Strangers in the Night Continues.
Blok’s Unknowns.
“My beloved, be brave,
and you will be with me,
I will be swaying over you
with my cherry blossom.
A green star, I will twinkle
from the East.
I will splash ice-cold water
on your armor.
I will appear over the brook
as a free water-maiden.
It’s liberating, it’s
hurtful, it’s sweet for us together.
It’s easy for us to die in
dark nights,
Gazing into each other’s dead
eyes.”
Alexander Blok. From Harps
and Violins.
The
following 1902 poem from the sixth cycle of Verses
About A Fair Lady is no longer fairytalish, but downright mystical:
“He
would enter, simple and meager,
Not breathing, he was silent
and lit off.
Relentless and emerald,
An eye was laughing at him.
Or else, secretly astonished,
It was looking at him in the
quiet.
He was silent, enchanted
By the sweet closeness of the
soul…”
In other words, “he,” man,
felt the presence of another mystical being.
“…But
forever, counting moments,
He knew that she would
change…”
Being
a man, he was bound to know that in the course of human life a person’s soul
changed.
“...On
the pages of the secret book [sic!]
He was seeing the same
scrawls.
He was strange, simple and
meager,
The silent recluse.
And, attentive and wondrous,
The secret eye was watching
him.”
(See
more along these lines in my subchapter Blok’s
Unknowns, postings CCLXXVIII and CCLXXIX.)
***
In
another mystical poem (1906) St. John’s
Night [St. John is of course John the Baptist], Blok writes:
“The
night is blazing with green light –
But you will flare up
together with it,
Intoxicated in this magic
By the double-poison of
beauty!”
Or
in a more pastoral 1904 poem about a blue shepherd-boy, Blok writes about the
sky:
“But
high up in the emeralds
The clouds-sheep are plodding
along.
Their reflections are
swimming
In the still and dark pond.”
In
the 1905 poem Echo from the 1904-1905
poetry collection Bubbles in the Earth,
Blok writes:
“Toward
the green dale, appealing, listening,
I walk upon rustling foliage.
And the cold crescent stands
without burning
Like a green sickle in the
blue.”
In
the 1908-1916 poetry collection Harps and
Violins, there is an untitled poem, where a dead woman is calling upon her
beloved:
“My
beloved, be brave, and you will be with me,
I will be swaying over you
with my cherry blossom.
A green star, I will twinkle
from the East.
I will splash ice-cold water
on your armor.
I will appear over the brook
as a free water-maiden.
It’s liberating, it’s
hurtful, it’s sweet for us together.
It’s easy for us to die in
dark nights,
Gazing into each other’s dead
eyes.”
Apparently,
this maiden had drowned, as she is calling herself “a free water-maiden.” One more reason for Margarita to change her
desirable mode of suicide from poison to drowning in the 24th
chapter of Master and Margarita: The
Extraction of Master, when Margarita feels betrayed:
“ Should I be asking for it myself?
No, by no means! – she said to herself.
All the best to you, Messire, she said out loud, while thinking to herself:
Just let me get out of here, and then I
will get myself to a river and drown in it.”
In
both cases, this is Blok. When he writes from the masculine person, it is
poison. In a 1904 poem, Blok writes:
“After
me! After me! You are pleading with your glance,
You believe in dropped off
words,
As though twice – a cup of
poison –
I would be bringing to my
lips!”
And
in Master and Margarita’s 13th
chapter, The Appearance of the Hero,
here is master talking about his
beloved:
“She was saying that she had
gone out that day with the yellow flowers in her hands in order to be found by
me, and if that had not happened she would have poisoned herself, because her
life was empty.”
But
master delivers an even more compelling testimony:
“She
appeared before me with a wet umbrella in her hands, and also with wet
newspapers. Her eyes were radiating fire [one more unmistakably Blokian expression!],
her hands were trembling, and were cold. First she rushed to kiss me, then in a
hoarse voice and slapping the table with her hand, she said that she was going
to poison Latunsky…”
When
Blok is writing from the feminine person, it is drowning. Already in the 4th
cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady,
Blok writes about a girl who had drowned herself, in the final four poems
concluding this cycle:
“We
were meeting in the evening fog,
Where there are reeds and a
ripple by the bank.
Neither anguish, nor love,
nor a grudge,
All has faded away, passed,
retreated –
A white moan, funereal
voices,
And your golden oar…”
And
then an explanation:
“You
were hidden by the fogs.
And the voice itself was
weak.
How pale were the dresses!
How strange was the quietude!
And the embraces were filled
with lilies,
And you are looking in
madness.”
In other words, the girl was lying in a coffin in a white dress! As Blok explains in the last stanza:
“But
was it possible for me not to
recognize
The white river flower,
And those white dresses,
And the strange white hint?”
In
the penultimate stanza, the drowned woman is haunting him:
“You
are looking in quiet languor,
Having parted the river
reeds…
I have chosen a different
road,
As I am going, my songs are
not the same…”
And
before that, Blok writes:
“I
remember the steps of the throne
And your first stern
judgment…”
The
time has now come for him to answer for everything:
“The
evening will soon be upon us,
And the night – facing fate:
Then my onward march will be
overturned,
And I will return back to
you.”
And
in the last verse:
“You
did not leave, but perhaps
In your unfathomable setup
You could exhaust and
overcome
All that I loved of this
earth.
And there is no harder
separation.
To you, unresponding like a
rose,
I am singing, a gray
nightingale
In my multicolored prison.”
And
in the same 4th cycle of Verses
About a Fair Lady, in a 1902 poem, Blok writes:
“I
know the day of my damnation
And run into my pre-timely
tomb.
I free myself from the embraces,
But he is keeping guard at
the crossroads.
His annoying screams –
Now close by, now from afar,
Fear, shame, and wild horror,
And naked anguish,
And at the crossroads, a
pitiful captive,
I stumble and I scream,
He’s luring me with a white
water-maiden,
From a distance he warms up a
candle…”
The
reader will find out who “he” is in my next subchapter Strangers in the Night: Blok Split.
To
be continued…
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