ABSTRACT
In his birthday poem entitled “May 24, 1980,” Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) evokes hardships that he has encountered during forty years of living, then he concludes stunningly: “Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx, / only gratitude will be gushing from it.” “Gratitude”—this is a fine word with which to remember him. Despite exile and a faulty heart, as well as personal disappointments to which a few poems (such as “On Love” or “Six Years Later”) discreetly allude, the Russian poet invigoratingly, and contagiously, expresses gratitude for a cosmos in which, as philosophers phrase it, there seems to be “something instead of nothing”—a cosmos full of beautiful, funny, or puzzling “things” in which we can delight. And not just delight, it must be added, but also, potentially, the welling-up of that rare and, as Brodsky sometimes terms it, “higher” sentiment created in us when we read evocations of and thus envision—see anew—the same things, yet this time as they are passed through the revivifying perceptual and linguistic filters of a gifted poet. However onto-logically separate they remain from us, cobblestones, for Brodsky, are not just wet, they “glisten like bream in a net.” And the frigidness of the North (and of the Communist era during which he grew up and suffered) is experienced as a polysemous “cold that, to warm my palm, / gathered my fingers around a pen.” This ultimately optimistic—or more precisely, affirming—outlook does not mean that Brodsky’s poetry is naive, self-deluding, or facilely joyous. On the contrary, his writing can be melancholy, even bitterly clear-sighted. It can also be tantalizingly mysterious, akin in this respect to the ungraspable cognitive processes of thinking and especially versifying:
