Poem of the Week – Willow by Anna Akhmatova
By the 1950s, Anna Akhmatova had emerged as the leading female voice in the creatively compelling chorus of celebrated Soviet-era poets. Her early output was primarily concerned with themes of passion and romance. Still, the horrors of war and the severity of the Stalinist regime soon required creating a more sombre and reflective kind of poetry, one that furtively and tentatively expressed a disenchantment with public affairs and a yearning for prohibited desires.
This week’s poem was written in 1940 and was included in Akhmatova’s pulped book of poems Reed. In it, the speaker shuns their connection with humanity in favour of an affinity with nature but remembers that the same tragic transience that undoes the glories of our species governs the fate of all things.
In times of extreme trauma, people tend to identify more with inhumane aspects of the natural world. Flora and fauna can assume new spiritual significance in a grieving human heart. People’s affection for their fellow humans dissipates, and consolation is achieved through an attachment to other manifestations of life.
We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.
Willow by Anna Akhmatova (1940)
…and a decrepit handful of trees.
—Aleksandr Pushkin
And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.