Vladislav Khodasevich (1886 - 1939)
BALLAD

(Literal translation from the original Russian by Dimitri Obolensky.)

Brightly lit from above, I am sitting in my circular room and looking up at a sky of stucco and at a sixteen candle-power sun.

All around me, also lit up, are chairs, a table, and a bed. I sit, and in my confusion do not know what to do with my hands.

White palm-leaves of frost silently bloom on the window-panes. The watch in my waistcoat pocket is ticking with a metallic sound.

Oh, the stagnant, barren wretchedness of my hopeless life! Whom can I tell how sorry I feel for myself and for all these objects?

And then, clasping my knees, I begin to sway to and fro, and, falling into a trance, suddenly start speaking to myself in verse.

Incoherent, passionate words! They make no sense at all. But sounds are more truthful than meaning, and the word is more powerful than anything.

And music, music, music weaves itself into my singing, and a narrow, narrow, narrow blade pierces me.

I rise above myself, above lifeless reality, my feet in subterranean fire, my brow in the moving stars.

And with wide-open eyes, perhaps with the eyes of a serpent, I watch my pitiful objects listening to the wild singing.

And the whole room begins to move rhythmically in a smooth, circular dance, and someone hands me a heavy lyre through the wind.

And the sky of stucco and the sixteen candle-power sun have vanished: Orpheus is standing on the smooth black rocks.

Commentary by Vladislav Rozentuller

Our consideration of the poem will not be a philological or literary analysis. We will follow the psychological state, or consciousness, of the poet as expressed in the poem. Because we're dealing with a translation, we won't have access to the original words, or their sound and rhythm, and therefore our approach will mostly be through images. It is through the words we do have, and the images they convey, that we will try to recreate the poet's inner state and the radical changes it goes through between the beginning and end of the poem.

The images at the end of this poem come to life in us with purest feelings of freedom, creativity, and joy. The sky of stucco and the sixteen candle-power sun have vanished; nothing artificial remains. Surrounded by living nature (we can extend the picture in our imaginations to include sea, sky, and sun), the poet has become a singer. The name of Orpheus carries us to ancient Greece and a time when the beauty of nature coexisted in harmony with the beauty and artistic capacity of the human being.

But at the beginning of the poem (first three verses) the situation is quite opposite to this. Sky and sun -- perhaps the two most transcendent images of nature -- have been replaced by a stucco ceiling and a bare light bulb. Confined within this artificial world, the poet is benumbed. And the round room, with no mention of windows or doors (like Baba Yaga's hut in Russian fairy tales), offers no exit.

So the poet's initial condition is one of frozen passivity. We are struck by the degree of his inner paralysis. Whatever his outward movement, nothing moves in his soul. Three characterizations of his activity reflect his psychological state: he is sitting, he is looking, and he doesn't know what to do with his hands. Sitting, even from a physical point of view, is rather passive. Of course, such sitting could be filled with inner activity -- reflection, suffering, and so on. But here the poet sits in an inwardly empty state, bewildered and lost ("in my confusion"). He doesn't know what to do with himself, where to put his limbs, because an artificial world deprived of life and soul provides no occasion for meaningful activity. All parts are disconnected from each other. His hands may be moving, but only mechanically, without purpose. His body has only an outward existence, unmotivated from within.

The overall impression is only strengthened by the manner of his looking. If you look with interest at an object, your soul is very much involved in the process of looking. You experience and feel the object coming alive within yourself. Imagine how full your soul could be if you were looking at the actual blue sky and radiant sun, and then compare that experience to looking at an electric light bulb in a bare ceiling. The poet simply stares unresponsively; he is immobilized by the deadened electrical light like a rodent by the eyes of a python. Even if he were driven by his circumstances merely to walk back and forth in frustration, we would see a meaningful engagement with his surroundings. But here there is nothing of the sort. And so the soul freezes in itself, unable to overcome this lifeless light and awaken any inner movement. The poet sits, he looks, he doesn't know what to do.

