{"id":950,"date":"2020-04-08T03:53:16","date_gmt":"2020-04-08T03:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=950"},"modified":"2020-04-08T04:28:25","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T04:28:25","slug":"osip-mandelstams-the-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/slargo\/osip-mandelstams-the-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Osip Mandelstam’s “The Age”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think this poem portrays a man’s response to the passing of time with nostalgia and grief in coping with growing older and inevitably insignificant<\/span>. In the poem, the narrator<\/span>\u00a0refers to his age as a beast that has experience in both the older and new centuries. <\/span>The poem reads:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\u201cA creature, as long as life persists\/ Must bear its backbone and exist\/ And a wave rolls and plays \/ Down invisible vertebrae\/ Like a child’s soft cartilage\/ The era of the infant earth<\/span> \/<\/span>\u00a0Life\u2019s brainpan has been offered up<\/span> \/\u00a0<\/span>Like a sacrificial <\/span>lamb\u201d(56).<\/span><\/p>\n

I think these lines of the poem may serve as a criticism of society in the 20th century. These lines\u00a0<\/span>show<\/span>\u00a0t<\/span>hat the most recent century is born without any knowledge from the past, making it as pure as<\/span>\u00a0\u201ca child\u2019s soft cartilage.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The poem also address blood springs from the throat of earthly things (56). The blood of life is not as fruitful as how the beast remembered the ol<\/span>der century. For me, I feel that there is an air of <\/span>nostalgia<\/span> that Mandelstam addresses.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>If<\/span> time continues to pass, and <\/span>if<\/span> age expands<\/span> with the passing of years, there is a natural wave of human <\/span>emotion like grief and longing. There is also a heightened sense of fragility and weakness involved with the “building blood from earthly things.”(56). <\/span><\/p>\n

As the poem continues in its descriptions of the beast and <\/span>temporality, Mand<\/span>elstam brings about an air of renewal and hope. \u00a0He writes, \u201cAnd once again the buds will swell\/ And nature will<\/span> explode in green\/ But your spinal cord is snapped \/ My wonderful but sorry age\u201d (56). He emphasizes the rebirth of a new cent<\/span>ury while also acknowledging that the body will not be able to keep up with the changes brought by a new age. Nonetheless, he remains in awe of life\u2019s eternal ch<\/span>ange. I believe that he is also saying that life is beautiful and ruthless. Although life has created humans, there is<\/span> still the presence of apathy and indifference for death.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think this poem portrays a man’s response to the passing of time with nostalgia and grief in coping with growing older and inevitably insignificant. In the poem, the narrator\u00a0refers to his age as a beast that has experience in both the older and new centuries. The poem reads: \u00a0\u201cA creature, as long as life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1028,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","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\/950","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\/1028"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}