Onegin stanza
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Onegin stanza (
My uncle—high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him—
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"
Like the
In Russian poetry following Pushkin, the form has been utilized by authors as diverse as Mikhail Lermontov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Jurgis Baltrušaitis and Valery Pereleshin, in genres ranging from one-stanza lyrical piece to voluminous autobiography. Nevertheless, the Onegin stanza, being easily recognisable, is strongly identified as belonging to its creator, and its use in œuvres of any kind implicitly triggers a reading of the particular text against the backdrop of Pushkin's imagery and worldview.[citation needed]
The Onegin stanza is also used in the verse novel Equinox by Australian writer
Some stanzaic forms, written in iambic tetrameter in the poetry of Vladimír Holan, especially in the poems "První testament"[1] and "Cesta mraku", were surely inspired by Onegin stanza.
References
- ^ The poem was translated into English by Josef Tomáš.
External links
- Tetrameter.com A website featuring work written in tetrameter by various poets
- On Translating Eugene Onegin A poem by Vladimir Nabokov written in Onegin Stanzas
- Selections from The Golden Gate