Gumilev’s quatrain is quite excellent:
"There is a God, there is a world. They exist
eternally.
While people’s lives are
momentary and wretched.
However, a person can accommodate everything,
Who loves the world and believes in God."
Of course you cannot dogmatise these words. Here,
it is possible to retort against every pronouncement: perpetuity of the world
is not the same as that of God’s; human life is but momentary, but the soul’s
life is not momentary; the world loves devious counsel, but it only believes in
God. Nevertheless, this quatrain contains an excellent poetical
expression of a deep idea: that the fullness of life consists of accepting the
world as a creation of the All-Good God. In accepting life as a gift from God,
a person lives with an optimistic and harmonious view of the world, creating a
spiritual world and a bold, bright outlook on life.
A person has inner contentment when he doesn’t
have any spiritual discord. Such is the meaning of Polonsky’s stanza:
"Blessed is he who is given two types of
hearing:
Who hears the ringing church bells,
And hears the prophetic voice of
the Spirit."
The obvious meaning of these words is in that a
contemporary person lives a full substantive life, when his inner voice (be it
a poetical or philosophical inspiration, or simply a general outlook on life),
combines with the faithfulness of tradition, and with the religious faith that
has been interwoven into him.
It has to be acknowledged that the Russian poetry
of the golden 19th century age of literature itself possessed this
quality and was therefore principled, ideal and wholly laudable.
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