Rex’s Reviews > Eugene Onegin > Status Update

"Happy a hundredfold, whoever
can lean on faith, who can dismiss
cold reason, sleep in sensual welter
like a drunk traveler in a shelter,
or, sweeter, like a butterfly
in flowers of spring it's drinking dry;
but piteous he, the all-foreseeing,
the sober head, detesting each
human reaction, every speech
in the expression of its being,
whose heart experience has cooled
and saved from being charmed or fooled!"

"We each enjoy a special hobby,
each of us has his favorite lobby:
one sees a duck and aims his gun,
one raves in verse like me, and one
hunts cheeky flies, with swatter sweeping,
one leads the multitude in thought,
one finds in war amusing sport,
one wallows in delicious weeping;
the wine-addict adores the cup:
and good and bad are all mixed up."

"Whom then to credit? Whom to treasure?
On whom alone can we depend?
Who is there who will truly measure
his acts and words to suit our end?
Who'll sow no calumnies around us?
Whose fond attentions will astound us?
Who'll never fault our vices, or
whom shall we never find a bore?
Don't let a ghost be your bear-leader,
don't waste your efforts on the air.
Just let yourself be your whole care,
your loved one…"

"I need to rest from all this rhyme:
I'll end my tale some other time."

"Today a mental fog enwraps us,
each moral puts us in a doze,
even in novels, vice entraps us,
yes, even there its triumph grows."

He wrote this when he's hardly 24!

"I'm blind to every apparition;
and yet a distant admonition
of hope sometimes disturbs my heart;
it would be painful to depart
and leave no faint footprint of glory…
I never lived or wrote for praise;
yet how I wish that I might raise
to high renown my doleful story,
that there be just one voice which came,
like a true friend, to speak my name."

youth is a fever; we must spare
its natural right to rave and flare.

Alas, on pleasure 's wild variety
I've wasted too much life away!
But, did they not corrupt society,
I'd still like dances to this day:
the atmosphere of youth and madness,
the crush, the glitter and the gladness,
the ladies' calculated dress:
I love their feet—though I confess
that all of Russia can't contribute
three pairs of handsome ones—yet there
exists for me one special pair!
one pair!…

A man who's active and incisive
can yet keep nail-care much in mind:
why fight what's known to be decisive? custom is despot of mankind.

We all meandered through our schooling
haphazard; so, to God be thanks,
it's easy, without too much fooling,
to pass for cultured in our ranks.

🤣😂🤣

I.5