Words Preserved Against a Day of Fear

JOSEPH BRODSKY WOULD HAVE turned 80 in May, but anyone who knew him in the 1980s or ’90s would find it absurd to imagine him as an octogenarian. His robust presence, which commanded any room back then, was incompatible with the idea of his shrinking into doddering frailty. But Brodsky was both young and old. His energy, his probing mind, the rakish slant of his shoulders, his reach-for-the-rafters poetry readings—these qualities kept him ever clothed in the semblance of youth, a boy genius in secondhand jackets that looked as if they came off the rack wrinkled and ink stained, yet draping him like a monument. But he also seemed old. Watching him chain-smoke Kent III cigarettes, having first bitten off the filter, despite two bypass surgeries, made his death from a heart attack in 1996 at age 55 seem a terminus already ticketed. And long before ill health carved a certain tiredness around the eyes, he exuded the aura of someone who had lived more deeply than most, been through much more. His slate-blue peepers looked not only across rooms, but centuries.

This gaze suggests the mien behind his poetry. Even when they first appeared, Brodsky’s poems spoke to the moment, but also through it. At the conclusion of “Eclogue IV: Winter,” translated from the Russian by himself, he captures the passing feel of writing on a page while also making the case for its permanence:

Cyrillic, while running witless
on the pad as though to escape the captor,
knows more of the future than the famous sibyl:
of how to darken against the whiteness,
as long as the whiteness lasts. And after.

The urge to consciously speak across time, coupled with Brodsky’s ability to inject his own speaking presence into the poems, accounts for their high degree of self-reflexivity. As he writes in “A Part of Speech,” the poem that more than any other placed him on the world stage, “What gets left of a man amounts / to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.” Throughout his poems he makes constant reference to the fleeting and visceral act of speech itself, so much so that it is often hard to know where the man stops and the poem begins. Because Brodsky seems to be talking out loud in his poems, they can feel more recorded than written, no matter their loyalty to rhyme and meter. His friend and fellow Nobel laureate Derek Walcott shared his fondness for allusions to the