In this passivity, it's as if he doesn't exist as a soul or spirit. He is in a kind of anaesthetic state. Only his body is functioning, but without meaning, so that he sees without seeing and moves without intention. The active role is transferred...to what? An electric bulb. He is "lit from above" (passive verb), with the light acting upon him. Instead of an interested, radiating, inner activity of seeing on his part, he is "caught in the glare" of an outside light source -- a source that is inherently lifeless. The impression of passivity is only strengthened by the fact that the source of illumination is above, hanging over him like something big and inescapable, and he is below, a small, bent being without will.

Then, finally, there is the round room. Roundness can indicate many different things, depending on context. For example, it can signify harmony or completeness or security. But here the round room has the quality of uniformity, without any features to stimulate interest. It gives no impression, leaving the soul unmoved. Everything is the same in all directions. In terms of form, it's a desert. (State security organizations have been known to put suspects into round rooms. It disorients the mind.) Every movement of the senses is repelled -- thrown back at us with meaningless indifference.

The poet feels himself like a thing among other things, without distinction. The electric light falls on everything equally, making objects without soul. ("All around me, also lit up, are chairs, a table, and a bed.") The room is filled, not with the kind of consciousness associated with the light of the sun -- the light that inspires us to say "I see" when understanding dawns upon us -- but rather with the consciousness arising from electric light. Incidentally, this latter consciousness, which has become very much a part of our lives today, is something we can carry with ourselves even when we are outside. Then we see in nature, not the sun, but a more or less artificial light. To say that our consciousness is that of dead light is also to say that our consciousness is that of a dead world.

The third verse connects us to life and to time:

White palm-leaves of frost silently bloom on the window-panes.
The watch in my waistcoat pocket is ticking with a metallic sound.

What has happened to life? Green palm leaves become white; the warmth of a living thing becomes a frozen imprint; the soft, nourishing earth becomes a window pane; and the inwardly sounding joy of metamorphosing growth becomes a "silent bloom." Life has drained away, leaving only a shadow -- cold, perhaps beautiful, but lifeless, imitating growth through mere spatial extension.

As for time: we experience it healthily in a certain rhythm, balance, and harmony. We do well when we can place ourselves fully into one moment, sounding a certain chord in our inner life, and then enter the next moment with another harmonious chord, and so on throughout the day. We compose a music of the soul.

But now, instead of such harmony, the poet endures a mechanical, metallic ticking. In the original Russian it's not "ticking" but "noise," as if the instrument were broken and its disconnected parts yielded only a caricature of the music of time. This repetitive noise is as absolutely uniform in its way as the circular wall of the room, which on its part only caricatures the geometry of meaningful space. Just as the frost on the window pane is a ghostly shadow of a living palm, so the metallic ticking is a ghostly shadow of the soul's harmony. What we see here is the effect of electrical light-consciousness upon the fields of life and time, or life and soul. Furthermore, the entire play of time -- this cosmic play -- has contracted to the point where it can be contained in a waistcoat pocket. It is a mockery of time.

We have, then, in the first three verses, a deadened world, deadened life, and deadened soul.

Every situation we encounter in life invites a response from us. In the fourth verse we find the poet's response to his artifical world. He turns and faces it, thereby raising his soul above participation in it. To begin with, this brings terrible suffering. He consciously experiences what had remained unconscious before. He encounters the death around him and in his soul.

Oh, the stagnant, barren wretchedness of my hopeless life!
Whom can I tell how sorry I feel for myself and for all these objects?

We hear the cry of a soul recognizing its participation in a world of death and meaninglessness. This is his first active step. But we always face ever new choices, and a further step is necessary. Experiencing all this death, the poet could simply give up all hope and either fall into depression or acquiesce in the world's deadness. But at this moment he finds a different response. He feels compassion toward all the objects bound by this state of death, and also toward himself. This is the turning point. A flame of compassion is the first positive sign of life in him, becoming a center of warmth in his soul that is inaccessible to the electric light. From this moment on he has a hope of escape from his miserable condition, even if the hope is not yet fully conscious. To feel moral compassion in one's experience of the grave of the world is to find a point of beginning, an impetus for change. From here on this moral impulse takes hold of him ever more firmly.

