Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MY COUNTRY, by MIKHAIL YUREVICH LERMONTOV


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MY COUNTRY, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Patriot I am, but in so strange a fashion
Last Line: The heart to hear their talk, these tipsy lads!
Alternate Author Name(s): Lermontov, Mikhail Yuryevich
Subject(s): Russia; Soviet Union; Russians


PATRIOT I am, but in so strange a fashion
No reasons of the mind must rule this passion.
Russia's blood-purchased glory,
The calm that best her haughty trust beseems,
Her dark and ancient day of hallowed story:
-- 'Tis none of these that prompts my happier dreams.

I love her steppe, -- I know not why it is, --
Better, the steppe and the cold silences;
Forests that wave illimitable and free;
And river-floods big-brimming like a sea.
And oh! a sleigh that posts
Along a byway track, -- and unaware
You meet a tardy beam that pricks the proof
Shadow of night, -- the spirit of hearth and roof
Far out upon the air!
The trembling fire some wretched hovel boasts!

Give me the smoke of stubblefields alight:
A carzvan of nomad wains that winds
Across the enormous weald;
And on the hill, in the dun fallowfield,
A pair of stems, two birches glistening white!
I take such joy as many men know not,
To see a barn-door heaped, a straw-thatched cot,
A window and the carven shutter-blinds.
Some dewy holiday evening I'll sit by
To watch them dance, long hours, nor tire -- not I --
Of the trampling and the whistling: how it glads
The heart to hear their talk, these tipsy lads!





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