I Have Forgotten the Word I Wanted to Say (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Osip Mandelstam
- First Published: 1922
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Language or languages, Memory, Communication, Poetry or poets, Death or dying, Hell, Flight, Birds, Russia or Russian people, Amnesia, Shades or shadows
The Poem
“I Have Forgotten the Word I Wanted to Say” is a poem of six stanzas, each composed of four lines. Its rhythm is created by the placement of a regular number of accented syllables before and after the caesura, the pause in the middle of the line. This style of tonic verse is called dolniki in Russian and was the verse form preferred by some innovative Russian poets of the early twentieth century.
The poem, as is frequently the case in Russian lyric poetry, depends very much on its form to convey the poetic content. By writing in dolniki instead...
[The entire page is 1479 words long]
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