First, the impulse bursts into movement:

And then, clasping my knees, I begin to sway to and fro, and,
falling into a trance, suddenly start speaking to myself in verse.

We can recognize in his swaying, his rocking back and forth, the natural bodily expression of compassion and longing. It is the outer appearance of an inner song and gives visible shape to the question, "What can I do?" Where before there was a staring at a meaningless sky and a formless fidgeting with the hands, now, as a result of an inner moral gesture, his body takes on a beautiful form, like a bud in spring or an egg, full of life. We can feel something brooding in this form. Something awaits birth. The swaying testifies to an energy within.

And just as moral compassion naturally gave rise to movement, so now movement naturally issues in speech. The energy of movement reaches a point where it overfills his soul and flows on in words. The speaking begins "suddenly"; it could not be predicted. When we are able to experience the full measure of suffering, something happens to us and a response is engendered, but we cannot know when we will become "ripe enough" for this breakthrough. We cannot know when the bodily, willful impulses will blossom into a new potential of the soul.

The poet speaks to himself "in a trance" -- actually, the Russian says "in self-forgetfulness." The former electric consciousness, while lifeless, was all too starkly bright, clear, and insistent; but that consciousness has been dulled. What rises up in him now breaks through in verses that are unconscious, but alive and free, without the prosaic clarity of deadened thought. The soul, having been loosed from its former condition, speaks in place of the head -- speaks in rhythm and sounds.

Incoherent, passionate words! They make no sense at all. But
sounds are more truthful than meaning, and the word is more
powerful than anything.

At first the words are only a kind of babble, strange and incoherent to his former intellect. There is nothing exact, clear, or determined about them. But the soul has come alive; it feels, it burns with passion. At this moment the poet's consciousness is split. His "normal" self finds the new speech meaningless (it "makes no sense at all"), almost like the raving of a madman. But at the same time he feels a live passion. So he has to make a choice: which is more truthful and real -- the terms of an intellect that can only reflect the objects of an external world, or the direct language and movement of a soul reveling in its own inner reality of sound? Sounds can speak quite apart from meaning; they are prior to it. They are, in fact, the inside of meaning and therefore they are the most truthful part of speech. Meanings -- terms, images -- are born out of sound. In sounding words we experience a different, inner reality that, in its liveliness, is superior to ("more powerful" than) the outer world of nameable things. This is the reality the poet chooses, and his choice makes the next step possible.

He has discovered what is meant by the creative word -- the word that has power over things -- but so far he has found this power only within his own psychology. He has done all he can do while remaining within himself. In response to his efforts a blessed music sounds, not only from his own unconscious interior depths, but also from the objective depths of the world. His soul meets the soul of the world.

And music, music, music weaves itself into my singing, and a
narrow, narrow, narrow blade pierces me.

In these thrice-repeated words we can powerfully feel what streams toward the poet. This is no longer the spontaneous upwelling from his unconsciousness in response to his physical movement. Waves of the musical soul of the world meet him, penetrate and permeate him, and merge with his own more humble, if passionate, singing.

But there is something beside this music of the soul. The interweaving of soul and world pictured here is not merely an enlargement of the individual in some egotistic sense. It's quite the opposite. Only when the poet's own personality dies can a new, spiritual self be born. The soul must diminish in order to make room for what is higher. And so a "narrow, narrow, narrow blade" pierces him. If it were merely a matter of physical destruction, such a supremely narrow blade would not be needed; any sword would do. But it's as if this blade -- almost like a blade of light -- penetrated to the core of his being, entering his inner world, lancing his mundane personality, and releasing his spirit, which now can stretch its wings and escape the normal bonds of fleshly existence. Certainly the earthly personality will experience this blade as pain and suffering, but the spirit finds in it release and freedom.

Now the newborn self stands fully in view:

I rise above myself, above lifeless reality, my feet in
subterranean fire, my brow in the moving stars.

