I must remind you of the time when the poem was written. It was July 1917. The ongoing war in Europe; in Russia, the rule of the Provisional Government, the liberals from the Duma, who, having come to replace the impotent Tsarist regime, have proved themselves even more impotent than the former; the crash of all social institutions; the decline of traditional religious values and beliefs (those values and beliefs never helped to prevent WWI, remember); the total absence of perspectives and hopes—all of this allows us to characterise the spiritual atmosphere of that summer as suffocating. (I wonder if Nikolay Gumilyov, this hero of a man, would depict the spiritual atmosphere of 2019 in similar terms. Perhaps he would.) And this is exactly why the days of the poet ‘blow dully by’ (or ‘are quickly disappearing,’ as the other translation has it) and why ‘the pain is always the same.’ It must be very painful for a talented and a brave man, a poet and an officer, indeed, to know that his talents and his bravery are not needed, that he has literally nothing to which he could apply his fervour, nothing at all. You cannot fight for a good cause if no good causes exist. Neither can you unperturbedly go on writing lyric poems if those poems never stop suffering of your fellow humans. ‘There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,’ to quote a phrase coined by Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher and composer. (I wonder how you interpret this phrase.)
But could there be lyric poetry after the Battle of the Somme, after all, and what makes the horrible casualties of the Somme Offensive so very different from the as horrible casualties of the Nazi concentration camps? It is the dullness of the days that are not filled with meaningful efforts that causes Gumilyov’s pain, and the metaphor of dying nightingales never sounds as a simple figure of speech, as ‘an invincible flower that binds me to my flower,’ if you consider what a true pain the absence of meaning in your life can be. Why is, or why isn’t it painful? (Please note the question down.)Gumilyov spends the summer of 1917 in Paris where he meets and falls in love with Helena du Boucher, the daughter of a famous surgeon; it is she whom the poet refers to as the one who ‘too, knows pain’ in the second quatrain of this poem. During his rather short life, the poet always enjoyed the attention of beautiful women, and if you might want to say that alpha males always get females you would be very mistaken about the character of this attention. Suppose you keep insisting on this term and seeing each cavalry officer—which Gumilyov also was—as an alpha male. It this case, I perhaps must say that it is not man’s ability to kill his adversaries but his attempts to make his own life meaningful that make him attractive in the eyes of a woman. Allow me a quick remark about the incels, or ‘involuntarily celibates,’ the subculture of today whose members complain over their inability to find a romantic or sexual partner. The only question I as a woman want to ask them is: What have you done to become sexually or romantically attractive? I do not precisely mean visiting a gym, you know, even though it wouldn’t do you any harm. Women are not that obsessed with your muscles as you think they are; in general, they are not so egocentric, cruel, and shallow as you want them to be. What I really mean is: what have you done to create a purpose in your life? If no effort was made, if the absence of meaning in your life never was experienced by you as painfully as by Nikolay Gumilyov—you should stop complaining and take your ‘black pill’: it is exactly what you deserve.
But she too knows pain,
she who commanded
my love, and her satin skin
flushes with poisoned blood.