SOURCE: "Bells and Cupolas: The Formative Role of the Female Body in Marina Tsvetaeva's Poetry," in Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 232-46.

Like many other Russian women writers, Marina Tsvetaeva did not merely include women's language and physical experience in her poetry; they were central to her concern with poetry and poetic creation. These elements of her work have in recent years evoked an interest from women readers and feminist scholars of Russian literature which is reflected in the number of studies devoted to aspects of her work. Antonina Gove discusses the presence and chronological development of female roles in Tsvetaeva's poetry ["The Feminine Stereotype and Beyond: Role Conflict and Resolution in the Poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva," Slavic Review, Vol. 36, 1977]; Anya Kroth illustrates the importance of gender and specifically androgyny in Tsvetaeva's construction of a dichotomous world-view ["Androgyny as an Exemplary Feature of Marina Tsvetaeva's Dichotomous Poetic Vision," Slavic Review, Vol. 38, 1979]. Barbara Heldt's landmark study of women in Russian literature, Terrible Perfection, devotes several pages to Tsvetaeva as an autobiographer and a woman poet liberated from the "split selves" of her predecessors [Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, 1987]. In her recent book Death in Quotation Marks, Svetlana Boym examines how Tsvetaeva's self-mythologization as a poet involves "killing the poetess," that female dilettante stereotyped in Russian culture ["The Death of the Poetess," Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, 1991]. These and other studies discuss the poet's multifaceted treatment of female physicality and sexuality in poetry that explores the complex links between culture and physical experience, and that significantly expands the Russian tradition. Tsvetaeva worked within the stereotypes of Russian and western European culture to locate and test their effects on women and experiment with their constructs of gender. Women's language leads to a wide variety of consequences in her poetry, from traditional to subversive, from empowering to tragic.

The use of grammatically marked "female" language by Russian poets, male or female, has yet to be systematically studied, but the existence of unambiguously feminine linguistic markers might be seen as providing an identifiable "women's" language and hence the possibility of textual expression of the female body. Indeed, French literary theorist Hélène Cixous claims in a provocative reading that Tsvetaeva herself is a practitioner of écriture féminine, a process whereby the female body inscribes itself as text ["Difficult Joys," The Body and Text: Hélène Cixous, Reading and Teaching, 1990]. Cixous interprets parts of Tsvetaeva's autobiographic prose as metaphorical recovery of the female body; much of Tsvetaeva's poetry similarly investigates the sublimation of female physicality in Russian culture and religion. In poems devoted to the architecture of Moscow, Tsvetaeva re-realizes the female body: she revives the church by the presence of a woman's body and language while at the same time the church's status and aesthetic value lend value to the poet's words.

Tsvetaeva depicted a connection between Moscow and women in the early poem "Domiki staroi Moskvy" ("Houses of Old Moscow") published in 1912 in Volshebnyi fonar' (The Magic Lantern) and that association continued into her poetry of the revolutionary and civil war period when she compared the city to female historical figures. As Simon Karlinsky points out, the city of Moscow is "a central unifying leitmotif in Tsvetaeva's 1916 collection, Versty (vypusk I) (Versts [number I]). In it she locates herself amid the city's historic figures and poetic geography and outlines for herself, a little-known 24-year-old poet, a place among established Petersburg poets, including the foremost woman poet of her age, Anna Akhmatova. Tsvetaeva described her concern with Petersburg and its traditions in her 1936 prose memoir, "Nezdeshnii vecher" ("An Otherworldly Evening"), which details a visit to Petrograd at the end of 1915 and its influence on her writing of 1916. Much has been made of her use of the commonplaces that distinguish Moscow from St. Petersburg, many of them springing from oppositions based on gender. When she met Mikhail Kuzmin and other Petersburg poets, Tsvetaeva felt marked by her Moscow speech and reacted by speaking with increasingly Muscovite mannerisms: "Leniu fizicheski chisto dolzhen razdrazhat' moi moskovskii govor:—spasibo—ladno—takoe, kotoroe on neizmenno otmechaet:—Nastoiashchaia moskvichka!—chto menia uzhe nachinaet zlit' i uzhe zastavliaet ètu moskovskost'—usilivat', tak chto s Lenei, gladkogolovym, tochnym, tochenym—ia, v'iushchaiasia v skobku, so svoim 'pushche' i 'gushche'—nemnozhko vrode moskovskogo iamshchika" (Lenya must be purely physically irritated by my Moscow speech: "spasibo," "ladno," the sort of thing he invariably notes: "a real Moscow woman!" This starts to get me angry and forces me to intensify my Moscowness, so that with Lenya [smooth-headed, exact, chiseled], I [curving into a parenthesis] with my "pushche" and "gushche" am a little like a Moscow coachman). Tsvetaeva recited poems in order to represent Moscow to "ves' Peterburg" (all of Petersburg) and included Akhmatova with the male poets mentioned in "An Otherworldly Evening" in that monolithic masculine "ves' Peterburg" to stress the feminine gender of "odna Moskva" (Moscow alone).

