Part One of MUSE: HOW I CAME TO LIKE POETRY

by Simon Lebedinskiy

When I was young I lived in a little town in Russia. Once a neighbor, a young poet that always had messy hair and burning eyes, stopped by to chat. He liked to challenge me with poetry quizzes. He said: 

      -  Guess whose poem this is?

And he started reading aloud:

¹ “‘T’was then in valleys lone, remote 

   In spring-time, heard cygnet’s note

   By waters shining tranquilly,

   That first the Muse appeared to me…”

Here I interrupted him:

      -  Muse? Is that the girl who lives in the red brick house next door? Muse the Shorty? 

The poet got angry and said:

     -  Stop your nonsense! Muse is the symbol of poetry. If the Muse appears to someone, he would feel as if wings had grown behind him! And he will write brilliant verses. So, guess, who wrote those verses? 

     -  How should I know? I said.

He answered proudly:

     -  It was Pushkin who wrote it!  Yes! Muse appeared to all my favorite poets: Pushkin, Fet, Tutchev…

Here I again interrupted him and said:
     

     -  Listen, why do all your favorite poets have such ugly names: Pushkin, Fet,  Tutchev?...It would be awesome if people could say: “THE GREAT POET SIMON LEBEDINSKIY”   

The poet looked at me in disgust and murmured:

     -   What an idiot!

I got mad, squeezed my lips and said:

     -    Ah! So you say! OK, go home; tomorrow we will see who is an idiot!

The shaggy poet left and I started to wander around, trying to come up with something great. Suddenly a verse appeared in my head: 

     -    Oh MUSE, my dear, please appear! 

I was thrilled! Here it comes! I feel that I AM BECOMING A GREAT POET!

The second verse will come to me any second… any second… any second…. However, the second verse was not in a hurry to come to me. Suddenly, the moon appeared and I remembered that my shaggy neighbor once said that the moon inspires poetry. So I decided to take a walk to stimulate my creative process. I kept wandering along the streets repeating the first verse over and over again but all in vain. I had been wandering for quite a while. 

Next thing I knew, I found myself on the outskirts of town next to a gate that led into a huge warehouse-looking building. Being tired, I leaned on the gate, and said for the last time: “Oh Muse, my dear, please appear!” Suddenly, the alarm went off and an old hairy man ran out and started yelling at me: “A thief! I will show you!” He then stuck two fingers in his mouth, gave a loud whistle and yelled out: “Muse, get him!”

In an instant out of nowhere a huge scary bulldog appeared. Without any hesitation I turned around and rushed away, feeling behind my back fierce breathing of a blood-thirsty monster.

I ran as fast as I could. Suddenly the neighbor’s words came to my mind: “If the Muse appears to someone, he would feel as if wings had grown behind him”. I guess he’s right, I thought. I kept “flying” like this for a couple of miles until I realized that Muse was becoming tired and started to slow down. And now there was a good distance between us. So I stopped, turned around towards the tired canine and sarcastically yelled out the stupid verse in a revised form:

      -    Oh Muse, my dear, get lost, disappear!

Muse paused, turned around, and disappeared in the dark.

That is how I failed to become a great poet.

REFERENCES:

Translated by: Elena Cully      

Edited by: Mark Honeycutt and Gail Askins 

 ¹ excerpt from Alexander Pushkin’s novel Yevgeny (Eugene) Onegin, translated by Henry Spaling