After reading the selected poets for Wednesday’s class, I was particularly drawn to Akhmatova because of how effectively she communicates her messages. Her poems are much easier to read and flow nicely, especially when compared to the other poets. For example, “I taught myself to live simply” was a poem that particularly struck me because of the time we are living in now. Her personification of worries in the first stanza emphasizes her active role in living more simply; needing to walk every night to tire them out is a powerful way to describe this coping mechanism. Her description of what I presume to be autumn in the second stanza is also very moving. The rustling of burdocks and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster is a beautiful description of the setting in which she writes. However, to Akhmatova, this is about life’s decay and beauty, not her immediate surroundings. She finishes the poem with a powerful line about hearing birds land on her roof occasionally, claiming besides that, it is so quiet she would not hear a knock on her door. The way she writes makes it clear how she taught herself to live simply.
“Sleeplessness” continues the trend of inviting the reader to resonate with her. The first stanza describes the onset of this, as she “catch the distant sound of footsteps. Your words lullaby me well, they haven’t let me sleep for three months!” The slow approach of the trouble with sleeping, personifying it, gives the reader something to relate to. When she exclaims, “You’re with me, with me again sleeplessness!”, it almost portrays the frustration with the inability to sleep. She knows its motionless face, that of an individual lying still in bed but not able to start dreaming. The stream of consciousness she presents makes this poem, like many of her other works, very relatable. Akhmatova’s simple word choice but intense image formation, through various literary techniques, gives readers of her poems a way to relate in a capacity that other poets cannot.
Akhmatova’s realistic relatability is very present in “Sleeplessness” as you point out. She, like everyone who suffers from insomnia, is trying everything she can to chase it away. The best way she knows how is through trying to charm it, in a sense, through her poem. She says “Come now, my beauty, my illicit one,/don’t you like my poem?”. I think the beauty of Akhmatova’s poems comes in their simple intimacy both to the reader and to the subject of the poem.
I like the word “intimacy” that you chose to use. I agree, and I believe this intimate nature of her works is something completely unique. A lot of her poems seem to cue the reader into Anna’s personal life and sometimes shows stuff that seems like it should be privy to the author. I look at her experience in “In the Evening” as an example of showing Akhmatova’s inner psyche and shows a moment that seems way too personal to share to the world. This level of connection with the reader even makes the reader seem like one of loves she details in her many works.
I completely agree that Akhmatova’s peoms are intimate. When reading her poems, I noticed that they were all very personal and dove into her live that usually isn’t uncovered by poets. As you said, this is a completely unique aspect of her writing.
I think another aspect of the writing style that adds to the intimacy of the poems is the direct addressing of “you”. While we have seen other poets such as Mandelstam utilize second person writing in their works, Akhmatova creates a sense of intimacy of with this person, addressing them lovingly and fondly. For example, in multiple poems, she talks about the person’s eyes, hair, and face, demonstrates a sense of connection and fondness for the individual. The evocation of the face is very personal and truly connects the speaker of the poem and the “you”. The reader is positioned to look into this incredibly personal relationship illustrated through the language of the poem.
I like how you related “I taught myself to live simply” to our current reality today. Like you, I found Akhmatova’s works to be to easy to understand and efficient in communicating their message. I thought that her poems “intimate” nature that Colby and Eva talk about it also apparent and is also interesting to look at giving our current situation that requires us to live simply and intimately/closely closed off from the rest of the world.
I thought your connection between our time and Akhmatova’s through her poem “I taught myself to live simply” was very astute, especially since, on the surface, our time and hers don’t share too many similarities, but they inspire us to act in similar ways to seek some sort of solace. I think we’re all living through a tumultuous period, and I found her response to that comforting, and something that we’ve all been doing in one form or another, and that’s slowing down and evaluating what’s important.
Jacob, you did a great job picking up on Akhmatova’s simplistic and concise writing style. I wonder how long it takes her to choose each word in her perfectly crafted lines. I also connect to the anxiety exhibited in this poem. She addresses her restlessness and even offers a coping mechanism: “and to wander long before evening/ to tire my superfluous worries” (60). At the surface level, the phrase ‘wander long before evening’ depicts an anxious woman tiring herself combat insomnia. On a deeper level, the line demonstrates the transient state which prompts her troubles. Hopefully, we can all do some exercise to alleviate our fears and allow for a restful sleep.
I find Akhmatova’s clear style is well-adapted for tacking the historical traumas reflected in her later poems. In “Birds of Death” (1941), Akhmatova paints the starvation and loss of hope stemming from the Nazi siege of Leningrad through a sequence of images: “birds of death” circling over the city, the city breathing, people going to bed without food, and prayers for relief going unanswered. While the significance of each image in the procession hits a familiar note, the gravity of the situation carries through. I hope in our present situation that we never find ourselves reliving the horrors of the siege.
This is such a wonderful discussion! I love how Liam, Gabe, and Thando tie Akhmatova’s poems to our present moment, and how Zach gives attention to her late poems, which we didn’t have the time to discuss in class. Akhmatova is often remembered as the glamorous, romantic love poet of her youth, but in fact, as I mentioned, she lived a very long life for a Russian poet, and in her later years became a figure of reverence and authority that the new generation of poets such as Joseph Brodsky looked up to. Part of that stature came from the gravity and dignity of the poems she wrote in the 1940s responding to WWII, the Stalinist Terror, and the Siege of Leningrad (as Zach mentioned). A particularly moving example of her late poetry is the poem “Willow,” in which she uses a quote from Pushkin’s poem “Again I visited…” (describing his return to the estate where he had been exiled years before, and his encounter with a grove of trees that used to be young and were now old) to describe herself as the sibling to a willow tree that she has strangely outlived (as Akhmatova had outlived her own contemporaries).