You Will Hear Thunder

Anna Akhmatova, D. M. Thomas

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780804040846
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Anna Akhmatova lived through pre-revolution Russia, Bolshevism, and Stalinism. Throughout it all, she maintained an elegant, muscular style that could grab a reader by the throat at a moment's notice. Defined by tragedy and beauty in equal measure, her poems take on romantic frustration and the pull of the sensory, and find power in the mundane. Above all, she believed that a Russian poet could only produce poetry in Russia.

You Will Hear Thunder spans Akhmatova's very early career into the early 1960s. These poems were written through her bohemian prerevolution days, her many marriages, the terror and privation of life under Stalin, and her later years, during which she saw her work once again recognized by the Soviet state. Intricately observed and unwavering in their emotional immediacy, these strikingly modern poems represent one of the twentieth century's most powerful voices.

from Reed

Muse

When at night I wait for her to come,

Life, it seems, hangs by a single strand.

What are glory, youth, freedom, in comparison

With the dear welcome guest, a flute in hand?

She enters now. Pushing her veil aside,

She stares through me with her attentiveness.

I question her: ‘And were you Dante’s guide,

Dictating the Inferno?’ She answers: ‘Yes.’

1924

To an Artist

Your work that to my inward sight still comes,

Fruit of your graced labours:

The gold of always-autumnal limes,

The blue of today-created waters—

Simply to think of it, the faintest drowse

Already has led me into your parks

Where, fearful of every turning, I lose

Consciousness in a trance, seeking your tracks.

Shall I go under this vault, transfigured by

The movement of your hand into a sky,

To cool my shameful heat?

There I shall become forever blessed,

There my burning eyelids will find rest,

And I’ll regain a gift I’ve lost—to weep.

1924

The Last Toast

I drink to our demolished house,

To all this wickedness,

To you, our loneliness together,

I raise my glass—

And to the dead-cold eyes,

The lie that has betrayed us,

The coarse, brutal world, the fact

That God has not saved us.

1934

Dust smells of a sun-ray,

Girls’ breaths,—violets hold,

Freedom clings to the wild honey,

But there’s no smell to gold.

The mignonette smells of water,

Apple-tang clings to love,

But we were always taught that

Blood smells only of blood.

So it was no use the governor from Rome

Washing his hands before the howls

Of the wicked mob,

And it was in vain

That the Scottish queen washed the scarlet

Splashes from her narrow palms

In the thane’s gloomy suffocating home.

. . .

Some gaze into tender faces,

Others drink until morning light,

But all night I hold conversations

With my conscience who is always right.

I say to her: ‘You know how tired I am,

Bearing your heavy burden, many years.’

But for her, there is no such thing as time,

And for her, space also disappears.

And again, a black Shrove Tuesday,

The sinister park, the unhurried ring

Of hooves, and, flying down the heavenly

Slopes, full of happiness and joy, the wind.

And above me, double-horned and calm

Is the witness . . . O I shall go there,

Along the ancient well-worn track,

To the deathly waters, where the swans are.

1936

Boris Pasternak

He who compared himself to the eye of a horse,

Peers, looks, sees, recognizes,

And instantly puddles shine, ice

Pines away, like a melting of diamonds.

Backyards drowse in lilac haze. Branch-

Line platforms, logs, clouds, leaves . . .

The engine’s whistle, watermelon’s crunch,

A timid hand in a fragrant kid glove. He’s

Ringing, thundering, grinding, up to his breast

In breakers . . . and suddenly is quiet . . . This means

He is tiptoeing over pine needles, fearful lest

He should startle space awake from its light sleep.

It means he counts the grains in the empty ears,

And it means he has come back

From another funeral, back to Darya’s

Gorge, the tombstone, cursed and black.

And b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by D.M. Thomas
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• from Evening
• from Rosary
• By the Seashore
• from White Flock
• from Plantain
• from Anno Domini
• from Reed
• from The Seventh Book
• from Northern Elegies: The Fifth
• Requiem
• Poem without a Hero
• Notes