Pasternak’s poetry is undeniably introspective, asking the viability of choice and progress and challenging the notion that we have complete agency over our lives. He asks this through metaphors, namely those of an actor on a stage and of a train on the tracks, likening them to life. His Hamlet poem has an actor explaining how he felt during the play; acting out a character that someone else had laid out for him, yet being happy to play the role. He laments that the play will go on in a preordained sequence, with the ending set in stone and the path just as unchangeable and apparent. These lamentations relate to the narrator’s view of life; that we are born in order to play a role in our society, and our end and means of reaching the end is laid bare and inevitable. This notion is reinforced with the closing line “to live is not like walking through a field,” meaning that you don’t have complete mobility to decide how you live, but you’re following a set of tracks.
The idea of a track for an end destination is especially apparent in his work My Sister Life, which takes place on a train. The train is meant to represent this set course of life, as trains have to follow an unmoving track in order to get to their destination. In this train is a multitude of passengers, each asking “is this my station” when they are awakened by the howling of the breaks. This is meant to represent how we all have different endings, but we are all headed there on the same set of paths, and we’re just waiting for our turn to reach our destinations. The narrator of My Sister Life chases after the train, but it’s too fast, leaving him behind. I may be reading into this too much, but with the rampant metaphors regarding fate, I read this as a commentary that some people are on a different path in life, and sometimes people aren’t meant to share the same fate, and are destined to be apart. That being said, I also believe this poem alludes to industrialization and political changes, but in the context of Hamlet, I also read My Sister Life as an allegory for predefined fate.