Poetry vs. Reality Theme Analysis

We still, alas, cannot forestall it—
This dreadful ailment’s heavy toll;
The spleen is what the English call it,
We call it simply Russian soul.
‘Twas this our hero had contracted;
And though, thank God, he never acted
To put a bullet through his head,
His former love of life was dead.

From early youth she read romances,
And novels set her heart aglow;
She loved the fictions and the fancies
Of Richardson and of Rousseau.

Her husband at the time was still
Her fiancé—against her will!
For she, in spite of family feeling,
Had someone else for whom she pined—
A man whose heart and soul and mind
She found a great deal more appealing;
This Grandison was fashion’s pet,
A gambler and a guards cadet.

‘Your Olga’s look is cold and dead,
As in some dull, Van Dyck madonna;
So round and fair of face is she,
She’s like that stupid moon you see,
Up in that stupid sky you honour.’
Vladimir gave a curt reply
And let the conversation die.

Time was, with grave and measured diction,
A fervent author used to show
The hero in his work of fiction
Endowed with bright perfection’s glow.
He’d furnish his beloved child—
Forever hounded and reviled—
With tender soul and manly grace,
Intelligence and handsome face.
And nursing noble passion’s rages,
The ever dauntless hero stood
Prepared to die for love of good;
And in the novel’s final pages,
Deceitful vice was made to pay
And honest virtue won the day.

How oft have tearful poets chances
To read their works before the glances
Of those they love? Good sense declares
That no reward on earth compares.

And so, in slow but growing fashion,
my Tanya starts to understand,
More clearly now—thank God—her passion
And him for whom, by fate’s command,
She’d been condemned to feel desire:
That dangerous and sad pariah,
That work of heaven or of hell,
That angel… and proud fiend as well.
What was he then? An imitation?
An empty phantom or a joke,
A Muscovite in Harold’s cloak,
Compendium of affectation,
A lexicon of words in vogue …
Mere parody and just a rogue?

But those to whom, as friends and brothers,
My first few stanzas I once read—
‘Some are no more, and distant… others.’
As Sadi long before us said.
Without them my Onegin’s fashioned.
And she from whom I drew, impassioned,
My fair Tatyana’s noblest trait…
Oh, much, too much you’ve stolen, Fate!
But blest is he who rightly gauges
The time to quit the feast and fly,
Who never drained life’s chalice dry,
Nor read its novel’s final pages;
But all at once for good withdrew—
As I from my Onegin do.