Joseph Brodsky, honored yesterday with a plaque in London, wondered, like Seamus Heaney, if the careful, vulnerable, reflective, poetic voice could make any difference in a cruel, violent, and possibly meaningless world. His poem “A Part of Speech” broods on past (his own past, in Russia), present (he’s now an émigré, finding himself at the moment in Munich), and future (“when ‘the future’ is uttered, swarms of mice / rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece / of ripened memory which is twice / as hole-ridden as real cheese” — which is to say that for the poet the very concept of a future is an absurdity).

This past/present/future suggests a temporally dynamic poem, but “A Part of Speech” is Oblomov in successive sonnets, a chronicle of immobilism:

As regards all that parallel-
line stuff, it’s turned out true and bone-clad, indeed.
Don’t want to get up now. And never did.

That immobilism suggests an answer to the question of poetry’s function: It doesn’t have one.

Or it doesn’t have much of a public function. Consciousness it can do a lot for. The reader’s and the poet’s:

A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others – if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct. [A] novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader… [V]erse writing [and reading] is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe…

From his perch in comfortable Western Europe, the poet recalls silent dead village life in the east, where the poetic voice is a whisper of speech, or not even that, between the sound of the waves, a

wan flat voice
that ripples between them like hair still moist,
if it ripples at all.

He recalls (in a beautiful line) “A nowhere winter evening with wine,” and then evokes all the emptiness of that earlier place (“wind battering the limp grass / that submits to it,” “Silvery hoarfrost has transformed the rattling bell / into crystal,” “rows and rows / of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows / ever stand in orchards,” “a tram rattles far off, as in days of yore, / but no one gets off at the stadium anymore.”). And then we get this marvelous stanza:

As for the stars, they are always on.
That is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike
sphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon
here: well after hours, blinking.
The sky looks better when they are off.
Though, with them, the conquest of space is quicker.
Provided you haven’t got to move
from the bare veranda and squeaking rocker.
As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face
half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is
no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze
can be rested on none of these.

So there we have, mid-poem, the possibility that it’s all nothingness, no life anywhere. At best a mere ripple of it here. Or as Brodsky once said to one of his memoirists: “You know in the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in your life. Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.”

But there’s more poem, so let’s see…

Well, there’s love:

A voice
pitches high, keeping words on a string of sense.
… The heart, however grown savage, still beats for two.
Every good boy deserves fingers to indicate
that beyond today there is always a static to-
morrow, like a subject’s shadowy predicate.

The voice of his lover trills with meaning, and however nihilistic the heart, it seems hardwired to exist in a world of mutuality – a mutuality that promises a future, however “static” that future in fact turns out to be.

And there’s poetry itself (“the pen that puts up these limping / awkward lines”), which can at least hear and record humanity’s voice:

On occasion the head combines
its existence with that of a hand, not to fetch more lines
but to cup an ear under the pouring slur
of their common voice

For after all

What gets left of a man amounts
to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.

The poet concludes that he is “tired of summer,” tired of the warmth of Munich, and drawn to memories of frozen villages. Echoing the famous first lines of The Waste Land, the poet finds that he prefers the nihilistically appropriate eastern winter to the annoyingly lifelike western summer:

If only winter were here for snow to smother
all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted
green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed
book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm,
like a dog abandoning its blind owner,
crosses the road at the usual zebra.

And then he concludes the poem with a bracingly realistic definition of freedom:

Freedom
is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name
and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie,
and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram
nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.

Freedom is nothing glorious and fine and uplifting and large; it is simply the gradual Oblomovlike forgetting of enslavement. It is the capacity to experience despair – as this poet is experiencing despair – without weeping. The capacity to bear the metaphysical weight of the world – east and west – without collapsing.