Last night was the final session of my essay class, and I'm sad that it's over. The participants, their work, my own opportunities for reading and thought and conversation: the entire experience was so absorbing. I think it was a successful workshop, but it has also prompted me to cogitate about how I could have made it better and more useful, which is, I suppose, why teaching, like writing, always remains compelling.

Anyway: now a day of space has opened back up in my week.

This morning I am turning to one of the copies of Akhmatova translations that just arrived, and I'm reading the first words of Jane Kenyon's introduction to her translation of twelve poems: "As we remember Keats for the beauty and intensity of his shorter poems, especially the odes and sonnets, so we revere Akhmatova for her early lyrics--brief, perfectly-made verses of passion and feeling."

Then she quotes these lines:

With the hissing of a snake the scythe cuts down
the stalks, one pressed hard against another.

In that image I feel as if I am lifted into the life of a Tolstoy novel, where the physical world, and physical engagement with that world, have such an intense influence on the way in which the novelist's characters expand into both self-knowledge and a broader humane knowledge embracing time and geography and community and the inner private flames of yearning and hope. But all Akhmatova has done is to transcribe the details of a single moment. The miracle of poetry is its mystery.