id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
delos-539	Bernstein, Ilya	Two Poems from 1937 by Osip Mandelstam	2018	4	.pdf	application/pdf	1121	49	74	The reappearance of the word “quietly” gives it away: I believe it is to the bundles of light in his own eyes that Mandelstam offers this apology for using his voice, lest it disturb the process envisioned in the preceding stanzas. If only we live so long... Forgive me for speaking out loud... Read it quietly to me now... 15 March 1937 92 Osip Mandelstam ***** Mandelstam was not the first person to compare the retina to a spiderweb—the Greek anatomist who first described this body part had given it the name arachnoides—but he was perhaps the first poet to envision himself in the midst of photoreceptive tissue, as he does in the first of these poems, surrounded by luminous filaments and experiencing a clarity in which even the needs of the nation become viewable.	cache/delos-539.pdf	txt/delos-539.txt