From EVENING
‘The pillow hot . . .’
Reading Hamlet 
Evening Room 
‘I have written down the words . . .’
‘I share my room . . .’
‘Memory of sun seeps from the heart . . .’ 
‘The door is half open . . .’ 
‘High in the sky . . .’ 
Song of the Last Meeting 
Love 
‘He loved three things alone . . .’
Imitation of Annensky 
‘I came here in idleness . . .’ 
White Night
Legend on an Unfinished Portrait 
From ROSARY
‘I have come to take your place, sister . . .’ 
‘It goes on without end . . .’ 
‘We’re all drunkards here . . .’ 
A Ride 
‘Nobody came to meet me . . .’ 
‘So many requests . . .’ 
The Voice of Memory 
8 November 1913 
‘Blue heaven, but the high . . .’ 
‘Do you forgive me . . .’ 
The Guest 
‘I won’t beg for your love . . .’ 
‘I came to him as a guest . . .’ 
BY THE SEASHORE 
From WHITE FLOCK
‘Empty white Christmastide . . .’
Loneliness 
‘How can you look at the Neva . . .’ 
‘The road is black . . .’ 
Flight
‘I don’t know if you’re alive or dead . . .’ 
‘There is a frontier-line . . .’ 
‘Freshness of words . . .’ 
‘Under an empty dwelling’s frozen roof . . .’ 
‘The churchyard’s quiet . . .’ 
‘Neither by cart nor boat . . .’ 
‘Lying in me . . .’ 
Statue in Tsarskoye Selo 
‘O there are words . . .’ 
From PLANTAIN
‘Fame is like smoke . . .’ 
‘I shouldn’t be dreaming . . .’
‘Now farewell, capital . . .’ 
‘I hear the oriole’s always grieving voice . . .’ 
‘Now no-one will be listening to songs . . .’
‘The cuckoo I asked . . .’ 
‘Why is our century worse than any other? . . .’
From ANNO DOMINI
‘You’re like a strange . . .’ 
‘Everything is looted . . .’
‘Oh, life without . . .’ 
‘They wiped your slate . . .’ 
Bezhetsk 
‘To earthly solace . . .’ 
‘I’m not of those who left . . .’ 
‘Blows the swan wind . . .’ 
‘To fall ill as one should . . .’
‘Behind the lake . . .’ 
Rachel 
Lot’s Wife 
From REED
Muse
To an Artist 
The Last Toast 
*‘Dust smells of a sun-ray . . .’ 
‘Some gaze into tender faces . . .’ 
Boris Pasternak 
Voronezh
*Imitation from the Armenian 
Dante
Cleopatra
Willow 
*In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov 
‘When a man dies . . .’ 
*‘Not the lyre of a lover . . .’
Way of All the Earth 
From THE SEVENTH BOOK
In 1940 
‘Some walk in a straight line . . .’ 
*‘No matter that death . . .’ 
Courage 
‘And you, my friends . . .’
*‘That’s how I am . . .’ 
Three Autumns 
‘The souls of those I love . . .’ 
‘The fifth act of the drama . . .’ 
‘It is your lynx eyes, Asia . . .’ 
In Dream
‘Once more an autumn . . .’ 
*The Glass Doorbell 
‘And that heart . . .’ 
‘So again we triumph! . . .’ 
‘Let any, who will, still bask in the south . . .’ 
Music
From Northern Elegies
The First 
The Fifth 
The Sixth 
Seaside Sonnet 
Fragment
Summer Garden
‘In black memory . . .’ 
‘Could Beatrice write . . .’
Death of a Poet 
The Death of Sophocles
Alexander at Thebes 
Native Soil 
There are Four of Us 
*‘If all who have begged help . . .’ 
Last Rose
*‘Reviled and acclaimed . . .’
‘This land . . .’
*‘It is no wonder . . .’
‘What’s war? What’s plague? . . .’ 
In Memory of V. C. Sreznevskaya 
Christmastime (24 December) 
‘You will hear thunder and remember me . . .’ 
REQUIEM 
POEM WITHOUT A HERO
Notes
Translator’s Acknowledgments
*Poems not published in the collection but written in the same epoch.