A poem for August

August

• This was its promise, held to faithfully:
• The early morning sun came in this way
• Until the angle of its saffron beam
• Between the curtains and the sofa lay,

• And with its ochre heat it spread across
• The village houses, and the nearby wood,
• Upon my bed and on my dampened pillow
• And to the corner where the bookcase stood.

• Then I recalled the reason why my pillow
• Had been so dampened by those tears that fell-
• I’d dreamt I saw you coming one by one
• Across the wood to wish me your farewell.

• You came in ones and twos, a straggling crowd;
• Then suddenly someone mentioned a word:
• It was the sixth of August, by Old Style,
• And the Transfiguration of Our Lord.

• For from Mount Tabor usually this day
• There comes a light without a flame to shine,
• And autumn draws all eyes upon itself
• As clear and unmistaken as a sign.

• But you came forward through the tiny, stripped,
• The pauperly and trembling alder grove,
• Into the graveyard’s coppice, russet-red,
• Which, like stamped gingerbread, lay there and glowed.

• And with the silence of those high treetops
• Was neighbour only the imposing sky
• And in the echoed crowing of the cocks
• The distances and distances rang by:

• There in the churchyard underneath the trees,
• Like some surveyor from the government
• Death gazed on my pale face to estimate
• How large a grave would suit my measurement.

• All those who stood there could distinctly hear
• A quiet voice emerge from where I lay:
• The voice was mine, my past; prophetic words
• That sounded now, unsullied by decay:

• ‘Farewell, wonder of azure and of gold
• Surrounding the Transfiguration’s power:
• Assuage now with a woman’s last caress
• The bitterness of my predestined hour!

• ‘Farewell timeless expanse of passing years!
• Farewell, woman who flung your challenge steeled
• Against the abyss of humiliations:
• For it is I who am your battlefield!

• ‘Farewell, you span of open wings outspread,
• The voluntary obstinacy of flight,
• O figure of the world revealed in speech,
• Creative genius, wonder-working might!’

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was a Russian poet and novelist who was also well-known for his translations of Goethe and Shakespeare into Russian. His most famous work, the epic novel Doctor Zhivago, was censored in Soviet Russia because of its interpretation of the Russian Revolution, among other things. While Soviet authorities refused permission to publish the book, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out of the country and it was published in Europe and America in 1957 with the help of the CIA. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958; however, the Communist Party of Russia forced him to decline the prize. In 1988, surviving relatives accepted the prize in his name.