With the theme of the countryside and village life in times of change in mind, while reading Esenin’s poems I sensed a certain longing for the Russian homeland before the changes occurred and a certain resistance toward the industrialization and deforestation that was rapidly altering the natural state of the country. “Hey there, Russia, mother country…” really captured this resistance. The last stanza reads:

 If the heavenly host should beg me:

“Come to live in heaven above!”

I shall say: “Don’t give me heaven

But the Russia that I love.”

Using religious metaphor to emphasize the poet’s desire for the Russia that he once knew, by turning down the theoretical offer of the Lord to return to Heaven, we get a glimpse of the sadness and longing the poet feels. A similar idea is portrayed in “It can’t be dispelled, can this sorrow…”. The third stanza read:

Familiar views and expanses

By moonlight now seem not so fine.

Ravines … tree-stumps … bare slopes have saddened

These Russian horizons of mine.

What the poet once appreciated about their homeland is now less attractive and is seemingly “unfamiliar”. After describing the new landscape, the poem reads in the sixth stanza:

All of this is what we call the homeland,

Because of all this we meanwhile

In rainy days cry and drink vodka

While waiting for heaven to smile.

This stanza really conveys how disheartened the people of Russia are through the changes brought upon their once worshipped homeland. Lastly, the poem “The disquiet of vaporous moonshine…” directly references the industrialization and deforestation of the Russia countryside and village land by referencing “things made of steel and of stone” and the soil-tilling, primitive plough, and poplar and birch trees suffering anguish in the fifth stanza. The sixth stanza really stuck out to me:

For myself, I don’t know my own future…

I’ve no place in the new life, I feel,

Yet still wish to see poor drab Russia

A prospering country of steel.

These lines accurately portray the loss of identity and belongingness residents faced as a result of industrialization and deforestation. Suddenly people are unsure of their future and the role they play in their rapidly-changing homeland.