Aleksandr Blok Poetry: World Poets Analysis
Aleksandr Blok sought to give a metaphysical dimension to his poetry by creating a persona that pays homage to a supernatural ideal, in his own words “an essence possessed of an independent existence.” This ideal is usually represented by the concept of the Eternal Feminine, which takes on a range of embodiments in the various stages of Blok’s development. Initially, he depicted an ephemeral, distant spirit, the Beautiful Lady, whose presence the poet perceives in almost every poem, but who is never made manifest. As Blok matured, his mental discipline, inquiring mind, and sensuous disposition prompted him to alter the image, until it became more of a literary device and less of a religious inspiration. While the vision retained some of its ethereal, purifying characteristics in later works, it also assumed demoniac, physically alluring aspects. In many other poems, desperate city women, whose misfortunes Blok ascertained from newspapers, represent the feminine ideal, as do the poet’s female friends and relatives. The persona’s attitude to the changing image is ambiguous. He is inexplicably and fatally drawn to some embodiments, observing others wistfully and indifferently. Eventually, social pressures, war, and revolution drew Blok further from the transcendental sphere, causing him to blend his vision with the concept of Mother Russia. Blok then saw the Beautiful Lady in the lined faces of praying peasant women and urban prostitutes, and even in the Russian landscape. A final attempt to revive the religious dimension of the image occurs in the revolutionary poem The Twelve, in which an effeminate, Christ-like ghost silently and gently accompanies marauding Bolshevik revolutionaries.
Blok was the forerunner of modern Russian poetry. He replaced the realistic, low-quality verse of the second half of the nineteenth century with a new lyricism, to which he gave a mystical dimension. Technically, he freed Russian verse from rigid meter and led the way to modern tonic patterns. The social upheavals of his era are reflected in his work but are always subordinate to artistic requirements. Blok appealed to all segments of the public and continues to be popular at home and abroad.
“Gorod” and “Arfy i skripki”
Although the Eternal Feminine is a constant in Blok’s work, it does not exhaust his poetic themes. After witnessing the bloodbath of the unsuccessful 1905 uprising in St. Petersburg, he devoted an entire cycle, “Gorod,” to his hometown. Only a few of these poems express political observations; most of them deal with the darker aspects of street life. Feelings of impending catastrophe, both personal and societal, pervade the poetic atmosphere. The later cycle “Strashny mir” (a terrible world) extends this theme of urban degradation and misery. In one of the sections of the cycle, “Plyaski smerti” (dances of death), which echoes Charles Baudelaire’s “Danse Macabre,” Blok evokes the disintegration of his society, which the persona views in the shape of a corpse, no longer believing in transcendence, while soulless St. Petersburg citizens dance their own deaths through empty lives. In the seventy-two-poem cycle “Arfy i skripki” (harps and violins), Blok endeavors to link poetry to music, and several of his verses were later set to music. He manages to reproduce the rhythm of ballads, romances, and factory and folk songs in these and many other poems. Finally, the unfinished epic “Vozmezdie” is a lyrical chronicle of his family’s and nation’s destiny. Blok’s general poetic mood ranges from mystical belief and idealistic expectation to false rapture, skeptical, even cynical visions of life, and eventually sadness, despair, and critical aloofness.
Poetic style
Stylistically, Blok stands between the traditional syllabic meter and modern tonic patterns. In his earlier work, metric regularity...
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and exact rhyme dominate, to be followed by syllabotonic verse and experiments withvers libre. His rhymes become approximate, until he evolves a very modern, conversational style. Typically, his line has three stresses, interrupted by one or two unstressed syllables, but his rather extensive output shows great stress and syllable diversity within the line. He favors lexical repetition and occasionally repeats the first stanza as the last, with slight lexical change, to achieve a musical effect. Not the least of his skills is to transform vague, mystical notions into concise, elegant verse. Blok’s poetry is more accessible than the linguistic experiments of the Futurists and other innovators, and theme or thought are not as completely subordinated to technique. This accessibility, achieved with no loss of artistic quality, and the generally held belief that he re-created the great poetic traditions of the nineteenth century, give him a fame and exposure not matched by other modern Russian poets.
