A strictly emotional impression that the reader gets from this line is the sensation of a pure voice soaring upward and, as it were, renouncing (relinquishing) itself. Yet it should be remembered that the first—if not the only— reader whom the author has in mind here is the very person to whom the poem is addressed: Rilke. Hence, the desire for self-renunciation, the urge to disavow everything worldly —that is, the psychology of confession. Naturally, all this— both the choice of words and the choice of tone—takes place so unwittingly that the concept of "choice" is inapplicable here. For art, especially poetry, differs from any other form of psychological activity precisely because in it everything—form, content, and the very spirit of the work —is picked out by ear.
The above by no means signifies intellectual irresponsibility. Exactly the opposite is the case: rational enterprise— choice, selection—is entrusted to hearing, or (putting it more clumsily but more accurately) is focused into hearing. In a certain sense, at issue is a miniaturization, a computerization of selective, that is, analytical, processes, a transformation or reduction of them to one organ—that of hearing.
But not only analytical functions are relegated by the poet to hearing; the same thing happens with the purely spiritual aspect of creativity. Picked out "by ear" is the very spirit of the work, whose vehicle or transmitter in a poem is its meter, for it is precisely meter that predetermines the tonality of the work. Anyone with some experience in composing verse knows that verse meter is the equivalent of a certain psychological state, at times not of just one state but of several. The poet "picks" his way toward the spirit of a work by means of the meter. Lurking within the use of standard meters is, of course, the danger of mechanical speech, and every poet overcomes that danger in his own way, and the more difficult the process of overcoming, the more detailed—both for himself and for the reader—becomes the picture of a given psychological state. Often the upshot is that the poet begins to perceive meters as animate—inspired in the archaic sense—entities, as certain sacred vessels. This is basically just. Form is even less separable from content in poetry than body is from soul, and what makes the body dear is precisely that it is mortal (in poetry the equivalent of death is mechanicalness of sound or the possibility of slipping into cliche). At any rate, every verse-maker has his o^ favorite, dominant meters, which could be regarded as his autographs, for they correspond to the most frequently repeated psychological state of the author. Trochees with feminine or—more often— dactylic endings may properly be considered Tsvetaeva's "signature." In the frequency of their use Tsvetaeva probably surpasses even Nekrasov. It's quite possible, however, that both poets resorted to trochaic meters in response to the glut of iambic trimeter and tetrameter common to the works of authors belonging both to the "Harmonic School" and to the Russian Symbolists. Tsvetaeva may have had an added psychological reason: in the Russian trochee one can always hear folklore. This was kno^ by Nekrasov as well; yet his trochees echo with the narrative tone of the bylina (epic song), whereas Tsvetaeva's reverberate with lamentations and incantation.
Her involvement with the tradition of the lamentation (or rather the fact that her ear was attuned to it) can be explained by, among other things, the additional possibilities of assonance contained in trisyllabic clausulae, on which the verse line of the lamentation, as a rule, rests. Most likely, it is a question of the poet endeavoring to transmit the psychology of modern man by means of traditional folk poetics. When it works—and for Tsvetaeva it almost always worked—it gives one an impression of linguistic justification for any fracture or dislocation of the modern sensibility; and not only of a linguistic justification but, regardless of the subject, of a priori lacrimation. At any rate, it is hard to imagine anything more suitable than the trochee in the case of "Novogodnee."
Tsvetaeva's poetry differs from the production of her contemporaries by virtue of a certain a priori tragic note, by a hidden—in a verse—wail. Given that, it should be kept in mind that this note started to sound in the voice of Tsve- taeva not as a result of firsthand tragic experience but as a by-product of her working with language, in particular as a result of her experiments with folklore.
Tsvetaeva in general was extremely prone to stylization: of Russian antiquities (Tsar-Maiden, Swans' Encampment, etc.), of the French Renaissance and Romanticism ( "Phoenix" [Casanova's End], "The Snowstorm"), of German folklore ("The Pied Piper"), and so on. However, regardless of the tradition with which she dealt, regardless of the concrete content, and—what is more important—regardless of the purely intrinsic, emotional reasons that made her resort to this or that cultural mask, every theme was rendered, purely euphonically, in a tragic key. It was, in all likelihood, not only a matter of intuitive (at first) and physical (later on) perception of her own epoch, but of the general tone—background—of Russian poetic diction at the beginning of the century. Every creative process is a reaction to predecessors, and the purely linguistic harmonic stasis of Symbolism needed resolution. Every language, and especially poetic language, always has a vocal future. What
Tsvetaeva produced turned out to be the sought-after vocal way out of the condition of poetic diction, but the pitch of her timbre was so high that a split with both the broad readership and the bulk of the literary profession was inevitable. The new sound carried not merely a new content but a new spirit. Tsvetaeva's voice had the sound of something unfamiliar and frightening to the Russian ear: the unacceptability of the world.
It was not the reaction of a revolutionary or a progressive demanding changes for the better, nor was it the conservatism or snobbery of an aristocrat who remembers better days. On the level of content, it was a question of the tragedy of existence in general, par excellence, outside a temporal context. On the plane of sound, it was a matter of the voice striving in the only direction possible for it: upward. A striving similar to that of the soul toward its source. In the poet's own words, "gravitation from/the earth, above the earth, away from/both the worm and the grain." To this should be added: from one's own self, from one's own throat. The purity (as well as the frequency, for that matter) of this voice's vibration was akin to an echo-signal which is sent into mathematical infinity and finds no reverberation, or, if it does, immediately rejects it. But while acknowledging that this rejection of the world by the voice is indeed a leitmotif of Tsvetaeva's work, it must be noted that her diction was completely devoid of any "etherealness." On the contrary: Tsvetaeva was a poet very much of this world, concrete, surpassing the Acmeists in precision of detail, and in aphoristicness and sarcasm surpassing everybody. More like that of a bird than an angel, her voice always knew above what it was elevated, knew what was there, down below (or, more precisely, what—there below—was lacking). Perhaps that is why it kept rising higher and higher, to expand the field of vision, in reality, though, expanding only the diameter of the world within which the sought-after was missing. That's why her trochee in the first line of "Novogodnee" takes Bight, muffing the short sob with an exclamation point.