Poetry of the Swamp: Blok’s “Folks” Cycle Bubbles of the Earth

Abstract

magical song and spell seem to to be primeval form of poetry. -Nietzsche, The Gay Science Bubbles of Earth (Puzyri zemli) comprises first lyric cycle in Aleksandr Blok's Second Book, book that contains his poetic output for years 1904-1908.1 The poems of Bubbles of Earth seem oddities, owning little by way of linkage to rest of Blok's oeuvre. The setting in most of poems is swamp; their diction derives from folk vernacular; and their narrative orientation is toward folk genres. In his 1907 review of cycle, Andrei Bely did most, perhaps, to damage reputation of poems by encouraging subsequent critics to regard them as horrid, painful, childish, and idiotic.2 Commentary on cycle, overall, has settled for slightly dismissive verdict of playfulness to account for Blok's interest in swamp creatures. This fate is undeserved by poems that in fact engage rather serious philosophical problems concerning powers of language and Symbolist attempt to reconcile and experience. While thirteen poems of Bubbles of Earth, composed in 1904 and 1905, present a thematic domain uncommon in Blok's properties associated with swamp locale directly engage his interest in an article of 1908, Poetry of Spells and Incantations (Poeziia zagovorov i zaklinanii). In that essay, Blok regards charms cast by sorcerers as gold of genuine poetry, and maintains that in art of incantation, word and act become indistinguishable and identical, subject and object, magician and nature, sweetness of complete (5:37, 47).3 The sorcerer's ability to effect a synthesis between language and physical surroundings represents an ideal of unity cherished by Symbolists. In Bubbles of Earth, Blok seems to experiment in imagining a world in which poet exercises wizardly powers. This essay will consider folk context of cycle, in particular, intimations of spells and incantations. I would like to suggest that route into center of swamp, represented by cycle's central poem, is created by poet's sorcerer-like use of language, but that poems in second half of cycle move away from this organic wholeness of world and word, becoming riddled with an irony that sunders totality of sought by poet. The ambition to unite proves unachievable for modern artist. Paul de Man writes that language of Romantic poetry seems to in desire to draw closer and closer to ontological status of object, but that language is incapable of achieving absolute identity with itself that exists in natural object. That cohesive identity is elusive because poetic words move beyond common meanings to originate anew over and over again. Because of this disjuncture, he claims, for most post-Victorian poets, the priority of nature is experienced as a feeling of failure and sterility.4 The Russian Symbolists shared with Romantic poets not only idea of an intimate harmony between nature and humankind (which artist can bring to consciousness with his supernatural gift-an intuition of ideal form of world5), but also a common interest in customs, language, songs and riddles of folk. Blok has often been identified as a Symbolist cognizant of his ties to Romanticism. What Blok finds in spells and incantations appears to take on dilemma outlined by de Man by positing a world in which subject and object experience sweetness of complete unity. …