Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was born as Iosif Alexandrochich Brodsky, in Leningrad, on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship’s boiler room, and on a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and Polish, and began writing poetry.

According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. “I was a normal Soviet boy,” he said. “I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down:  Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad.” Notes from the Underground was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

His poetry was full of ironic wit and independent thinking, which got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. Brodsky was also persecuted because his family was Jewish. He was tried in 1964 for “parasitism,” condemned to a Soviet mental institution, and later sentenced to five years at Arkhangelsk, an Arctic labor camp. He served 18 months of that sentence, before an international outcry over his imprisonment helped secure his early release, but his poetry was then banned in the U.S.S.R.

_______________________________

1 January 1965

 The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.

What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which sometimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.

You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It’s clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it’s too late for miracles.
— But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven’s light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.

from Collected Poems in English, 1972-1999, © 2000 by Joseph Brodsky – Farrar Straus and Giroux

_______________________________
Continue reading →