pasternak as a great novelist,but he is one of
the greatest poets of our century as well.His poems have been widely
acclaimed.He belonged to the league of poets which include Anna
Akhmatova,Joseph Brodsky and the likes.The poets of faith,suffering and
human emotions.

   When I first read Dr.Zhivago,I was fascinated by its richness of
poetry. But most of all I liked the poems written by the hero Dr.Yuri
Zhivago, a poet and physician caught in the midst of Russian
revolution.These are given as an appendix to the novel.

   This particular poem is my favourite among the lot.It can stand by
itself.But related to the context it has more subtle dimensions.The poem
is based on a simple incident.The hero still doesen't know the heroine
Lara, but on his way home on a cold February night, Yura notices a
candle burning through a street window(In that room Lara is taking the
decision of her life).He just writes a poem on it.Little does he know
that the happenings in
that room is shaping up his destiny.

This is how Pasternak describes the incident:

"As they drove through Kamerger street Yura noticed that a candle had
melted a patch in the icy crust on one of the windows.The light seemed
to look into the street almost consciously , as if it were watching the
passing carriages and waiting for someone.

 'A candle burned on the table,a candle burned...' he whispered to
himself-the beginning of something confused,formless;he hoped that it
would take shape of itself.But nothing more came to him."

   The poem is remarkable for its simplicity,the richness of imagery and
the evocative tone.But in a more subtle way it reflects the poet's
compassion,his astounding faith and the suffering he went through.

                                                       -Anuraj

March -- Boris Pasternak

Guest poem submitted by Suresh Ramasubramanian:

(Poem #419) March The sun is hotter than the top ledge in a steam bath; The ravine, crazed, is rampaging below. Spring -- that corn-fed, husky milkmaid -- Is busy at her chores with never a letup. The snow is wasting (pernicious anemia -- See those branching veinlets of impotent blue?) Yet in the cowbarn life is burbling, steaming, And the tines of pitchforks simply glow with health. These days -- these days, and these nights also! With eavesdrop thrumming its tattoos at noon, With icicles (cachectic!) hanging on to gables, And with the chattering of rills that never sleep! All doors are flung open -- in stable and in cowbarn; Pigeons peck at oats fallen in the snow; And the culprit of all this and its life-begetter-- The pile of manure -- is pungent with ozone. -- Boris Pasternak

(attributed to Yurii Andreivich Zhivago).

Translation has rendered this poem (originally written in Russian, like the
classic novel in which it appeared) into blank verse.  It still retains much of
its original beauty.  The unusual imagery is what grabbed me - contrasting
winter (disease and suffering) with spring (health, youth).  It is a metaphor
for the whole book, I feel.

Zhivago's poems are all listed as an appendix (and there is a long note by
Pasternak in the middle of the text about how Zhivago's poems evolve in style -
from long, rambling blank verse to short, sharp poems with a staccato rhythm,
just three words to a line).  They also reflect his changing moods and fortunes.

On the whole, Zhivago is an excellent book, and the poems at the end are the
icing on the cake.  Every time I read the book (and the poems) I keep hearing
"Lara's Theme" from the David Lean movie.  Everything comes together into one
glorious whole.

Suresh.

Parabolic Balad -- Andrei Voznesensky

Guest poem submitted by Uma Raman:

(Poem #557) Parabolic Balad Among a parabola life like a rocket flies, Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow, Red-headed bohemian Gauguin the painter Started out life as a prosperous stockbroker. In order to get to the Louvre from Montmartre He made a detour all through Java, Sumatra, Tahiti, the Isles of Marquesas. With levity He took off in flight from the madness of money, The cackle of women, the frowst of academies, Overpowered the force of terrestrial gravity. The high priests drank their porter and kept up their jabbering: 'Straight lines are shorter, less steep than parabolas. It's more proper to copy the heavenly mansions.' He rose like a howling rocket, insulting them, With a gale that tore off the tails of their frock-coats. So he didn't steal into the Louvre by the front door But on a parabola smashed through the ceiling. In finding their truths lives vary in daring: Worms come through holes and bold men on parabolas. There was once a girl who lived in my neighbourhood. We went to school, took exams simultaneously. But I took off with a bang, I went whizzing Through the prosperous double-faced stars of Tiflis. Forgive me for this idiotic parabola Cold shoulders in a pitch dark vestibule... Rigid, erect as a radio antenna-rod Sending its call-sign out through the freezing Dark of the universe, how you rang out to me, An undoubtable signal, an earthly stand-by From whom I might get my flight-bearings to land by The parabola does not come to us easily. Laughing at law with its warnings and paragraphs Art, love and history race along recklessly Over a parabolic trajectory. He is leaving tonight for Siberia. Perhaps A straight line after all is the shorter one actually. -- Andrei Voznesensky

tr. W.H. Auden.

