To Fall Ill as One Should, Deliriously

Anna Akhmatova 1889 (Odessa) – 1966 (Moscow)



To fall ill as one should, deliriously
Hot, meet everyone again,
To stroll broad avenues in the seashore garden
Full of the wind and the sun.

Even the dead, today, have agreed to come,
And the exiles, into my house.
Lead the child to me by the hand.
Long I have missed him.

I shall eat blue grapes with those who are dead,
Drink the iced
Wine, and watch the gray waterfall pour
On to the damp flint bed.

------

Behind the lake the moon's not stirred
And seems to be a window through
Into a silent, well-lit house,
Where something unpleasant has occured.

Has the master been brought home dead,
The mistress run off with a lover,
Or has a little girl gone missing,
And her shoes found by the creek-bed...

We can't see. But feel some awful thing,
And we don't want to talk.
Doleful, the cry of eagle-owls, and hot
In the garden the wind is blustering.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

49 sec read
79

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXAA XBCX DXXD XXBC DXED EXXE
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 832
Words 162
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova was born in 1889 in Odessa on the Black Sea coast. In 1910 she married Nikolai Gumilev, who was also a poet. He was shot as an alleged counter-revolutionary in 1921. Very little of Akhmatova's poetry was published between 1923 and 1941. After Stalin's death her poetry began to be published again. She died in 1966, in a suburb of Moscow. more…

All Anna Akhmatova poems | Anna Akhmatova Books

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