Upon A Haystack On A Southern Night, Some doubts surround the exact date of birth but reports suggest that Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet was born on the 5th December 1820 which was two years before his Russian nobleman father Afanasy Shenshin married the divorcee Charlotta Foeth in Germany. He was therefore placed into the category known as a raznochinet, literally a person who does not belong to any particular class or state. He was not allowed to take his father’s name of Shenshin and, not surprisingly, all of this was a source of great distress to Fet for the whole of his life.
As soon as he was old enough he was sent away to a boarding school in Estonia and from there he moved to Moscow University in 1838 to study philology. He began writing poetry while at university and was able to publish his first collection in 1840, called The Lyrical Pantheon. Fet really came to the attention of the literary world in 1842 when his poems were seen regularly in magazines such as Moskovityanin and Otechestvennye zapiski, all of which received a great deal of praise from all quarters.
Upon A Haystack On A Southern Night by Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet
Upon A Haystack On A Southern Night
Upon a haystack in lands of South,
I lay, while facing skies of night,
The choir of stars, alive and couth,
Was trembling, spread at every side.The earth, mute as a dream half-hidden,
Was fast receding into space,
And I, as if the first in Eden,
Alone met the black night’s face.
Did I race to the depth profound,
Or did the stars race strait to me?
In mighty hands, it seemed me how,
I hanged above abysmal sea.With heart, so sinking and bewildered,
I measured with my look a depth,
Into which, every moment sighted,
I sink, and nobody helps.
