Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov
This brilliant bully and egotistic rake was, after his own fashion, a knight of the Grail and a poetic genius such as rarely graces any language.-BABETTE DEUTSCH and AVRAHAM YARMOLINSKY.
I LOVE you well, my steel-white dagger,
Comrade luminous and cold;
Forged by a Georgian dreaming vengeance,
Whetted by Circassians bold.
A tender hand, in grace of parting,
Gave you to mark a meeting brief;
For blood there glimmered on your metal
A shining tear-the pearl of grief.
And black eyes, clinging to my glances,
Filled deep with liquid sorrow seemed;
Like your clear blade where flame is trembling,
They darkened quickly and they gleamed.
You were to be my long companion.
Give me your counsel to the end!
I will be hard of soul and faithful,
Like you, my iron-hearted friend!
WHITE is the sail and lonely
On the misty infinite blue;
Flying from what in the homeland?
Seeking for what. in the new?
The waves romp, and the winds whistle,
And the mast leans and creaks;
Alas! He flies not from fortune,
And no good fortune he seeks.
Beneath him the stream, luminous, azure,
Above him the sun's golden breast;
But he, a rebel, invites the storms,
As though in the storms were rest. ad
COMPOSED WHILE UNDER ARREST
WHEN Waves invade the yellowing wheat,
And the saplings sway with a wind-song brief;
When the raspberry plum in the garden sweet
Hides him under the cool green leaf;
When sprinkled with lights of limpid dew,
At rose of evening or gold of morn,
The lilies-of-the-valley strew
Their silver nodding under the thorn;
When the brook in the valley with cooling breast, Plunging my soul in a cloudy dream,
Murmurs a legend of lands of rest
At the rise of his happy and rapid stream;
Then humbled is my heart's distress,
And lulled the anguish of my blood;
Then in the earth my happiness,
Then in the heaven my God.
I GAZE with grief upon our generation.
Its future black or vacant-and to-day,
Bent with a load of doubt and understanding,
In sloth and cold stagnation it grows old.
When scarcely from the cradle we were
rich
In follies, in our fathers' tardy wits.
Life wearied us a road without a goal,
A feast upon a foreign holiday.
Toward good and evil shamefully impassive,
In mid-career we fade without a fight.
Before a danger pusillanimous,
Before a power that scorns us we are slaves.
Precocious fruit, untimely ripe, we hang,
Rejoicing neither sight nor touch nor tongue,
A wrinkled orphan runt among the blossoms,
Their beauty's hour the hour of its decay.
The hues of poetry, the shapes of art,
Wake in our minds no lovely ecstasy.
We hoard the dregs of feelings that are dead,
Misers, we dig and hide a debased coin.
We hate by chance, we love by accident;
We make no sacrifice to hate or love.
Within our minds presides a secret chill
Even while the flame is burning in our blood.
A bore to us our fathers' gorgeous sporting,
Their conscientious childish vast debauch.
We hasten tomb-wards without joy or glory,
With but a glance of ridicule thrown back.
A surly-hearted crowd and soon forgotten,
We pass in silence, trackless from the world,
Tossing no fruit of dreaming to the ages,
No deed of genius even half begun.
Our dust the justice of the citizen
In future time will judge in songs of venom.
Will celebrate the weak and squandering father
In bitter mockery the cheated son.
A GOLDEN cloud slept for her pleasure
All night on the gaunt hill's breast;
Light-heart to her play-ground of azure,
How early she sped from the nest.
"And once we went at evening
Upon the steep high shore
To look upon the sunset
And hear the waters roar.
"He gave me gold and silver-
I would not take his gold.
He asked me for my true love-
My heart grew sad and cold.
"Then in my soft young bosom
His heavy knife-blade sank,
And here my corpse he buried
Upon the river bank.
"Out of my Stricken bosom
A great dry reed uprose,
And in it live my dolor,
My pain and all my woes.
"Oh happy, happy fisherman,
Pray let me, let me be,
Or have you never suffered
FROM "THE DÆMON" (Part I, xv)
On the sightless seas of ether,
Rudderless, without a sail,
Choirs of stars uplift their voices,
Where the mist waves rise and fail.
Through the hemless fields of heaven
Wander wide and tracelessly
Clouds, unshepherded, unnumbered,
Pale, ephemeral and free.
Hour of parting, hour of meeting,
Neither gladden them nor fret;
Theirs no yearning toward the future,
Theirs no haunting of regret.
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