Written almost entirely in the third person, “Balakirev’s Dream (1905)” is really a lyric poem masquerading as a narrative. The poem consists of nineteen unrhymed couplets, all but three of which are self-contained syntactical units. As the title indicates, the poem purports to recount the dream of Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), a famous Russian conductor and composer. Both the date in the title and the reference to the warship Sevastopol carefully situate the poem in time: during or just after the Sevastopol mutiny, which broke out spontaneously on November 11, 1905, and which, despite the support of other groups of insurgents, was soon crushed. Like the much more famous mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin, the Sevastopol mutiny was but a single episode in the ill-fated Russian Revolution of 1905-1907, which was ruthlessly suppressed by czarist forces.

The poem begins at a piano recital. Outside the concert hall, the streets are darkened by a strike; inside the hall, a pianist has begun to conjure up a dream world in which real stones (the brutal outside world?) become as light as dewdrops. The poet likens the black grand piano to a large spider trembling in its net of music. Listening to this music, the aging composer dozes off and dreams about a journey he is taking in the czar’s carriage (droshky), which is rumbling over cobblestones in a “crow-cawing” world that is both dark and threatening.

As frequently occurs in dream situations, the dreamer imagines that he is in two places at the same time: inside the carriage and running along beside it. Moreover, his sense of time is distorted: His clock shows that the trip has taken not hours, but years. He finds himself in a field in which a plow is lying idle; then the plow becomes a fallen bird that is transformed, in turn, into a darkened, icebound ship with people on its deck. As the carriage approaches the icebound vessel, the grating and clattering sounds it makes subside, and the wheels spin over the ice with a sound that is as soft as silk, recalling perhaps the activity of the grand piano-spider, weaving its delicate net.

Next, Balakirev finds himself the prisoner of the mutineers on board the Sevastopol. Handing him a curious “instrument,” which is “like a tuba or a phonograph/ or part of some unknown engine,” the hostile sailors tell him that only by playing this instrument can he save his life. Paralyzed with fear, Balakirev realizes that this instrument is the piston that runs the ship. He tries to defend himself by turning to the nearest sailor and begging him to cross himself. The symbolic gesture he urges upon the sailor becomes a reality when the man turns his sad eyes on Balakirev and—“as if nailed in the air”—is crucified. Just as the dreamer is about to witness the execution of the mutineers, the drumrolls that often accompany executions become a round of applause. The pianist has finished weaving his net of music, and Balakirev awakens with the impression that wings of applause are flapping in the hall as the pianist takes a bow. Though the fallen bird from the dream may once again have taken wing, the continued agitation in the street outside suggests that Balakirev’s anxiety dream is prophetic.

As was mentioned above, the poem consists of nineteen unrhymed, strongly rhythmical couplets. All but three of these couplets are self-contained syntactical units. Tomas Tranströmer uses this structural device, which enables sudden displacements in time and space, to create a realistically presented dream pattern. As each indeterminate dream image recedes, it is replaced...