Analysis of The Anguish of a Mirage

Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky 1855 (Omsk) – 1909 (St Petersburg)



They faded, the last bands of reddish,
Like whispers of prayers in night,
O tale, such seductive and maddish,
What else do you want of this heart?

Are not, beyond measure and count,
So hard in the snows my ways?
Aren’t gray empty spaces around?
Isn’t husky the ring of the bells?

And why, every minute and instant,
My heart is divided in two?
I know that she is in distance,
But feel her right near me, too.

Here they are, the snowy clouds,
I can’t take my eyes from all that:
Right now, shall merge our routs
In snows, so white and so dead.

Right now will be silently bound
And newly unbound our sleighs.
We’ll hear the bell’s common sound
In an instant of sadness and pains…

We’d heard… But we’ll not any more
Have meeting in this hazy night…
In the circle of anguish and woe
I wander on my path of blight…

They faded, the last bands of reddish,
Like whispers of prayers in night,
O tale, such seductive and maddish,
What else do you want of this heart?


Scheme ABAC xdex xfxf xxdx edex xbxb ABAC
Poetic Form Quatrain  (43%)
Metre 110011110 1101101 11101001 11111111 11011001 1100111 101101001 11001101 0110010010 11101001 11111010 1101111 1110101 11111111 1111101 0111011 11111001 01001101 1101101 011011001 11111101 11001101 001011001 11011111 110011110 1101101 11101001 11111111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 961
Words 185
Sentences 10
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 28
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 105
Words per stanza (avg) 26
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

55 sec read
61

Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky

Innokentiy Fyodorovich Annensky (Russian: Инноке́нтий Фёдорович А́нненский) was a poet, critic and translator, representative of the first wave of Russian Symbolism. Sometimes cited as a Slavic counterpart to the poètes maudits, Annensky managed to render into Russian the essential intonations of Baudelaire and Verlaine, while the subtle music, ominous allusions, arcane vocabulary, the spell of minutely changing colours and odours were all his own. His influence on the first post-Symbolist generation of poets (Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Mandelshtam) was paramount. more…

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