Of course, Tsvetaeva was born and raised in Moscow and so might have been expected to make poetic use of the city's associations in Russian history and culture. The same origin, however, did not prevent many other poets from joining Petersburg literary movements. Tsvetaeva's selection of "backward," patriarchal Moscow as an element of her poetic identity suggests that its many "feminine" associations provided her with language and possibilities that Petersburg did not: among other things, a historical and architectural background that is "female." Even the Moscow Kremlin, grammatically masculine and symbol of patriarchal authority in Muscovite Russia, was transformed by Tsvetaeva's focus on the "feminine" churches at its heart and by its geographical and poetic proximity to the (doubly-feminine) Moskvareka (Moscow River). A close reading of poems from 1916 shows that Tsvetaeva rejected denigration of Moscow as a poetic and historical back-water as she elaborated instead her own version of her native city and its traditions. Moscow thus assumes equal status with St. Petersburg and Tsvetaeva claimed equality with the best-known poets from that city.

Moscow's "female" church architecture determines elements of the poet's identities in three poems which I will discuss here. The poems, "Kanun Blagoveshchen'ia" ("Annunciation Eve"), "U tonkoi provoloki nad volnoi ovsov" ("The slender wire above the sea of oats") and "Zakinuv golovu i opustiv glaza" ("Lifting my forehead and lowering my eyes"), set up a relationship of physical body to textual body through bells and cupolas. As Jane Taubman points out in her article "Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova: Two Female Voices in a Poetic Quartet" [Russian Literature Triquarterly, Vol. 9, 1974], the bells and cupolas that recur in Tsvetaeva's poetry from 1916 to 1918 are not only real and evocative elements of the Moscow landscape but are also "enclosing spaces" with revealing Freudian significance. The church is, of course, an extremely resonant symbol of Russian culture which more or less links Russian Christianity with the rest of Christian and especially western European culture. Joanna Hubbs points out in her recent book, Mother Russia, The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture, that Christian churches in Russia are traditionally built and described in structural equivalence to the female body. Female elements in religion contribute to Tsvetaeva's definition of her being as a poet and her use of the discourse of religion underlines her reverence for poetry.

"Annunciation Eve," dated March 24-25, the eve and the day of that holiday, marks one of the first appearances in Tsvetaeva's poetry of Moscow's church architecture and gives a detailed description of architectural features that she would later abbreviate. The Immaculate Conception has been an image of great power for women writers, linking as it does womb and word; in Tsvetaeva's poetry it proves to be a crucial metaphor for the poetic process. The time (the Eve of the Annunciation) and place (the Cathedral of the Annunciation) coincide in a numinous location in the heart (or womb) of Moscow. This long poem has a looser rhyme scheme than Tsvetaeva usually favored and is unified by its sound texture; it also explores a disharmony between writing and motherhood absent in many other poems which she wrote at the time. She first describes the cathedral with moon and star above it (recalling Constantinople), beggars on the porch with repulsive voices, lamps and chandelier, saints with faces black from insomnia and icy windows in the cupola. While the worshipers pass a candle from hand to hand, the speaker herself prays to "Solntse-Materi" (the Sun-Mother), asking that she protect her daughter and keep her from her mother's "slovesnoi pyshnosti" (verbal luxuriance) so that the little girl will not also become "khishchnitsei, / Chernoknizhnitsei" (a bird of prey, / A practitioner of black magic). Once the service ends, people go their various ways but the speaker merrily shoves them aside volny valkie" (like unsteady waves) and runs to the Moscow River to watch the ice breaking.

