Anna Akhmatova's "poor words"

When a poem cuts just so, hairs stand on end, and hands balancing the book and neck balancing head forget about fatigue from mindless meetings, and ears bar the sounds of bus and TVmobile.

I had no idea that I would take to Anna Akhmatova, although her eyes did remind me of Christina Rossetti. Reading her sequence "Requiem" reminds me, how history bears out that poetry at its most powerful comes from persons most powerless. It was during his arduous years in exile that Dante wrote the "Commedia". The "dead poetry" that he begins with in the dark, harrowing journey through the "Inferno", culminates in "sacro poema", "sacred song". More on the "Purgatorio" (my favourite canticle) and the "Paradiso" in a future post (I am not wise enough to love the "Paradiso").

Anna Akhmatova wrote "Requiem" for herself and the other mothers and widows who queued outside prison walls, waiting to see their sons and husbands who were incarcerated by the Stalinist regime. She sings:

I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

"Requiem" is a poem about national suffering in the voice of a suffering woman. Akhmatova said that the poem haunted her for fifteen years, "like bouts of an incurable illness".

I cannot begin to say how her lines move me, nor how it is that I who know nothing of regimes and bone-crushing brutality can feel the dead weight of the voice that says flatly, scornfully, in the opening lines of section 8, "To Death":

You will come in any case, so why not now?
Life is very hard: I'm waiting for you.
I have turned off the lights and thrown the door wide open
For you, so simple and so marvellous.

And I unashamedly marvel at the way a simple rhyme and a simple repetition evoke an unanswerable anguish in these closing lines of the untitled section 2:

Son in irons and husband clay.
Pray. Pray.