Poem of the End
Marina Tsvetaeva(1924)
Extract
A kiss on the forehead means: erasure of memory. I kiss your forehead.
A walk through Prague becomes a funeral procession for love, each street and bridge a station of grief. Marina Tsvetaeva's 1924 poem traces a final evening between two lovers with the intensity of a wound being examined by the one who inflicted it. The verse moves in jagged, breathless fragments, lines snapping like tendons, the Russian language pushed to its breaking point by a poet who could not write quietly about anything. Composed in exile, far from the Moscow she had lost, it transforms a personal parting into a confrontation with the nature of all ending. Every line insists that love is not a feeling but a place, and that to leave it is a kind of death from which the body inconveniently survives.
If you loved this
Tolstoy writes the same doomed love at novel length, and the train station is where both stories end.
Neruda sings the same farewell with the same intensity, but in shorter bursts where Tsvetaeva sustains a single long cry.
Brontë writes the same love that can only exist by destroying itself, and the moors are as bleak as Tsvetaeva's Prague.