Though the male clergy and male saints are tacitly present in this poem, Tsvetaeva's speaker describes women: the beggar-women in the porch at the beginning of the poem, the old women who pause to cross themselves at its end and the speaker herself. Inside the church, at the center of the poem, is a gendered space seen as female, underscored here by its dedication not only to the Mother of God but also to the conception of her child, which highlights Mary's womb and her role as a vessel. Her perfection is defined by a lack (of sin, here: sexual relations with a man) and by maternal devotion. She displays the traditional patriarchal construct of woman as space rather than voice. Unless sublimated into architecture, female anatomy is intrinsically sinful (except in the case of Mary) while language, the vehicle of male intellect and poetic/religious tradition, is elevated and spiritual. The Word that Mary bears is not her own, but rather God the Father's; furthermore, the Word incarnate is male. Mary bore a son but, like her own mother, Tsvetaeva in 1916 had only a female child. Girl-children might be potential bearers of the Word but in any but the most heretical Christian sects they can never be the Word.

Mary is mute and passive, just like Tsvetaeva's presentation of one of Russian culture's most notorious women, Pushkin's wife Natal'ia Goncharova, whose emptiness drove Pushkin to try to fill it. Stephanie Sandier's article, "Embodied Words: Gender in Cvetaeva's Reading of Puskin," points out that Tsvetaeva emphasized Natal'ia Nikolaevna's wordlessness: "Once again, the woman's silence merits Cvetaeva's implicit criticism, as well as the reiteration that the wordless beauty is a blank space, a nobody" [in the Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 1990]. Mary also recalls the Sibyl in Tsvetaeva's poems of 1922 and 1923: the Sibyl is invaded by Apollo and he reduces her body to a cave, womb or resonating space for the Voice that she bears. These myths of Mary and the Sibyl connect womb, breast, mouth and head, all of which are also united in the church's arrangement of space. The two types of female physicality exemplified by Mary and the Sibyl and inhabited by male language differ only in Tsvetaeva's attitude towards them depending on their expression in her culture. Mary's "Word" is not her own but Tsvetaeva's quotation of Ovid's Sibyl stresses possession of voice over that of body: "Moi zhily issiaknut, moi kosti vysokhnut, no golos, golos—ostavit mne Sud'ba!" (My veins shall run dry, my bones shall wither, but Fate shall leave me my voice, my voice!)

The narrator of "Annunciation Eve" is a woman who uses her voice and combines word and womb differently from Mary, a mere recipient of the Word and of the narrator's prayer. The speaker addresses neither God the Father nor God the Son (nor her husband, unless he can be understood as the angel who has flown from her), rather, she asks Mary, who shares the experience of motherhood, to protect her daughter. At the same time, the narrator distances herself from Mary since her prayer is the conception of her own word. The purpose of her prayer, besides sharing the joy of the holiday, might be that her daughter too be free to choose between church and poetry. In the end, the narrator flees outside to the spring thaw, leaving Mary inside the church where nothing seems to thaw or change.

It is significant as well that the narrator does not once do what I have already done several times: refer to Bogoroditsa (Bearer of God) as "Mary." Instead she adheres to the Orthodox tradition wherein Mary is identified by the titles "Bogoroditsa" or "Bogomater"' (God's mother) which describe Mary in terms of motherhood, as if she is not a person in her own right. The ambiguous phrase "Mater'—materi" (Mother—to a mother) evokes Tsvetaeva's mother, also named Marina, who died when the poet was a

child. This hidden equivalence adds undertones to the poet's relationship with the woman whom she addresses: the poet's mother and the Virgin are conflated into a single figure who has abandoned the narrator.

Motherhood is celebrated in the Orthodox liturgy for the Annunciation, part of which is echoed in the poem. Worshipers re-enact Mary's conception by enlivening the church-womb with words—a magical liturgical language—and fire—candles that illuminate and warm the virgin's icy womb. The word becomes fire that sparks conception: at the end of the poem, the ice on the Moscow river is breaking on this holy day near the equinox and the approach of spring and sunlight. The church itself is a womb: worshipers are in the position of children of the Mother of God and like the narrator are "born" out of the church at the end of the service. The narrator's exit is likened explicitly to the birth-like violence of the thaw of the Moscow river: she shoves her way out "like unsteady waves" to watch the ice break (freeing water and language) and takes with her the poem she conceived while in church.