I found this marvellous poet in a slender anthology of post-Stalin Russian
writing called Half-way to the Moon edited by Patricia Blake and Max Hayward and
published in the US, by Holt, Rinehart and Winstein in 1964. It was nestled
among other half-forgotten books donated by some kind soul to a hospital ward.
The dark and dusty cupboards of hospital wards are veritable buried treasure to
the single-minded ferreter and lover of second-hand volumes. It helps to be a
doctor and inhabit those nether regions. I rescued  Voznesensky and brought him
and his companions home. They have kept me frequent and excellent company for
more than 20 years now.

At the back of the anthology, in the section on Notes on Authors, Andrei
Voznesensky is listed tersely as 'the best of the post-Stalinist generation of
poets. He was born in Moscow in 1933. He attended the Moscow Architectural
Institute in 1957, and published his first poems in 1958.'

The longer and more evocative Introduction by Ms. Blake fleshes this skeleton to
life.

He was Russia's first modern poet, who flowered in the the thaw after Stalin's
three decades of repression. He was Pasternak's devoted disciple and stayed with
the Master until his death.

He was an accomplished and sophisticated technician who constructed his verse of
assonances, rhymes and puns that served his intention rather as a brilliant
orchestration serves a central musical idea. "Form isn't what counts", he says.
"Form must be clear, unfathomable,disquieting, like the sky in which only the
radar can sense the presence of a plane." Most characteristic of his idiom are
the abrupt shifts in tone and intention within the same poem, he is tender
jocular mocking and finally compellingly ironic.

A very compelling poet and performer, he electrified the Russians of his time
and had a tremendous following.

The translation renders the Russian into a powerful English poem. Through Auden,
Voznesensky speaks to a wider audience and now he and other fine non-English
speaking and writing poets need to be introduced to the world wide web.

Uma.

The Maldive Shark -- Herman Melville

(Poem #775) The Maldive Shark About the Shark, phlegmatical one, Pale sot of the Maldive sea The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim, How alert in attendence be. From his saw-pit mouth, from his charnel of maw The have nothing of harm to dread, But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates, And there find a haven when peril's abroad, An asylum in jaws of the Fates! They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey, Yet never partake of the treat-- Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, Pale ravener of horrible meat. -- Herman Melville

Melville has none of the airiness or delicacy of, say, Keats or Flecker
(whose respective ages he neatly bisects). Instead, his verse is _chunky_,
with layer upon layer of densely piled phrases, murky and threatening and
yet strangely vivid. The net effect is powerful, and not completely benign:
the ominous cadences add to the terror of the shark, the 'pale ravener of
horrible meat'...

thomas.

[Poetry and Prose]

Herman Melville is, of course, more famous as a writer of prose - and what
prose! His masterpiece 'Moby Dick' is generally considered one of the
greatest novels of all time - wildly, incredibly inventive, linguistically
and philosophically challenging, and a rollicking good adventure to boot. It
may not be the easiest of reads to get through, but it's definitely worth
the effort. http://www.melville.org/ has more on the writer and his work.

Martin once ran a week of "poems written by writers of prose"; check out
Poem #179, "Missed", P. G. Wodehouse
Poem #181, "The Guards Came Through", Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Poem #183, "Sorrows of Werther", William Makepeace Thackeray
and, later:
Poem #259, "Songs from an Evil Wood", Lord Dunsany
Poem #261, "Recompense", Robert E. Howard
Poem #664, "Conceit", Mervyn Peake
Poem #701, "Teeth", Spike Milligan

While the above examples may be by and large unremarkable, they do serve to
highlight the achievement of writers such as Thomas Hardy and Rudyard
Kipling, who achieved equal acclaim for both forms of their art. D. H.
Lawrence, Oliver Goldsmith and Edgar Allan Poe are hardly any less
distinguished than the two giants named above, while J. R. R. Tolkien and
Lewis Carroll deserve special recognition for the way their prose is
immeasurably enhanced by the inclusion of verse - so much so that the two
are well nigh inseparable (in this reviewer's mind, at least). Boris
Pasternak and Jorge Luis Borges round out the list; all these writers can be
found on the Minstrels website, at
[broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet.html .

