Thoughts from Akhmatova

Dante

Even after his death he did not return

to the city that nursed him.

Going away, this man did not look back.

To him I sing this song.

Torches, night, a last embrace,

outside in her streets the mob howling.

He sent her a curse from hell

and in heaven could not forget her.

But never, in a penitent's shirt,

did he walk barefoot with lighted candle

through his beloved Florence,

perfidious, base, and irremediably home.

In this poem, Akhmatova captures the pain of an exile--that betrayal by the one you love most, your hometown (metaphorically, your mother), is the worst sort of betrayal. Akhmatova identifies with Dante here. She tells us that this pain is so great that even in heaven, it doesn't go away. Although Florence is faithless to him (and Russia to her), it is irremediably beloved and home.

Also, writing of a tree that she grew up with but was cut down in her poem, "Willow," she says, "Oddly, I have survived it: / out there a stump remains." This captures the strange feeling you sometimes have when something or someone, whom you'd assumed as a child would live forever and was much stronger than you, dies. It is a surprise to have survived it, and this increases one's grief.