JOSEPH BRODSKY
469
eyelAs alien from you" is not a scolding but rather an admission of the appro–
priate response . With " ... though under its treelYou soon would halt everlast–
ingly" the carriage and the exposition part of the poem indeed come to a halt.
Essentially, the central theme of these two stanzas is their heroine 's lack of
any inkling or premonition of her approaching end. This could be perceived as a
remarkable expectation indeed, were it not for her age. Besides, although
throughout the cycle the poet insists on the suddenness of Emma Hardy's demise,
it's obvious from other sources that she was affiicted with several ailments, in–
cluding a mental disorder. But presumably there was something about her that
made him convinced of her durability; perhaps that had to do with his notion of
himself as the Immanent Will's plaything.
And although many would regard the third stanza's opening as heralding the
theme of guilt and remorse that the same many would detect in the whole cycle,
"I drove not with you" is just a restatement of that premonition's requirement;
worse comes to worse, of his probable failure at obtaining it. The next line and
a half postulate quite resolutely that probability, ruling out grounds for the
speaker's self-reproach on that account. Yet for the first time, true lyricism creeps
into the poem: first through the ellipsis, secondly through "Yet had I
satl
At
your side that eve" (which is, of course, a reference to his not being at her side at
the moment of death) . It takes over in full force with "That the countenance I
was glancing at," where all the consonants of "countenance" vibrate, giving you
a passenger's silhouette swaying from side to side because of the carriage's
movement, seen against the light. The treatment again is quite cinematic, the
film being black-and-white . One could throw "flickering" into the bargain,
were it not 1912.
And were it not for the starkness of "Had a last-time look" (still, percep–
tions often run ahead of technology, and as we said earlier, montage wasn't in–
vented by Eisenstein). This starkness both enhances and shatters the almost loving
tentativeness of "the countenance I was glancing at," betraying the poet's eager–
ness to escape a reverie for the truth , as though the latter is more rewarding.
A reverie he certainly escapes, but he pays for that with the monstrous next
line: with recalling the heroine's actual features in "Nor have read the writing
upon your face." The reference here, obviously, is to the writing upon the wall,
whose inescapable equation with the heroine's appearance tells us enough about
the state of the union prior to her death. What informs this equation is his sense
of her impenetrability, and that's what the poem was
all
about thus far, since this
impenetrability applies to the past about as much as it does to the future, and it's
a quality she happens to share with the future generally. Thus his reading of
Emma's equivalent of"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" here is no fantasy.