Celebration of the Eternal Feminine
Blok’s celebration of a feminine ideal is a twentieth century version of earlier cults, encompassing the Gnostic image of Holy Sophia, the adoration of the Virgin Mary in its various guises, Dante’s devotion to Beatrice, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s evocation of the Eternal Feminine in Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1838). Blok was not directly influenced by Western manifestations of the concept, though he employed all of them. His interest in the symbol came from the writings of the mystic philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, who incorporated Holy Sophia into his ideological system. Blok called his ideal more generally the Beautiful Lady, devoting not only his first collection, Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame, to her, but also extending the vision in diverse guises in all major subsequent work. His choice of an ancient symbol was influenced by the belief that familiar, even proverbial, concepts call forth deeper emotions than newly created metaphors. The more than three hundred poems of his first collection portray the Beautiful Lady as a godlike essence which can never assume concrete, earthly shape, but is accessible in spirit to the perceptive poetic persona. The image thus appears in fleeting poses, in the flickering of a candle, the rustle of a curtain, a breeze, or simply as a felt presence. Particularly prominent is Blok’s evocation of a distant shadow: “I waited for You. But Your shadow hovered/ In the distance, in the fields . . .” or “You are leaving into crimson sunset/ Into endless circles.”
In this semblance, the Beautiful Lady is sometimes an elemental, an almost pagan spirit, enveloped in mists and twilight, floating by in a snowflake or glistening in a star. She appears as a figure in a song and is herself a song, perceived in snatches of distant melodies. In line with traditional symbolism, she is frequently represented by a radiant light: “I wait. Unexpectedly a door will open,/ And vanishing light will fall on me.” The association with light extends naturally to religious settings, in which the Beautiful Lady is an incarnation of the Virgin. She is anticipated by the persona at the temple entrance: “The church steps are illuminated/ Their stones alive—and waiting for Your steps,” and immediately perceived within: “Holy Lady, how caressing the candles,/ How comforting Your features.” The poems tend to follow a rigid scheme: a physical setting empty of other people, the persona’s anticipation, his ritualistic incantations, and the resultant perception of the vision.
Blok often used dark/light contrasts to separate image from persona and the rest of the world. In a well-known poem of this type, “I Go into Darkened Temples,” the worshiper waits in the dim edifice, contemplating the flickering candle before the icon of the Virgin. The intense longing produces a state of excitement, in which real or imaginary creaks, rustles, and movements translate into a perception of her presence. The icon seems to come alive as the worshiper falls into a trance, engulfed by dreams and fairy-tale images. The final impression is an instant of joy and relief. These verses are not so much a lyrical diary, though Blok designated them as such, as they are a glimpse of his spiritual search. The intensity of his emotions carries a hint of immaturity, even sentimentality, which is redeemed, however, by the careful transmutation of the ecstasy into a restrained poetic idiom, and by the gossamer quality of the dreamlike reflections.
Several factors led the poet to change the image and thus extend the range of his spiritual odyssey. The idea of constant longing and expectation, interrupted only by vague, insubstantial moments of revelation, failed to satisfy the poet on a permanent basis. Doubt in the validity of his adoration, even in the existence of the Beautiful Lady and impatience with her remoteness already appear in the first collection. Blok sees himself as her “Obscure slave, filled with inspiration/ Praising You. But You don’t know him.” He also reproaches her: “You are different, mute, faceless,/ Hidden away. You bewitch in silence.” In the end, he challenges the symbol more directly: “You are holy, but I don’t believe You.” In one of Blok’s most quoted poems, “I Have a Premonition of You,” he fearfully anticipates other embodiments: “The entire heaven is on fire, and Your appearance near,/ But I am terrified that You will change your visage.” The changes were inevitable in the light of the poet’s determination to transfer some of the mystique to his fiancé Lyubov, who became his wife in 1904. This attempt at earthly incarnation miscarried, for while he implored Lyubov to serve as his inspiration, addressing her with the same capitalized “You” often lavished on the Beautiful Lady, she refused all mysticism and insisted on an ordinary flesh-and-blood relationship.
