Finding space for a winter eclogue: Joseph Brodsky and ‘Eclogue 4’

This article presents a thorough-going account of Joseph Brodsky's poem ‘Eclogue 4: Winter’. In particular, it provides a detailed study of the relationship between this poem and the Fourth Eclogue of the Roman poet Virgil. While this relationship has most commonly been read in primarily temporal terms (in interpretations which emphasise the prophetic element in Virgil's so-called ‘Messianic Eclogue’), the present article argues that the poem's carefully choreographed series of spatial contrasts is at least as important for the construction of its meaning. Indeed, the opposition between Brodsky's North and Virgil's South determines the strategy of this poem to such an extent that — controversially for Brodsky — space is thereby rendered a more significant category in it than time. By carving out a place for itself in relation to its cultural tradition (including the Russian classicising tradition) as well as to the cosmos, Brodsky's Winter Eclogue duly identifies the North as the outskirts at which eternity itself unravels.