The formidable Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” This quote does much to categorize Russian poetry during the second, third, and fourth decades of the 20th century. Political tumult and changes marked this period so drastically that it is almost impossible to divorce art from the Russian Revolution and the young Soviet Union. Many poems between 1918 and the 1930s were focused on the current political and social themes of the time, usually related to the Soviet Union, yet there are a select few that appear rather innocent. Even so, it is veritably impossible to analyze a poem from 1918 without the thought “How is this not about the revolution” entering the brain. Some poems, like Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems Grow” initially seem to have to political subtext. However, with closer analysis, and a passing understanding of Tsvetaeva’s life and Russian history, the innocent and purely artistic facade of the poem melts away. In the first stanza, Tsvetaeva writes:

Poems grow in the same way as stars and roses,

Or beauty of no use to a family.

To all the wreaths and apotheoses,

One answer: –From where has this come to me?

Although seemingly about the craft of poetry, Tsvetaeva is writing about her own life. The poem was written in August 1918, almost a year after the revolution. Around this time, as a result of the upheaval of the revolution, the city of Moscow (Tsvetaeva’s home) was plunged into a deadly famine. Marina Tsvetaeva made a brutal decision: placing her young daughter in an orphanage in 1919 in the hopes she would survive the famine. She would die there of starvation. When read in the context of these events, the poem takes on an entirely different meaning. When Tsvetaeva writes “Or beauty of no use to a family”, she is literally talking about poems not being something concrete that can be eaten or bartered. The first line “Poems grow in the same way as stars and roses” is her expression of helplessness in the face of the artistic and poetic muse. Poems come to her, yet she has no way of converting verse into a way to save her starving daughter. The last line is her bewilderment at the relentlessness of her creativity. She wonders why she has the ability to create  poetry, and marvels at the way poems “grow” inexplicably. These are not happy thoughts, though. Her gift is great, yet ironic: it gives her no way to feed her family. In the end, her poems served only as personal comfort. Her daughter Irina died alone and abandoned in 1920. Her mother could only scream into the void.