Although the center of the poem echoes church liturgy, the narrator's relationship to the church is highly ambiguous. She admires the splendid lights but juxtaposes Mary's icon to the "disgusting voices" of beggar-women in the porch and sees the faces of the saints "shining with black insomnia." The poem also has a strong pagan or heretical subtext: the speaker's first glimpse of the moon above the church reminds her of Holy Sophia, the main cathedral of Byzantine Orthodoxy converted to a mosque; the moon recalls the Islamic moon abbreviated in the base of the Orthodox cross, the symbol of Russian conquest of the Tatars. These religious symbols contain their own negation and hint at mutability. Mary is addressed as "Sun-Mother," a locution from the pagan, pre-Christian stratum of Russian folk religion which reflects her amenability to reinterpretation by those who do not adhere to church dogma.

If Mary is the narrator's "Mother," the narrator cannot be the Word: besides her gender, her sin of "verbal luxuriance" makes her "a bird of prey" and "a [female] practitioner of black magic." The "black book" (chernaia kniga) of the poet-witch is not the Bible, a book of someone else's words to read and repeat. To recite or write one's own words, for a woman at least, is subversive if not sinful and here it clearly leads the narrator away from her child. It is not conceiving and writing a poem that is antithetical to child-bearing (since the speaker has done both) but, rather, choosing to be a poet, devoting all one's capacities to the production of one's own words rather than to reproduction of children.

Tsvetaeva's narrator not only does not imitate Mary but in this and many later poems her narrators reject repetition of established Orthodox doctrine. This poem itself is preceded and followed by poems that celebrate a folk razgul (debauch) chosen in defiance of inevitable patriarchal condemnation and punishment. In later poetry Tsvetaeva turned to the Greek myth of the Sibyl whom she both equated with and differentiated from the Virgin: while Mary gazes at her Son in silent adoration or suffers at His death, the Sibyl speaks words that her listeners must strive to hear and interpret and she is associated with poetry rather than with motherhood. With this shift, the poet gained not only the status of an oracle but a persona who was able to give birth to words repeatedly. Tsvetaeva's poems from 1916 also search for alternative deities: her narrator lights a large candle to Dmitrii and Marina, as if to icons and addresses Blok and Akhmatova in fulsomely religious language. The Virgin herself can assume alternative identities as a folk Bogoroditsa-Troeruchitsa (Three-armed Mother of God) or as part of someone else's poetic mythology (e.g. Akhmatova holding her son or Blok's last love).

In her prose reminiscences, Tsvetaeva retrospectively stressed the importance of Anna Akhmatova for her poetic development. The tenth poem in the 1916 cycle "Stikhi k Akhmatovoi" ("Poems to Akhmatova"), "U tonkoi provoloki nad volnoi ovsov" ("The slender wire above the sea of oats") elaborates Akhmatova's influence on other women writing poetry at the time….

(The slender wire above the sea of oats / Today has a voice—like a thousand voices! / And the coach bells driving past—holy, holy, holy— / Don't they speak, Lord, in the same voice. /I stand and listen and rub an ear of grain apart, / And the voice closes me in like a dark cupola. / / It's not these swimming willow branches / I touch devoutly—but your hand. / For all who languorously praise your approach,— / You are an earthly woman, but to me—a heavenly cross! / Nights I bow in prayer to you alone,— / And all the icons look out with your eyes!) Repetition of the word golos (voice) four times in the first six lines of the poem underlines its significance in Tsvetaeva's poetic philosophy. Here it is not the narrator's own voice but the objects around her that express Akhmatova's fame and, finally, Akhmatova's own voice. Religious imagery (particularly "holy, holy, holy") recalls the 1916 cycle of poems addressed to Blok as well as the rest of this cycle: such religious and liturgical vocabulary emphasizes poetry's significance in the narrator's life and in the world. The icons here, all looking with Akhmatova's eyes, grant Akhmatova semi-divine status. They are not only objects of prayer and worship but also windows into heaven; the worshiper's prayer, in effect, obliges Akhmatova to notice her.

