DO PRAY Prince P. A. Vyazemsky

Temporal

 

Trans-re-lated from Russian

Do Pray

Do pray! A prayer does lend wings
To a soul nailed down to earth,
And cuts away the key of plenty
In rocks overgrown with thorns.

It is a shroud for us against helplessness.
It is a star in the foppish fog.
And the sacrifice of pure praying is
An incorrupt fimiam for the soul,

From the out-of-reach abodes
An angel bright flies down to us
With a refreshing cup of satiety
That burns the hearts with thirst.

Do pray – when as a serpent cold
Yearning penetrates your bosom;
Do pray – when in the barren steppes
Your dreams' path has been laid,

And for the heart  – an orphan with no kith or kin,
There is no shelter, nowhere to take some rest.
Do pray – when boiling in you as a deaf stream
Is your struggle against passions;

Do pray – when before a mighty destiny
You hold no weapon and are weak;
Do pray – when fate happens
To gladden you with amiable eye.

Do pray, do pray! All sinews of your soul
Do outpour in a fervent prayer
When your golden-winged angel –
Having torn away the shroud off your eyes –
Directs them to an image sweet,
that your soul seemingly has dreamed of.

Both on a clear day and under threat,
In the face of happiness or of disaster,
And no matter whether passing over you
Is a cloud shadow or a starry ray.

Do pray! Through a sacred prayer
There grow in us the mystic fruits.
All's vague in this life swift-running.
All has to pay tribute to decay.
And joy must need be fragile [and precarious],
And each and every rose must come into flower.

What shall be – is far beyond the eyesight,
And unreliable is that which is.
The prayers only shall not tell lies
And they shall word the mystery of life,

And tears that drop with prayer
Into the orifices of goodness' vessel,
Shall spring up as living pearls
And shall embrace the soul with brilliance.

And you – shining so happily
With beams of hope and beauty –
In those days when a young soul
Is a sanctuary of virgin dreams, –

Do not trust too much the earthly
Flowers of an earthly paradise.
But do believe with childlike simplicity
In what we have not from the earth,
What for the mind is covered with darkness,
But to the heart is visible from afar,

And to bright sacraments with prayer
Elate your hopes with wings. 

~1840~
~(To M. A. Barteneva)~
Prince Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky (1792-1878) 

А leading personality of the Golden Age of Russian poetry


. . .

In the 1830-s, like all the "literary aristocracy", Vyazemsky found himself out of date and out of tune with the young generation. He had the great sadness of surviving all his contemporaries. Though it was precisely in his last years that his poetical talent bore its best fruit, he was forgotten and abandoned by critics and public long before he died. He grew into an irritated reactionary who heartily detested everyone born after 1810.

. . . 

Vyazemsky is probably best remembered as the closest friend of Pushkin. Their correspondence is a treasure house of wit, fine criticism, and good Russian. In the early 1820s, Pushkin proclaimed Vyazemsky the finest prose writer in the country. His prose is sometimes exaggeratedly witty, but vigor and raciness are ubiquitous. His best is contained in the admirable anecdotes of his Old Notebook, an inexhaustible mine of sparkling information on the great and small men of the early nineteenth century. A major prose work of his declining years was the biography of Denis Fonvizin.

Though Vyazemsky was the journalistic leader of Russian Romanticism, there can be nothing less romantic than his early poetry: it consists either of very elegant, polished, and cold exercises on the set commonplaces of poetry, or of brilliant essays in word play, where pun begets pun, and conceit begets conceit, heaping up mountains of verbal wit. 

His later poetry became more universal and essentially classical.

From a letter (1812) to his wife Vera:

"I repeat my request to you to write to me more often, and for you to not forget that I'm going out of Moscow, and that – consequently – you maybe will not have letters to receive from me on [each and] every post.

My silence should not worry you, for were I to fall sick, then the army is so close that they will upon the hour send me [back] to Moscow, just as they have already sent back many [others]. Besides, bad news always travel fast. And so, I beseech you, my dear Vera, as much as possible resort to common sense [reason] and do not indulge in all the fears that will be born within you by imagination and by your tender love to me.

Pray to God for me, and I – for you, and all shall go well."