WHICH ONE ARE YOU?
after Akhmatova’s “Muza”
Ah, welcome guest, my Muse!
I wait up for you, whom no one
can compel. The candle is lit.
The pot of tea is enough for two.
There is champagne for the finish
when we have done with poetry.
All that I am or ever hope to be
is in this night’s expectation.
Freedom and glory — and youth, too —
I offer up, when with your flute
you arrive, and the lines fill up
in perfect symmetry and flow.
I wait. Wait. At my unlocked door
that ever-so-light twice tapping
fails to come no matter how far
I lean into midnight’s silence.
Instead, from above, a wind howls.
The shutters flap-clap and shear off
from the trembling house-side. The tea
in my cup shows rolling waves.
Then, hooded and winged, one comes,
in somber and terrible robes,
tattered with cold eternity.
Oozing through the torn window screen
her bulk swells in until it fills
entire the moonlight’s trapezoid.
The room is small. She seems to take
full half of it. I huddle down.
Gentle Euterpe, laurel-browed,
this is not you, the expected!
Her silver veil she puts aside.
Her eyes fix mine with calm resolve.
Her tablet and stylus laid down,
she places one hand over mine,
the thumb-and-double-digit hold
upon my pen now led by hers.
“Millions already dead,” she says.
“And millions more to come. Commence!”
My hand shakes. I tremble. “Why me,
the merest lyric poet, why me?” —
— “Because they have not killed you yet.
And because you can.” The blank page
is filled with lines. I write till dawn.
It is done now. She moves to go.
“Which one are you?” I ask. — “The one
who whispered into Dante’s ear
the cantos of his Inferno.”—
All I can say is, dumbly, “Oh!”
Note: Anna Akhmatova's Russian poem, "The Muse," is only eight lines long, and it is one of the most perfect lyric poems ever written in any language. I have never dared to translate it, because the English version by Stanley Kunitz is so fine that I could not imagine it done better.
Only now, after decades of living with this poem, and opening all my featured readings with it, did I come to realize that there is an unexpressed secret hidden in this poem. The "turn" in the poem is when the poet asks her Muse, "Are you the one ... whom Dante heard dictate / the lines of his Inferno?" She answers, "Yes." In Akhmatova's Russian the final word is not da, for "Yes," but ya, for I am, rhyming with dikotovala (dictate).
A spine-chilling line. But why, we ask, does Akhmatova interrogate a Muse she would seem to know so well? My answer is that this Muse is a stranger, not the one she expected.
Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry, is a gentle maiden who carries an aulos (flute) and wears a laurel wreath. Instead, her guest is, unexpectedly, Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.
Sometime later in her life, Akhmatova would be challenged to write about the horrors of Stalin's rule, when a woman standing in a line to learn the fate of prisoners challenges her, "Can you describe this?" So "The Muse" is prophetic of what a lyric poet would be called to do, and which she did in her long poem, "Requiem."
Finally, I saw a way to adapt this poem on my own terms, elaborating on it to make plain that Akhmatova's visitor is not the one she expected, and is in fact a terrifying one.
All the lines came to me yesterday upon waking. They are unrhymed eight-syllable lines, except for the final couplet. I did not think I would ever find an equivalent to Akhmatova's last two lines in English, but I think the almost unvoiced "Oh!" is a nice way round it out, and should be very effective in reading aloud.
