Verses on the Unknown Soldier (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Osip Mandelstam
- First Published: 1967
- Type of Work: Poetic sequence
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric sequence
- Subjects: Human race, War, World War I, Soldiers, Russia or Russian people, Battles, Tombs or graves, Pilots or pilotage, Light, Cemeteries, Arms or weapons
The Poem
Described as an “oratorio” by its author, “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (also translated as “55 Lines about the Unknown Soldier”) is a cycle or sequence of eight poems, with the individual poems showing considerable variation in length and stanzaic structure. At 114 lines, the “oratorio” is one of the few longer works in Osip Mandelstam’s poetic oeuvre and is closely connected with a looser cycle of meditations on the age and on the poet’s place in it, which Mandelstam wrote in the 1920’s. The basic meter is an anapestic trimeter but with the...
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