More important than the icons for the purposes of this analysis is the "dark cupola" which encloses the speaker: both the voices that praise Akhmatova and Akhmatova's own voice place the narrator inside a church as a possibly unwilling worshiper. The union of voice and cupola recalls Blok's "Devushka pela v tserkovnom khore" ("A girl was singing in the church choir") with its ambiguous combination of artistic beauty and final despair. If the voice can go no farther than the cupola, it might as well die there. The narrator has been listening and rubbing apart an ear of grain, as if undoing her own poetic labor (the ripe ear perhaps equivalent to the completed poem). Akhmatova's voice and reputation put the speaker back in the womb where she can neither see nor move. There she also presumably grows and matures; her voice resonates and strengthens as she emerges from this imposed poetic daughterhood: the grain is free to be reborn from the earth's darkness. Although Tsvetaeva's daughter asserted that Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva were sisters in poetry, this poem suggests instead that their relationship was like that of mother and daughter. In another poem from the same cycle, Tsvetaeva imagines herself in the position of an heir beside Akhmatova's dead body; in yet another she equates Akhmatova with a heretical Virgin Mary, intimating the same connotations of womb and word discussed above. This implication is strengthened by comparison with the last poem she wrote to Sof 'ia Parnok, "V ony dni, ty mne byla kak mat'" ("In those days you were like a mother to me"), also from 1916.

At the same time, Tsvetaeva's insistence in this cycle on naming, a prerogative she jealously reserves for mothers, allows her in turn to reverse roles, to mother and to assume power over Akhmatova. If a woman's possible relationships to a man include bearing the man's child as well as mothering him (an alternative Tsvetaeva frequently exploits), relations with other women, including Akhmatova, might entail becoming simultaneously poetic mother and daughter. The ambiguous nature of such a relationship is embodied by Akhmatova's presence in the poem: she is illuminated (an icon lit by a lamp, a heavenly cross that is both guide and burden) but also shadowed (like the dark interior of a cupola whose outside may shine with gold but whose inside provides no guide for the narrator). The ambiguity as to who is mother and who is daughter emphasizes the poet's agency in forming her own textual body: she is free to choose her own ancestors, to become someone else's poetic lover or child. The relationship takes place within a linguistic world that she herself takes part in creating.

The narrator's relationship with God, the saints and angels emerges in terms of church architecture in "Zakinuv golovu i opustiv glaza" ("Lifting my forehead and lowering my eyes"), written in 1918, the third poem in Part II of Versty (vypusk II) (Versts [number II]). Part II of this collection is commonly seen as a shift in focus from the flesh to the soul and its relationship with the body; in this poem too the body is a bearer of spiritual meaning….

(Lifting my forehead and lowering my eyes, /I stand—before the visage of the Lord and all the saints. / Today is my holiday, today is—Judgment. / The assembly of youthful angels is embarrassed to tears. / The righteous are dispassionate. Only Thou, / On a throne-cloud, lookest as a friend would. / What thou wishest—ask. Thou art kind and old, / And thou wilt understand that with this kind of Kremlin bell / In my breast—it's impossible to lie. / And thou wilt understand how passionately, day and night, / Providence and Arbitrariness struggled / In the breast that moves—millstones. / Thus, as a mortal woman,—my gaze is lowered, / Thus, as a wrathful angel—my forehead is lifted, / On Annunciation day, at the Royal Gates, / Before thy face—look!—I stand. / And my voice, after abandoning my breast like a dove / moves in a circle in the red-golden cupola.) The assonantal texture of the poem (for example in line 11, "Bo-ro-lis' Promysel i Pro-iz-vol") and the absence of a regular rhyme scheme suggest the complexity of the equations it draws; rhymes and alliterations turn up unexpectedly both within lines and in final positions. The stressed ("masculine") line endings place extra emphasis on final words and syllables.

The narrator's physical presence is established by several details: her head is lifted while her eyes look down, and her breast or chest (grud') is the emphasized final word in three lines. Direction simultaneously upward and downward reflects the narrator's dual nature of mortal woman and wrathful angel, a being who is both gendered and ungendered. The loss of gender at the scene of judgment is maintained by the absence of any grammatical indications of the speaker's gender until the penultimate stanza; as Anya Kroth points out, angels are beings who transcend gender. (In the Russian tradition, however, this transcendance is usually expressed through masculine names and forms.) The duality grows stronger when the woman is explicitly labeled as one who shall die whereas an angel is immortal and partakes of divinity. The Russian tradition has always retained the ambiguous, dually sensual and religious connotations of the word strast' (passion) but here the passion associated with the speaker is denied to the Righteous, perhaps privileging the woman's body over those of "holy" men.