Nechayannaya radost
Blok’s second book, Nechayannaya radost, features an altered image of the Beautiful Lady. The thirteen-poem lead cycle “Puzyry zemli” identifies the symbol with the Macbethian witches, described by William Shakespeare: “The earth has bubbles, as the water hath/ And these are of them.” Religious adoration is here replaced by riotous cavorting amid the demons of the St. Petersburg marshes. The second cycle of the book, “Nochnaya fialka,” a fantastic tale composed in 1905-1906, expands this underground involvement. A new version of the Eternal Feminine appears in the form of a graceful but lethally poisonous flower princess. The dreamer-poet leaves his city and friends to venture far into a swampy netherworld, where he encounters a faceless, ageless vegetable female. This sweet-smelling woman flower eternally spins, casting her devastating marsh breath over others, while she herself blooms in the poisonous atmosphere. The sleepy hero perceives distant echoes of a happier land, now forever lost to him. The style of “Nochnaya fialka” demonstrates Blok’s increasing technical mastery. Though he preserves traditional regular rhythm, he usesfree verse and uneven rhyme and syllable schemes. This poem is considered one of Blok’s best.
In Blok’s subsequent collections, the Eternal Feminine assumes whatever aspect suits the poetic theme. When casting his unrequited love for Natalia Volokhova into verse in the cycle Snezhnaya maska, the vision becomes a glacial force, indifferently condemning the persona to a frozen wasteland. In “Faina,” she is a cruelly teasing gypsy. Blok’s most famous poems feature other embodiments of the ideal. In “The Stranger,” she is a prostitute, uncannily reflecting the purity and mystery of the Beautiful Lady, and in “A Girl Sang in a Church Choir,” she is a young singer transformed into a ray of light, promising salvation, while the piercing cries of a child reveal her deception. When the poet does make contact with his vision, the encounter is usually unsatisfactory or violent, as in “Humiliation,” where the persona wrestles with a prostitute and shouts in despair: “I am neither your husband, nor bridegroom, nor friend!/ So go ahead, my erstwhile angel and plunge/ Your sharp French heel into my heart.”
The Twelve
Blok’s most controversial manifestation of a divine vision occurs in the final stanza of his revolutionary poem The Twelve. Technically, The Twelve is a masterpiece. It pits the icy, howling snowstorm of the revolution against the vulnerable population, seen as unsure of its footing and slipping on the ice. All segments of society confront and attempt to hurdle the Bolshevik snowdrift. A fur-clad upper-class lady fails and lies prostrate; a fat-bellied priest attempts to squeeze by furtively; a bourgeois stands undecided at the crossroad; an intellectual shouts his dissent; and a peasant woman, not understanding the political event, succeeds in clambering across the snowdrift. Prostitutes using incongruous political jargon establish union fees for their services. These scenes are background for the main drama dealing with twelve Red Army men who think they safeguard the revolution, but really loot and kill. One of them murders his lover in a jealous rage, only to be overcome by religious scruples and feelings of guilt. At poem’s end, the revolutionaries continue on their violent path, boldly asserting their freedom from religion, but—unknown to them—they are led by the shadowy, gentle, garlanded figure of an effeminate Christ, whose unexpected appearance transmutes the marauders into the twelve disciples. Blok was vilified by both the Left and the Right for this inexplicable ending, but insisted that his poetic instinct dictated it. The controversy over this image for a long time obscured appreciation of the poem’s exquisite artistic craftsmanship. Blok wrote very little after The Twelve.