The Poem of the End (with "The" in the title) is a major poem by the White Russian symbolist poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Written in Prague in 1924, the poem details the end of a passionate affair with Konstantin Boeslavovich Rozdevitch, a former military officer. Each of the sections deals with the crossing of a bridge and the symbolism is echoed relentlessly throughout the poem; the mood is unremittingly tense and foreboding.
- Lovers for the most
- part are without hope: passion
- also is just
- a bridge, a means of connection
(from the Elaine Feinstein translation).
- The happy lot
- Of lovers without hope:
- Bridge, you are like passion:
- A convention: pure transition.
(from the Nina Kossman translation)
Famous quotes containing the words the end and/or poem:
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)