Saturday Rave: Beyond the Sun by Andrei Bely

The Russian writer and intellectual Andrei Bely was born in Moscow in 1880. He carried on being Russian (though he didn't always live there, Russia not being at all times a healthy place for those of independent mind) and he certainly carried on being a writer and an intellectual.

He wrote a very much admired book, Petersburg, and he also devoted a lot of thought to the use of stress in poetry, devising a system of joining up stresses and half-stresses on the page and discovering that many of them formed squares and rectangles.

This wonderful portrait is by Léon Bakst 

I don't know what shape the original stresses of Andrei Bely's poem Beyond the Sun make, but here it is in translation so you can work it out in English if you like. It seems a very Russian poem, to me, but luckily not too dismayingly intellectual.

The world-gold sunset is ablaze with fire,
Having pierced through with radiant airiness,
above the peaceful cornfield it set fire to crosses
and distant outlines of cupolas.

Airy veils, waving, whispering with a gust of freedom
in the azure expanses
wind around us with cold satin kisses,
flying from east to west.

The hot sun - a golden ring -
Your contour, piercing the cloud, burned out
The hot sun - a golden ring -
departed from us into the Unknown.
We shall fly to the horizon: there
eternal day without sunset shines through a red curtain.
Speed to the horizon! There a red curtain
is woven from daydreams and flame. 

**

Nowadays when I see a sunset, I tend not to want to fly towards it but to hurry home and have a cup of tea. So I'm grateful to this poem for reminding me what it's like to be young.

Word To Use Today: horizon. This word comes from the Greek phrase horizōn kuklos, limiting circle, from horos, limit.