THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

etween the destruction of the temple and the future destruction of this addressee: both
will inevitably be possessed by the howl of silence.
All of these breaks and shifts unsettle the reader, yet they do not overpower the
poem's overall structure. The poem consists of five clearly delineated quatrains with
alternating rhyme. 217
Largely symmetrical in form, it reaches a dynamic climax in the
middle quatrain. The end of the poem returns the reader to its beginning by comparing
the addressee of the final stanza to the overgrown little church of the first and by recalling
the sonorous silence. The signs of disturbance within this whole seem to reflect the
unsettled nature of Lavinia's internal world, a world which, like the poem, still retains a
sense of coherence and has not yet collapsed into madness. Despite her unpredictability
and idiosyncrasy, Lavinia is ultimately able to provide a powerful picture of her church
as an open universal space, comparable to the body of an individual human being.
This comparison of church and human body, already suggested in the parallels between
the convent and Lavinia in the sister's letter, 218 evolves into an explicit equation in the
thirty-fourth poem of Lavinia: "Весенняя церковь" ("Spring Church"):
Печальное постное пенье
Проникло легко под ребра
И сердца лампаду
Протерло
Ладонью.
Как будто я стала сама
Мягкою белою церковью,
И толпы детей и старушек
Входили, крестясь и мигая,
Мне в чрево и кланялись сердцу,
А сердце дымящим кадилом
Качалось, так мерно качалось.
Когда же они уходили—
217 The first rhyme in the first stanza is inexact, and the fourth stanza has only one rhyme.
218 This connection is also suggested in the fifth poem which repeats images from the third poem to
describe Lavinia's own body. I will discuss this poem later in the chapter.
163