What appears at first reading to be merely duality is multiplied by the complexity of associations and by the vertical convergence, typical of Tsvetaeva's poetics, in which heaven and hell, God and devil are separated by no more than a breath. Even the angelic nature of the speaker is not simple: the angel is facing God rather than standing with him, a prideful posture that might suggest Lucifer. Two lines in the poem end with "stoiu" (I stand) set off by dashes from the rest of the line; the effect is one of a narrator frozen in space, her stance a challenge, as if she will wait there until judgment is forthcoming.

Facing the speaker are God, the angels and the Righteous, as depicted in icons on the Russian church's iconostasis. The Church Slavic preposition in the phrase "Pred likom" (before the visage) and the capitalization of "Sud" (Judgment) underline the gravity of the narrator's position: this is not merely a pictorial version of theology but the Last Judgment itself. "Lik" (visage) refers to the ineffable quality of the icon but also identifies it as merely an image, a symbol of the God provided by her culture and religion. The narrator's position at the royal gates (which divide the main space of the church, accessible to the mass of worshippers, from the inner sanctum) echoes that of a soul seeking admission to paradise, as in the epigraph to Tsvetaeva's Versts (number I), "Ptitsy raiskie poiut, / V rai voiti nam ne daiut" (Birds of paradise sing, / They do not let us enter paradise). God himself, however, looks at the speaker as a friend would and, after its first appearance, the informal pronoun Ty (Thou) is no longer capitalized. The speaker grows less formal and more intimate with God as the poem progresses: by the first line of the last stanza, this increasing intimacy incorporates God's presence in the space that the poem creates and the solemn "Before the visage" of the first stanza gives way to the everyday forms "Pered litsom tvoim" (In front of thy face) in the sixth stanza. Unlike many poems in which the reader may assume the role of addressee, the impossibility of assuming God's role at the Last Judgment renders the reader a mere spectator to the poem and reminds us that the poet, however much she may value our attention and admiration, is concerned primarily with other questions.

The Last Judgment for the poet occurs on "[her] holiday," the Annunciation, two years after the date of "Annunciation Eve." Another earlier poem, "V den' Blagoveshchen'ia" ("On Annunciation Day"), refers to the day as "prazdnik moi" (my holiday) as does this one and shows the narrator freeing tame birds in accord with the folk tradition of the holiday. The Annunciation illuminates Tsvetaeva's activity as a woman poet, a woman who bears the Word. She is to be judged both as a mortal being of the female gender and as a poet, if indeed the two can be separated while they are united in the same person. While "Annunciation Eve" treats the eve of the holiday, in "Lifting my forehead and lowering my eyes" the narrator is to be judged on the day itself: her deeds (or poems) are complete and immutable, no longer open to advice or command but only to explanation and justification.

The teleology of the Last Judgment is emphasized by Tsvetaeva's use of capitalization which follows the standard usage of her time in most of the poem but highlights the words "Promysel" and "Proizvol." Their significance as "Providence" and "Arbitrariness" may perhaps also be translated as "Cosmos" and "Chaos"; capitalization calls attention to their identical prefix pro-, meaning "going through" or "passing." Thus the two categories that struggle within her breast achieve a directedness quite appropriate to the final event of a life in linear time. At the same time, this directedness is opposed to the cyclic action of the millstones in the speaker's breast, a circling which is repeated in the end by the freed voice in the cupola.

The image of millstones harks back to the grain that the narrator rubs in "The slender wire above the sea of oats" as well as to other poems from the revolutionary period in which Tsvetaeva equates poetry with agricultural processes. Grinding grain is hard labor, the fate of human beings cast out of Paradise. Nonetheless, grain ground into flour results in the bread that becomes flesh or Flesh, a transsubstantiation that ties labor directly to inspiration. Work and inspiration, perhaps in parallel to "Providence" and "Arbitrariness," inhabit the speaker's breast and generate her poetry.

