The Demon - Mikhail Lermontov

Rating: ★★★★★
10/01/16


Where the land knows no time
where bonfires have no end,
and doomed shadows often tend
to mutter songs that poorly rhyme,

there lies the Demon, another prey of his kingdom.

and one by one the ages passed,
as minute follows after minute,
each one monotonously dull.

Tired of his empire, he soon claimed
a small thrill,
a world of chance,
an emerald hill,
somebody's glance.
“I shall live now!”, he naively exclaimed.

And long he gazed, with fascination,
at the sweet view; as if in a dream

The wide earth he started to wander;
on the Caucasian mountains he stopped,
a desperate sigh of hope there he dropped,
as he saw the bride that made him ponder

and filled his soul with chords and joy.

words came no more . . . had he forgot?

Princess Tamara was her divine name;
but heavens didn't forgive
his eyes made of fire,
no one could outlive
the nature of his desire,
as the weeping chants of fate abruptly came;

such solitude on the sunless face of pride.

The crafty Demon with infernal
reveries had tempted him; in thoughts
beneath the gloom, the shades nocturnal,
it was his sweetheart's lips he sought.

There is no redemption for those who can't speak
nor freely touch; in this land or far above
where everything's whiter than a pale dove,
amidst the bluest ocean or a Caucasian peak;
an eternal misfortune, silent and bleak,
the suffering of being unable to love—

another Russian friend thus wrote.

A cry resounded, tortured, fierce,
troubling the stillnesses nocturnal.
In it were love, and pain's hard kernel,
reproaches, a last desperate prayer,
and then a hopeless, an eternal
farewell to life—all these were there.

We hurt the things we love most,
things so distant and of silence full;
fair signs which existence was null,
people never found yet always lost.

As the sound of the piano reaches the end,
Lermontov's poetry invades this mind,
a torrent of thoughts, loud and blind;
no hope of ever being able to find
meaning in these lines vainly penned.

Words that rest on nobody's palm,
destined to hide from the world's sight;
words without any music, beat or calm.