Akhmatova: Poems

From EVENING
‘The pillow hot . . .’
Reading Hamlet
Evening Room
‘I have written down the words . . .’
‘I share my room . . .’
‘Memory of sun seeps from the heart . . .’
‘The door is half open . . .’
‘High in the sky . . .’
Song of the Last Meeting
Love
‘He loved three things alone . . .’
Imitation of Annensky
‘I came here in idleness . . .’
White Night
Legend on an Unfinished Portrait

From ROSARY
‘I have come to take your place, sister . . .’
‘It goes on without end . . .’
‘We’re all drunkards here . . .’
A Ride
‘Nobody came to meet me . . .’
‘So many requests . . .’
The Voice of Memory
8 November 1913
‘Blue heaven, but the high . . .’
‘Do you forgive me . . .’
The Guest
‘I won’t beg for your love . . .’
‘I came to him as a guest . . .’

BY THE SEASHORE

From WHITE FLOCK
‘Empty white Christmastide . . .’
Loneliness
‘How can you look at the Neva . . .’
‘The road is black . . .’
Flight
‘I don’t know if you’re alive or dead . . .’
‘There is a frontier-line . . .’
‘Freshness of words . . .’
‘Under an empty dwelling’s frozen roof . . .’
‘The churchyard’s quiet . . .’
‘Neither by cart nor boat . . .’
‘Lying in me . . .’
Statue in Tsarskoye Selo
‘O there are words . . .’

From PLANTAIN
‘Fame is like smoke . . .’
‘I shouldn’t be dreaming . . .’
‘Now farewell, capital . . .’
‘I hear the oriole’s always grieving voice . . .’
‘Now no-one will be listening to songs . . .’
‘The cuckoo I asked . . .’
‘Why is our century worse than any other? . . .’

From ANNO DOMINI
‘You’re like a strange . . .’
‘Everything is looted . . .’
‘Oh, life without . . .’
‘They wiped your slate . . .’
Bezhetsk
‘To earthly solace . . .’
‘I’m not of those who left . . .’
‘Blows the swan wind . . .’
‘To fall ill as one should . . .’
‘Behind the lake . . .’
Rachel
Lot’s Wife

From REED
Muse
To an Artist
The Last Toast
*‘Dust smells of a sun-ray . . .’
‘Some gaze into tender faces . . .’
Boris Pasternak
Voronezh
*Imitation from the Armenian
Dante
Cleopatra
Willow
*In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov
‘When a man dies . . .’
*‘Not the lyre of a lover . . .’
Way of All the Earth

From THE SEVENTH BOOK
In 1940
‘Some walk in a straight line . . .’
*‘No matter that death . . .’
Courage
‘And you, my friends . . .’
*‘That’s how I am . . .’
Three Autumns
‘The souls of those I love . . .’
‘The fifth act of the drama . . .’
‘It is your lynx eyes, Asia . . .’
In Dream
‘Once more an autumn . . .’
*The Glass Doorbell
‘And that heart . . .’
‘So again we triumph! . . .’
‘Let any, who will, still bask in the south . . .’
Music

From Northern Elegies
The First
The Fifth
The Sixth
Seaside Sonnet
Fragment
Summer Garden
‘In black memory . . .’
‘Could Beatrice write . . .’
Death of a Poet
The Death of Sophocles
Alexander at Thebes
Native Soil
There are Four of Us
*‘If all who have begged help . . .’
Last Rose
*‘Reviled and acclaimed . . .’
‘This land . . .’
*‘It is no wonder . . .’
‘What’s war? What’s plague? . . .’
In Memory of V. C. Sreznevskaya
Christmastime (24 December)
‘You will hear thunder and remember me . . .’

REQUIEM

POEM WITHOUT A HERO


Notes
Translator’s Acknowledgments


*Poems not published in the collection but written in the same epoch.