The inner, limitless man rises above the small, spatially limited outer man. What for the poet had been a question of inner choice -- Which is more real, inner or outer reality? -- is now answered by direct experience. His inner being connects with the ensouled universe in a way very different from the manner of his previous, object-dominated consciousness, and he perceives what remains hidden to the normal "I."

Fire is something that doesn't allow life to freeze, doesn't allow earth to become a dead rock. Subterranean (inner) fire is the source and protector of everything living on earth. An ancient Greek wise man said, Everything comes out of fire. But the same element of fire works in our will -- in our legs and feet. The fire of our moral deeds unites us with the fire of the universe.

Our connection to the world through thinking ("my brow") is a different matter. Pure, lively thinking radiates light, becomes a source of light -- becomes a star illuminating the darkness of outer reality just as the stars of heaven send their light into the night's darkness. Moreover, the stars around the poet's brow are not fixed and frozen, but moving. Our thinking must be alive, capable of viewing phenomena from different points of view, just as the entire circuit of the zodiac is required in order to manifest the light-filled wisdom of the cosmos.

Now the whole world stands before the perceiving and understanding poet in a new way.

And with wide-open eyes, perhaps with the eyes of a serpent, I
watch my pitiful objects listening to the wild singing.

His eyes are not held in narrow, analytical focus, but are wide open, as if in wonder. Only so can he perceive the world in its wholeness and in all its connections -- not through outward observation, but through inner participation. The ancients saw in the snake a giver of the world's living wisdom. In the familiar, circular symbol of the snake biting its tail, where the beginning and end meet, we can feel a quiet wisdom and harmony. True perception is quiet and passionate at the same time. One experiences not oneself, but the world. And the world is no longer a world of soulless things, but of suffering creatures ("pitiful objects") who are longing and listening for the wild, singing human spirit. It depends on the human being, whether he will perceive a world of things or a world of longing, listening creatures.

Following the cleansing of the doors of perception there comes a time to act. The poet's music becomes capable of enlivening even "things." They not only listen to the music, but they take in the spirit of the singer. What had been static and deathlike is roused to movement.

And the whole room begins to move rhythmically in a smooth,
circular dance, and someone hands me a heavy lyre through the wind.

This is not only movement, but fully ensouled movement, rhythmical, harmonious, with a circular beauty opposite to the deadened, immobile circularity of the prison-room. Just as the artist takes the inert substance of pigments and, in applying them to a canvas, transforms them, ensouls them, and just as the actor takes his body and transforms it on stage, so these formerly dead objects, by being brought into fluid movement, experience a kind of resurrection. And in the transformation of substance the poet finds his own mission. It's the human mission: to rise above himself as a higher being, and to bring redemption to the world.

He receives the seal or proof of his artistic mission in the form of a lyre -- itself an example of artistically transformed matter. Further, the lyre is heavy and cannot be used merely to entertain. It's a burden to carry, imposing upon the singer a weight of responsibility not to misuse the gift. A heavy lyre, after all, is not a toy; its mission should not be forgotten. And it is handed to him through the wind, as if the elements themselves, aroused by the singing, were now harnessed to the instrument's inspired harmonies. "Someone" who is unknown and who therefore stands in a higher place gives him the lyre and with it a mission to transform the earth. So we have three elements: the earth that needs to be transformed; a higher power that gives to human beings their task upon earth; and the human being himself who, renewed in soul and spirit, can accept this mission.

And the sky of stucco and the sixteen candle-power sun have
vanished: Orpheus is standing on the smooth black rocks.

The last verse confirms the complete metamorphosis of the conditions we saw at the beginning. The dead objects have disappeared. The reborn human being, as artist, stands upon a living earth. To meditate on these rocks is to recognize in their smoothness and blackness an expression of the fire inside. It's fire that has cooled into substance. Unlike soil, this is a strongly formed substance, like an artistic creation. No longer bent in a passive, sitting position, the poet now stands upright on these solid rocks. (Compare how different the image would be if he were standing in soft sand.) He has become Orpheus, a figure who, reminding us of the ensouled world of the Greeks, brings the landscape alive with his singing.