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

By describing his carefully stored "earthly moments" as fake and useless coins, the
speaker suggests his life’s utter lack of value. Despite this worthlessness, "tenebrous
giants" 79 will steal the coins anyway, sealing his death and leaving no hope for rebirth.
The poem "Старуха" similarly describes a meaningless life, helplessly robbed.
An old woman drags her sled through the windy and snowy streets of Moscow. Crying
out to a passerby for help, she is ignored. The next day her corpse is found in the snow:
Легкий труп, окоченелый,
Простыней покрывши белой,
В тех же саночках, без гроба,
Милицейский увезет,
Растолкав плечом народ.
Неречист и хладнокровен
Будет он,—а пару бревен,
Что везла она в свой дом,
Мы в печи своей сожжем.
The light corpse, stiff with cold,
Covered with a white sheet,
On the very same little sled, without a coffin,
The policeman leads away,
Having pushed aside the crowd with his shoulder.
Speechless and cold-blooded
It will be—but the pair of logs
That she was taking to her home,
We will burn in our stove.
After death, the old woman is robbed of her humanity, described only as a corpse. She
has just one thing of value left—the logs with which she planned to heat her home. They
will not warm her speechless, cold-blooded corpse, but rather they will fill the stove of
the bystanders who witnessed but disregarded her struggle in the snow. The word "печь"
appears in only two other poems in Путем зерна, "Дом" and "Хлебы," in which it is
associated with the final image of the "path of the grain"—the baking of bread. Here,
instead of providing sustenance, the stove will quickly devour stolen wood—wood which
79 Note that Khodasevich refers to the hawker in “Газетчик” as a giant as well (line 14).
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