The last song

Anna Akhmatova

By 1917, the number of Russian soldiers who were injured, dead, missing, or held as prisoners of war was approaching five million men. The situation on the home front was equally bleak: over 400,000 Russian civilians were killed as a result of military action in the First World War, and another 730,000 civilians died due to famine and disease. Three years of horrific death and slaughter had given rise to a national mood of hopeless despair. When the Russian Revolution began on March 8^th, 1917, few doubted the central role that the Great War had played in the unrest that led to the eventual overthrow of Russia’s monarchist government. 

Anna Akhmatova, one of the foremost Russian poets of the twentieth century, shaped the chaos into poetry. She had written about the start of the war in her poem “In Memoriam, July 19, 1914”: “We aged a hundred years, and it / all happened in an hour.” In the midst of the 1917 revolution, she composed the haunting poem “Now no-one will be listening to songs.”

Now no-one will be listening to songs.
The days long prophesied have come to pass.
The world has no more miracles. Don't break
My heart, song, but be still: you are the last.

Not long ago you took your morning flight
With all a swallow's free accomplishment.
Now that you are a hungry beggar-woman,
Don't go knocking at the stranger's gate.

                        --1917

                        Translated by D.M. Thomas

Russian recruitment poster, WWI

Repeated throughout the poem are images of isolation and alienation: the solitary beggar, the stranger who has barred himself behind his gate, the last song, and the loneliness of “no-one.” Even the most desperately needy will find no hospitality or place to shelter, for this is a world bereft of miracles. 

The poem recalls a past when music soared like a bird, yet in a new world born out of violence, the “bitter days foretold [have] come over the hill.”* The turbulence of revolution may have created its own discordant noise like nothing heard before – but it is not a song. 

Akhmatova’s poem is itself a dirge, bidding a melancholy farewell to the traditional tunes of folklore that have joined communities and connected the past to the present.  Addressing song itself, the poet pleads with it to be silent, for the last surviving melody sings of a past that can never be recovered – and that tune has the power to break the heart. 

Russian cavalry on Eastern Front, WWI

* This from Stanley Kunitz’s translation of the poem’s second line. 

Something miraculous will come

Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia's most acclaimed poets, was described by critic Joseph Brodsky as "the keening muse."  Many of her poems are brief, lyrical, almost mystical, yet with "a note of controlled terror" (Brodsky).  She and her family suffered under Stalin's regime, and her poetry responding to that era is her best-known work.  However, Akhmatova is also one of the lost voices of The Great War, a voice that cries out again to be heard.  Below is one of her early poems, published in 1921.   

Everything's looted, betrayed and traded

night sky, credit Jason Kinnan

Everything's looted, betrayed and traded,
Black death's wing's overhead.
Everything's eaten by hunger, un-sated,
So why does a light shine ahead?

By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
Breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July's sky, deep, and transparent,
New constellations are thrown.

And something miraculous will come
Close to the darkness and ruin,
Something no-one, no-one, has known,
Though we've longed for it since we were children.
     –Anna Akhmatova, translated by A.S. Kline

The title of the poem and its opening images speak of the agonies of living in a world spoiled by war.  Like an immense vulture grown fat upon corpses, Death hovers over the earth, blocking out the sun.  The war is a bloated beast with an insatiable appetite for more death and destruction – "Everything's eaten" – and it seems as if the fighting and pain will never end. 

And yet – the poem whispers that all is not lost forever.  Without reason, beyond rationality, a light shines ahead.  In the mystery of a wood, where leafy trees somehow have continued to live and blossom, a delicate cherry scent perfumes the air.  And in the darkness of the night, "deep and transparent," entire new worlds of stars are thrown into being, as if from the hand of God.   Recalling the incarnational mystery of the dirty stable of Bethlehem, the poem looks past "darkness and ruin" and affirms that "something miraculous" will come. 

What I find most intriguing is that "something," although twice repeated, is never specifically named.  We will know it, however, when it arrives, for "we've longed for it since we were children." 

For what have the children been waiting?  What is the miracle that is anticipated?  Peace is the simple answer, but it seems unlikely that children thought of it or desired it in the distant days of childhood before the war ever began.  I like to think that the longed for miracle is the joyful sense of belonging to the wonders of the world, of participating in everyday miracles, of simply coming to value the miracle and gift of life.