For Osip Mandelstam
Anna Akhmatova 1889 (Odessa) – 1966 (Moscow)
And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
And over St Peter’s there are poplars, crows
there’s a pale green dome there that glows,
dim in the sun-shrouded dust.
The field of heroes lingers in my thought,
Kulikovo’s barbarian battleground.
The frozen poplars, like glasses for a toast,
clash now, more noisily, overhead.
As though it was our wedding, and the crowd
were drinking to our health and happiness.
But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard
the room where the exiled poet is banished,
and the night, marching at full pace,
of the coming dawn, has no knowledge.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 36 sec read
- 117 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABABCCDEFGHIJKLMN |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 685 |
Words | 123 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 17 |
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"For Osip Mandelstam" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 20 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/2986/for-osip-mandelstam>.
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