The Optics of Memory in Brodsky's ‘Fifth Eclogue’

This article examines Brodsky's 1981 ‘Fifth (Summer) Eclogue’ in the context not only of Virgil's ‘Eclogue V’ but also of two Russian writers who experiment with the pastoral: Pushkin and Nabokov. Following Virgil, Brodsky asks in his poem how it might be possible to transcend human time through participation in a creative community of poets. Even more importantly, he questions whether such participation must lead to a universalized ideal, an engulfing of the individual in the embrace of eternity. Brodsky concentrates on the infinitesimal details of the very particular locale of his northern Russian youth to oppose any possibility of generalization. This article demonstrates how Brodsky uses a finely-tuned optical “art of measurement” to prove the dependence of an amorphous eternity on individual experiences of time and memory, particularly as they occur in and against a larger frame of cultural tradition. Parallels are drawn throughout between Brodsky's concentration on details of place and Nabokov's “scientific” approach to poetry.