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

How many times have flown to you
Inspired dreams—
Just because your name rings,
Brenta, you little red stream,
False image of beauty!
I too hurried once
To glance into your ebb-tides,
Happy and moved
By the inspiration of love.
But bitter was the reward.
Brenta, I looked once
Into your turbid waters.
Since that time, Brenta, I have loved
Solitary wanderings,
The trickling of steady rain,
And on my hunched shoulders
A cloak of wet canvas.
Since that time, Brenta, I have loved
Prose in life and in verse.
Following in the tradition of Byron's and Pushkin's romantic extolments of the Brenta,
the young poet travels to the majestic river but, instead of a magnificent source of
inspiration, discovers only "a rust-colored, mean little stream." 82
The love which drove
him there rewards him only with bitterness. His affair has crumbled, and, more
importantly, his blind trust in romantic images has been broken. All Brenta can offer is a
resonant name, fitting for a poetic line but perpetuating a false image of beauty.
Bethea sees evidence of Khodasevich's poetic maturity in this poem—an
emergence of ironic word-play which will play a central role in his later poetry. By
rhyming Brenta, whose name has been glorified as resonant and ringing, with brezenta
82 In his commentary to Eugene Onegin, Nabokov writes: "In a curious poem, the great poet Vladislav
Hodasevich (1886-1939), a century later, described the kind of therapeutic shock he experienced when,
upon visiting the real Brenta, he found it to be a ryzhaya rechonka, a rust-colored, mean little stream."
Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), vol.
2 (Commentary and Index), 186.
66