Sunday Poem: I came to him as a guest ... by Anna Akhmatova
'I came to him as a guest ...' (For Alexander Blok)
I came to him as a guest,
Precisely at noon. Sunday.
In the large room there was quiet,
And beyond the window, frost.
And a sun like raspberry
Over bluish-grey-smoke-tangles
How the reticent master
Concentrates as he looks!
His eyes are of the kind that
Nobody can forget. I'd
Better look out, better
Not look at them at all.
But I remember our talk,
Smoky noon of a Sunday,
In the poet's high grey house
By the sea-gate of the Neva
January 1914It was 1914, when Anna Akhmatova's collection of poems Rosary appeared. It was so well received and she was so frequently invited to speak that she imitated to comment, "I taught our women how to speak, but don't know how to make them silent." Akhmatova was now at the forefront of the Acmeists, the literary movement among Russian poets in the early 20th century that rejected the vagueness of symbolism and sought to replace it with "beautiful clarity," simplicity, and perfection of form. The intellectual and bohemian life of St Petersburg, which centered on the Stray Dog Café, an inconspicuous café, in the heart of the city, hailed Akhmatova as the Queen of Neva.
The Stray Dog Café acted as a meeting place for Russia’s greatest creative minds, and as an art space to share work and inspire one another. It was an atmosphere of camaraderie, and of artistic and sexual intrigue. There Akhmatova befriend Boris Pasternak and met the Assyriologist Vladimir Shilejko, who would become her second husband.
Darker times lay ahead, though. Akhmatova - frequently described herself as Cassandra - was already writing in 1914:
How can you bear to view the Neva,
How can you bear to cross its bridges? ...
No surprise I’m marked for sadness,
Since that vision of you appeared.
Sharp, the black angels’ wings,
Soon, the judgement day;
And raspberry-coloured bonfires blossom
Like roses, in the snow.
‘How can you bear to view the Neva'Book: Selected Poems, Anna Akhmatova, Folio Society, 2016