FIRST POEM
889
metrical accent of the line encountered a normally unstressed syllable
«(ny"
in the Russian example, "la"
in
the English one). This pro–
duced a delicious acceler,ation, which, however, was much too familiar
an effect to redeem banality of meaning.
That I chose for my first attempts at composition such ancient
molds, seems to me nowadays monstrous.
It
was as if a budding
musician were given a viola d'amore or a harpsichord to use for his
first lesson. Indeed, I find it difficult to accept as authentic the recol–
lection of my versifying at a time when I had really no inkling of
what it was all about. For I did not know that beyond the archipelago
there was the continent; that beyond mere verse, rime-bangled or
blank, fettered or free, falsely clear or falsely recondite (concealing
triteness beneath ashen obscurities-the waste product of some rec–
ognized religion) there existed a Russian prose which borrowed its
romantic sweep from science and its terse precision from poetry.
A naive beginner, I fell into all the traps laid by the singing
epithet. Not that I did not struggle. In fact, I was working ,at my
elegy very hard, taking endless trouble over every line, choosing and
rejecting, rolling the words on my tongue with the glazed-eyed
solemnity of a tea taster, and still it would come, that atrocious
be–
trayal. The frame impelled the picture, the husk shaped the pulp.
The hackneyed order of words (short verb or pronoun-long adjec–
tive-short noun) engendered the hackneyed disorder of thought,
and some such line as
«mo-i mu-chi-tel-ny-e grio-zy"
(my anguished
daydreams) led in its turn to something ending in
«roZY"
(roses) or
«beriozy"
(birchtrees) or
«grozy"
(thunderstorms), so that certain
emotions were connected with certain surroundings not by a free
act of one's will but by the faded ribbon of tradition. Nonetheless
the nearer my poem got to its completion, the more certain I became
that whatever I saw before me would be seen by others.
As
I focussed
my eyes upon a kidney-shaped flowerbed (and noted one pink petal
lying on the loam and a small ant investigating its decayed edge)
or considered the tanned midriff of a birch trunk where some hoodlum
had stripped it of its papery, pepper-and-salt bark, I really believed
that all this would be perceived by the reader through the magic
veil of my words such as
«utrachennye rozy"
or
«zadumchivoi beri–
o<.y."
It
did not occur to me then that far from being a veil, those
poor words were so opaque that, in fact, they formed a wall in
