WHITE NIGHT
I see a distant past
And a house on the Petersburg Quai.
Daughter of a small landowner of the steppes,
You had come from Kursk to be a student.
You were beautiful, young men loved you.
Through that white night we two
Sat on your window-sill
Looking down from the skyscraper.
Like gas butterflies the street lamps,
Touched by the morning, trembled.
I talked to you softly
Like the sleeping distance.
And we, like Petersburg spreading away
Beyond the shoreless Neva,
Were held in timid fidelity
To a mystery.
Out there, far off, in the dense forest,
Of that white night of spring,
The nightingales filled the woods
With the thunder of their praisegiving.
The mad trilling rolled on,
The voice of the small insignificant bird
Roused a bustle of delight
In the depth of the spellbound forest.
Thither crept the night,
Hugging the fences like a barefoot tramp,
Trailing behind it, from the window-sill,
The wraith of that conversation.
Within the reach of its echo,
In fenced gardens,
The branches of apple and cherry
Put on white blossoms,
And white as ghosts, the trees
Crowded into the road
As though waving good-bye
To the white night which had seen so much.
Boris Pasternak
NOTE
This poem is from a group of poems titled “ ZHIVAGO’S POEMS “ which appear at the end of the novel “ DOCTOR ZHIVAGO “ as translated from the Russian by Manya Harari and Max Hayward and published in 1991 for Everyman’s Library by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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