VORONEZH - For Osip Mandelshtam

In her poem, "Voronezh", Akhmatova focuses heavily on the weather. How does this assist in evoking a sense of atmosphere and emotion for the reader?


In the poem, 'Voronezh', Anna Akhmatova focuses heavily on the weather and it evokes a sense of atmosphere and emotions to be felt for the reader so that they can imagine and feel the place and put them selves in the enviornment she describes. The location this is written would be in a city called St Petersburg where she loved, and was written for her poet friend, Osip Mandelshtam who had been exiled to Voronezh for writing a poem critical of Stalin. The first few lines in her poem described the landscape and the weather, "the town is frozen solid...trees, walls, snow, beneath the glass. Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice..." which sets the reader to place themselve in the image of the cold winter type of weather. When she has mentioned the field of Kulikovo, she has included the feeling of the atmosphere again describing the sight, "battlegroud caught. Frozen poplars...clash now..." This helps to evoke the sense of the emotion, with the knowledge about the battle, how the feelings would be depressing, sad and isolating. The atmosphere is sensed more to the end of the poem, when the poet describes the happiness at the wedding, but completely flips to a miserable emotion when she mentions the execusion of Mandelshtam, "But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard the room where the exiled poet it banised". These lines from the poem explains how she had written another poem for Mandelshtam which is named 'Fear and the Muse' who had been executed because he had written what the government didnt want to read, therefore was banised for his poem. In result, instead of him writing what he wanted to do, she wrote poems for him. This adds to the atmosphere created throughout the poem for the reader to understand the meaning of the poem which is for her friend, and sense the coldness of the environment around her when the poem was written.