I would like to offer this as a Russian Poet's work from WWI! Anna Gorenko experienced the War, the Revolution and the death of Nikolai Gumiley.
Akhmatova was born Anna Andreevna Gorenko. She was raised in an upper class family in the town of Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg. At an early age, she became interested in poetry, though it was not fashionable at the time. When her father found out about her aspirations, he told her not to shame the family name by becoming a "decadent poetess" (Kenyon 2). He forced her to take a pen-name, and she chose the last name of her maternal Great-Grandmother, a Tartar. In 1910, Akhmatova married Nikolai Gumilev.
n 1917, during World War I, Akhmatova's third book, White Flock, was published. Russia experienced extremely heavy losses during the war, and Akhmatova often gave poetry readings for the benefit of the wounded (Reeder 89). White Flock contains Akhmatova's famous poem about World War I, "In Memoriam, July 19, 1914." It begins with the lines, "We aged a hundred years, and this/Happened in a single hour" (Herschemeyer 210). Another poem in this book, "We thought: we're poor," gives voice to the suffering of those who lost loved ones in the war:
We thought: we're poor, we have nothing,
but when we started losing one after the other
so each day became
remembrance day,
we started composing poems
about God's great generosity
and--our former riches. (1-7)
(McKane 74)
With this book, Akhmatova's connectedness with the suffering of her country began to be an important theme in her writing. In the poem, "Prayer," this is an almost mystical union:
Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song--
This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays. (1-8)
(Hemschemeyer 203)
A poem about Gumilev's death also appeared in this book. This version has also been translated by Judith Hemschemeyer:
You are no longer among the living,
You cannot rise from the snow.
Twenty-eight bayonets,
Five bullets.
A bitter new shirt
For my beloved I sewed.
The Russian earth loves, loves
Droplets of blood.
(Hemschemeyer 287-288)
works cited: khmatova, Anna. Selected Poems. Trans. Richard McKane.
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989.
Akhmatova, Anna. Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
Trans. Jane Kenyon. St. Paul: Eighties Press, 1985.
Akhmatova, Anna. Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Trans.
Judith Hemschemeyer, Ed. Roberta Reeder. 2nd ed. Boston:
Zephyr, 1992.