This poem is remarkably interesting in its prosodic pattern or, rather, prosodic plot. It grows out of a phantom dialogical context and begins with a question.

How is this age worse than those gone before?

Someone unnamed and unseen asks again, and, in asking, hesitates with the answer, perhaps even with the decision to answer at all.

We hear the question and seem to see a noncommittal shrug, an inward-directed, indefinite, and perhaps bored gaze (Blok’s “night, street, lamp, drugstore” — a rhyme for “those gone before”). By repeating the question, the impersonal voice seems to be trying to understand whether there is a subject for conversation, whether there is a basis for contrasting this age with the previous ones.

The modal verb “could,” also voiced after another doubt-filled pause, is yet another prosodic retardment. This "could" literally clings to the end of the first, longest line. In the original text, this line is further slowed down by the presence of the longest word in the entire poem — “predshestvuyushchikh” (“предшествующих” — “preceding”). Reading, pronouncing it, is like seeing a procession of vague figures.

(One recalls Akhmatova's auto-commentary to the line from the “Poem Without a Hero” — “Not to me, so to whom?”: “The combination of 'to', 'so', 'to' expresses the author's confusion.” As in that line, here too one sees careful articulatory-respiratory direction.)

But suddenly a jolt — the responsive "It be" sharply repels the questioning "How." The tone changes abruptly — the voice sounds decisive and desperate. What it says bears the glow of a somber revelation, if not an epiphany — the (non)participant of a salon (presumably) discussion instantly becomes a visionary, a prophet.

In a few jerks, the voice attains a supernal height.

“How” — “It be,” “it” — “but” — monosyllabic, super-schematic, but requiring a full sound stress on each of the initial monosyllabic words of all four lines, giving the intonation a prophetic inevitability.

Contrary to the well-known anecdote attributing to the senior Akhmatova the side note “I don't understand these 'big' words at all — 'poet,' 'billiard,'” she understands big and very big words perfectly, moreover, at least since Rosary, she boldly and diversely works with "big" vocabulary and imagery referring to biblical and religious-philosophical topics. In her poems, the art of pathos and poetic perspective, rooted in the ode tradition, is clearly visible.

The short word “age” is a big word. In this context, a very big one. It encompasses everything — Derzhavin's “eternity, before the ages born,” and “the nineteenth century, the age of steel” and “the twentieth century, the forlorn age” — panoramas with special effects — from Blok's Retribution.

From this supernal height, from this specific dimension — metaphysical, metahistorical, whatever you call it — the age is seen as a sick and suffering being, capable of experiencing emotions and making rash decisions.

…in the haze of grief and woes,

It touched the blackest sore, the darkest wound,

But couldn't heal it, couldn't find repose.

This “couldn’t” is repeated twice and reads ambiguously in this context: we see the inherent hopelessness of attempts, and the sharp, emphasized by this repetition, frustration, the break of the initiated action, which led to that irreparable thing that makes this century the worst of all.

This is an anthropomorphized Zeitgeist, the human age, the age of the human, a humanized age (in a few years, Osip Mandelstam will unfold a superb metaphor built on a similar convergence in the poem “1 January 1924”).

The speaker undoubtedly feels connected to it, at least endowed with the ability to sense and understand its feelings, to realize their mind-clouding influence. The “worseness” attributed to this metaphysical being is not “the darkest wound” per se, which is evidently some kind of congenital disease, but the fact that, intoxicated by the products of its own mental activity (“in the haze of grief and woes”), it unwittingly turned its disease from chronic to acute — and is now doomed.

What these “the blackest sore, the darkest wound” are, we can only guess, but it's hardly worth trying to equate them with specific woes of the century (fratricidal wars, social injustice, temptations of the superhuman, etc.) — it is, so to speak, what gaped in it initially, but from careless touching opened into an infernal chasm. The age has only just begun, but to the prophetic gaze, it is obvious that it is doomed.

After the announcement of the diagnosis and verdict — a new pause, which one might want to call an eclipse.

In the blink of an eye, in the blink of an age — and we, along with the prophesying voice and clairvoyant gaze, find ourselves on another level of reality — not in the metaphysical space of personified eons, lit by the diffused light of metaphysical eternity, but in the present time and relatively precise geographical coordinates.

We stand facing west, seeing the rooftops of European cities lit by the setting sun. The reality before us is still illuminated by the rays of the earthly sun. Around the words I've italicized, there exists a prosodic halo, a special, foreboding condensation of meaning. One can hear that this is prophetic, foreboding speech; that a contrast is outlined.

What we are in is not a holistic chronotope. The West, big cities, illuminated rooftops — this is “there-and-still,” contrasted with the encroaching “here-and-now.” The observer captures the point of transition for us. Or rather, the turn: turning away from the west, we see some other space, lit not by the earthly sun but by the presence of a negatively corresponding infernal entity, which is not directly named in the original text (the-one-that-cannot-be-named?), but is figuratively called "the white one." Here, the prosodic emphasis is so strong and specific that white seems to be the radiation of the blinding blackness of that “darkest wound” that the sick current age has reopened.

What is this white creature in the original? Is it Death? An emanation of Lucifer, imprisoned in the ninth, icy circle of hell? A diabolical, world-destroying entity?

Judging by the fact that it marks houses with crosses, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew is impending, now the final one — and the historical massacre was only its forerunner.

It's hard to shake the feeling that in Akhmatova's "white" two infernal blizzards are combined — Pasternak's (“All doors marked with crosses, as in St. Bartholomew's / Night. The blizzard-conspirator's stern decree…”) and Blok's — from “The Twelve.” The West, as we remember, is still living under the cover of urban civilization (there are city rooftops), but “here” each marked house is pointed out and doomed, and this “here” inevitably creeps onto the rest of the world.

The last line seems to close the chain of questions and answers, comparisons, and contrasts. "Now" and "still," "there" and "here," black and white, rows and crows, it doesn't matter if these marked houses and crows mean the same thing — or mean nothing. We do not see them in the light — this is the radiation of darkness.

No, we don't see.

There is no we.

VIACHESLAV POPOV