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

The final gifts of your earthly cares.
But let me not be burned like a Roman:
I want to taste the earth's fetal dream,
I want to sprout with spring grass,
Circling along the ancient, celestial path.
In the dusk of the grave the poppy and honey will decay,
The coin will vanish into my dead mouth…
But after many, many dark years
A mysterious stranger will unearth my skeleton,
And in my black skull, broken by the spade,
A heavy coin will rattle—
And gold will gleam among my bones,
Like a little sun, like a trace of my soul.
Common features of "Золото" and "Путем зерна" are immediately obvious. Formally,
both poems are written in rhyming iambic couplets: "Путем зерна" is written in
alexandrines; "Золото" alternates between iambic hexameter and pentameter. Both
poems share a striking number of words and images: the gold coin gleams in the black
skull of "Золото"; the grain, destined for the black earth, gleams like gold in the hand of
the sower of "Путем зерна." The poet's body ("Золото") and the grain ("Путем зерна")
will, after death, germinate (прорасти) and create new life. Each will follow the "way of
the grain"—circle along the "ancient and celestial path." Khodasevich treats the grain
and the gold coin as symbols for the poet's soul which, in both poems, will be renewed or
rediscovered after death. In "Путем зерна," however, Khodasevich extends the
metaphor of the grain beyond the individual soul to the soul of a nation. He turns the
personal experience of "Золото" into a collective, national journey.
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