The last stanza of "Lifting my forehead and lowering my eyes" differs from the others in that the first line, which continues the syntax of the preceding stanza, is separated graphically from the following two lines. The physical separation on the page mirrors the flight of the narrator's voice as it leaves her body and circles high above her head, following the acoustics of the church's interior. Her voice moves like a dove (the first syllables gol-os and gol recall kol-okol of the third stanza) which is also located in the speaker's breast. This dove is the symbol of the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit and the bird that is traditionally to be freed on the holiday. The cupola where it circles is neither icy nor dark, as in the earlier poems, but bright redgold: the narrator has emerged from night and daughterhood into the day when she will be judged as a mature poet. The inspiration of the day is simultaneous with the birth of the words which emerge from her body and take flight as a separate being.

The narrator's voice has left her at the moment which will presumably seal her fate forever and this offers several possible readings. Perhaps, just as the dove has risen above the iconostasis, the speaker may rise above the judgment represented by the church's iconography. Without her voice and its spiritually redeeming qualities, though, she may be found wanting. The dove circling above may convey that the cyclic and timeless nature of poetry exempts it from the linear model of human life: the voice remains after the speaker has been judged and has passed on to heaven or hell. The ever-present subtext of Blok's "A girl was singing in the church choir" reminds us that the bird, flying or not, is still within the cupola rather than free in the sky.

The result of the judgment which the speaker anticipates is up in the air. Possibilities range from the most joyful (to be assumed, body and soul, into heaven since, like Mary, the speaker has borne the Word) to the most sinister (to be cast down as a wrathful angel, Lucifer, who was often linked in Christian tradition to the female sex). What can be said with certainty is that the poet, as both woman and angel, both body and voice, is a microcosm of the earth capable of containing any number of apparently contradictory elements. Tsvetaeva explores the implications of her gender here not by including the male (equally-gendered) alternative but by ascribing to herself traits of an angel who transcends gender. She is perpetually at a point where opposites contact and interact with one another in a tension that produces the holy bread of her poetry.

The cupola and iconostasis in this poem convey a complex interplay of church and female body: the architecture peculiar to Moscow and Muscovite Russia is internalized by a poem in which Moscow itself is no longer celebrated. The narrator's breast holds millstones and a Kremlin bell and, like the Tsar'-kolokol which once housed a small chapel, it is itself a church. The Moscow church contains the narrator's body which is itself a church and which also contains the church of her breast. With its depictions of divine beings and its history, a church is a microcosm of the world; its cupola above (golden here, in other cases dark blue with golden stars) represents the sky or heaven. The narrator's voice, then, has reached heaven like a dove that will intercede for her. At the same time, the resonant cupola is a womb, so that the voice's ascent mirrors the descent of the dove—the Holy Spirit—at the Annunciation.

This poem and the others that I have discussed treat the Russian church as a body and the woman poet's body as a church (not necessarily an orthodox one!), allowing female experience to move from the periphery of Russian culture to the center. For all its repression or diabolization of the "feminine" elements that do not fit patriarchal definitions of acceptable womanhood, the church still houses its liturgy within architectural forms which are both beautiful and "female" and which offer the woman poet a paradigm for poetic creation that is deeply problematic but also very fertile. The "tower of the symbolists," readable as an attempt to move away from earthly reality and closer to the Absolute, is transformed in Tsvetaeva's poems to resemble a bell tower that links earth to heaven but belongs to neither. This explains why the poet in her "Poèt—izdaleka zavodit rech'…" ("The poet acquires speech from afar…") might swing off the bell tower: ringing bells is what poets always do. Tsvetaeva expressed the urge to plunge downward or fly upward rather than continue the tension that made human life so difficult for her, even though it provided the disharmonies of gender, physicality and spirituality, etc. as bases for her poetry.

The narrators of these poems are neither mortal nor divine, neither totally mother nor totally poet. Each assumes a medial place that is typical both of Tsvetaeva's poetics and of sacrificial roles in mythology: suspended from a high place, wise beings and victims assume a location between heaven and earth. A woman is both bearer, the Marian or Sibylline vessel of life and the word, and potential martyr, a broken body whose soul has flown like the narrator's voice in the third poem examined here. The numinous moment of childbirth, especially in Tsvetaeva' s era, often involved both possibilities. A complex relationship of body and soul or spirit emerges from an analysis of the place of female physicality in Tsvetaeva's poetics. Final judgment of poetic activity remains suspended, however, since it is not clear whether creating new beings through language amounts to praiseworthy imitation of God or damnable competition.