After reading the selected poets for Wednesday\u2019s 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, \u201cI taught myself to live simply\u201d 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
\u201cSleeplessness\u201d continues the trend of inviting the reader to resonate with her. The first stanza describes the onset of this, as she \u201ccatch the distant sound of footsteps. Your words lullaby me well, they haven\u2019t let me sleep for three months!\u201d The slow approach of the trouble with sleeping, personifying it, gives the reader something to relate to. When she exclaims, \u201cYou\u2019re with me, with me again sleeplessness!\u201d, 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After reading the selected poets for Wednesday\u2019s 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, \u201cI taught myself to live simply\u201d was a poem that particularly struck me because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1017,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-9-the-silver-age-and-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1017"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}