For an essay on the necessary distinction between poetry and other forms of
expression, see poem #349.

Things I Didn't Know I Loved -- Nazim Hikmet

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1350) Things I Didn't Know I Loved it's 1962 March 28th I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train night is falling I never knew I liked night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain I don't like comparing nightfall to a tired bird I didn't know I loved the earth can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it I've never worked the earth it must be my only Platonic love and here I've loved rivers all this time whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills European hills crowned with chateaus or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see I know you can't wash in the same river even once I know the river will bring new lights you'll never see I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow I know this has troubled people before and will trouble those after me I know all this has been said a thousand times before and will be said after me I didn't know I loved the sky cloudy or clear the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish I hear voices not from the blue vault but from the yard the guards are beating someone again I didn't know I loved trees bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino they come upon me in winter noble and modest beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish "the poplars of Izmir losing their leaves. . . they call me The Knife. . . lover like a young tree. . . I blow stately mansions sky-high" in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief to a pine bough for luck I never knew I loved roads even the asphalt kind Vera's behind the wheel we're driving from Moscow to the Crimea Koktebele formerly "Goktepili" in Turkish the two of us inside a closed box the world flows past on both sides distant and mute I was never so close to anyone in my life bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Gered(& when I was eighteen apart from my life I didn't have anything in the wagon they could take and at eighteen our lives are what we value least I've written this somewhere before wading through a dark muddy street I'm going to the shadow play Ramazan night a paper lantern leading the way maybe nothing like this ever happened maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy going to the shadow play Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather's hand his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat with a sable collar over his robe and there's a lantern in the servant's hand and I can't contain myself for joy flowers come to mind for some reason poppies cactuses jonquils in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika fresh almonds on her breath I was seventeen my heart on a swing touched the sky I didn't know I loved flowers friends sent me three red carnations in prison I just remembered the stars I love them too whether I'm floored watching them from below or whether I'm flying at their side I have some questions for the cosmonauts were the stars much bigger did they look like huge jewels on black velvet or apricots on orange did you feel proud to get closer to the stars I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don't be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to say they were terribly figurative and concrete my heart was in my mouth looking at them they are our endless desire to grasp things seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad I never knew I loved the cosmos snow flashes in front of my eyes both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind I didn't know I liked snow I never knew I loved the sun even when setting cherry-red as now in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors but you aren't about to paint it that way I didn't know I loved the sea except the Sea of Azov or how much I didn't know I loved clouds whether I'm under or up above them whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois strikes me I like it I didn't know I liked rain whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train is it because I lit my sixth cigarette one alone could kill me is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue the train plunges on through the pitch-black night I never knew I liked the night pitch-black sparks fly from the engine I didn't know I loved sparks I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return -- Nazim Hikmet

           19 April 1962, Moscow
           Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)

Notes:

Justice's poem [Poem #1343] was triggered by, as William wrote, something on
the periphery; a light at a window. This brings to my mind a whole slew of
poems that triggered by visions and sightings like that. We have Pasternak's
Winter Night [Poem #45] and that super incantaion "and a candle burned on the
table". This is linked to one of the early scenes of the novel, Dr.  Zhivago,
where he watches a candle burning at a window. We also have Seth's Protocols,
where the narrator is walking past a house and writes "May the sun burn these
footprints on the lawn".

This brings us to this lyrical monolouge of Hikmet in which he lists all
those peripheral things that he had experienced (and which I suppose all
of us have or will experience) in his life and brings to each of those
recollections, a sweet ache of finally talking about them and acknowleding
those experiences. While Justice's poem deals with just a single incident
this poem is almost autobiographical in sweep, making it more "sumptous".

I first came upon a snippet of this poem in the New York Times Book Review
and just loved those lines:

"I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass "

And since it had been raining off and on, here in Atlanta, these lines
have been on my periphery in the recent days.

Cheers!
Sashi