grown tall and a traveler like his father, speaks
another language and views his father with dis-
dain. The Oedipal worry of the earlier poem/
letter becomes realized. The beginning of the
last stanza ‘‘whether it’s not that island’’ echoes
‘‘all islands resemble one another.’’ The final loss
of vision, the blindness caused by continuous
travel over the blue of the sea towards the blue
of the sky, recalls the earlier phrase ‘‘the eye
soiled by the sea horizon.’’ The extension of
mythological Homeric allusion is taken to its
extreme: the great hero Odysseus, the sacker of
the cities, the man of intense and obsessive curi-
osity, the devoted husband and protective
father, the proud king of Ithaka, now has
become the outsider, the stranger. The disguise
that Odysseus employs in Homer to accomplish
his transition from a war hero to the reinstated
king of Ithaka becomes the essence of Brodsky’s
Odysseus. There is little doubt that Brodsky’s
sense of his own imminent exile comes into play
here. The bitterness of estrangement from the
homeland is conveyed through the transforma-
tion of the heroic into its opposite: there is no
road that leads back home, even for Odysseus.
The classical allusion thus receives a distinct
local color characteristic of Russian exile poetry
in general: the journey back is impossible.
This poem is also concerned with another
idea pivotal to Brodsky’s poetics: the painful
price of greatness. Odysseus’ disorientation in
time and space marginally touches upon this
theme which is explored in much more elaborate
detail in two other Brodsky poems which employ
classical references. In the poem, ‘‘Dido and
Aeneas,’’ Brodsky offers an original interpreta-
tion of Book IV of Vergil’sAeneid.
‘‘Dido and Aeneas’’
The great man stared through the window
but her entire world ended with the border
of his broad Greek tunic, whose abundant
folds
resembled the sea on hold.
And he still stared out through the window,
and his gaze
was so far away from here, that his lips were
immobile
like a seashell where the roar is hidden, and
the horizon
in his goblet was still.
But her love
was just a fish—perhaps which mightplunge into the sea in the pursuit of the ship,
and knifing the waves with the supple body,
perhaps yet overtake him—but he,
he in his thoughts already strode upon the
land.
And the sea became a sea of tears.
But, as one knows, precisely at the moment
of despair, the auspicious wind begins to
blow.
And the great man left Carthage.
She stood before the bonfire, which her
soldiers
had kindled by the city walls,
and she envisioned between the flame and
smoke of the fire
how Carthage silently crumbled
ages before Cato’s prophecy.
Vergil’s Dido is never a shadow of Aeneas’
greatness. On the contrary, she is his rescuer, his
only chance to recover after the shipwreck and
continue the search for ‘‘the new Troy.’’ Initially,
he is only a suppliant at her mercy, nothing but a
hospes (guest) later elevated to the status of a
consort. She is the queen, one who has the power
and strength to make the decision which she lives
to regret: to succumb to Aeneas’ charm and
heroic past. She is also the heart of their affair,
whether she is confiding to Anna her feelings,
confronting Aeneas, or ascending the funeral
pyre she builds for her own destruction. In the
fourth book of theAeneid, for the first time
Aeneas’ claim to greatness is called into question
when juxtaposed with the character of Dido.
Dido’s only weakness is her love for Aeneas
which drives her to neglect her primary respon-
sibility as a Carthaginian queen and the building
of her city, her greatest accomplishment (non
coeptae adsurgunt turres.Aen. IV. 86). Even at
the time of her suicide, she remains a powerful
figure which Vergil compares with the most
famous tragic figures of Greek tragedy, who
happen to be male: Pentheus and Orestes. Her
suicide is not depicted as weakness but as a
further proof of Dido’s (and thus Carthage’s)
long-lasting strength and resistance. Dido is
never depicted as vanquished.
However, in Brodsky’s poem, Aeneas is the
focus of the work and Dido his shadow, almost an
annoying obstacle to his divinely inspired designs.
Here Brodsky’s classical theme evokes two radi-
cally different views of love: ‘‘his’’ and ‘‘hers.’’ The
two contrasting perspectives are described in terms
of ‘‘movement’’ and ‘‘immobility.’’ The recurrentOdysseus to Telemachus