Nothing ever happens twice, / Nor will it. For this reason, / We were born without proficiency, / And will all die without routine.

You ask: Who thus ordains? / The omnipotent God of details, / The omnipotent God of love…

Throw open this dungeon of mine / Give me the brilliant light of day…

Ever since the Eternal Judge / Granted me the omniscience of a prophet, / In the eyes of men I read / Pages of enmity and vice.

It may be that everything has been profaned by centuries of crimes; / It may be that nothing has remained unstained…

The somber Demon, banished from the heights, / Soared aimlessly above the sinful earth…

When your weary consciousness / loses its balance; / when the steps of this staircase / slip from beneath your feet / like a ship’s deck; / when your nocturnal solitude / spits on humanity — you might / meditate on eternity…

Russia will awaken from its sleep, / And upon the ruins of autocracy / They will write our names!

In everything I long to reach / The very essence. / In my toil, in searching for my path, / In my heart’s unrest.

Like a single drop of water fallen in the sea / Is this entire firmament before you. / But what, then, is this universe I see? / And what am I in your regard?

Lithuania! My Homeland! You are like good health: / Only he learns how precious you are / Who has lost you. Today I am able to see — and describe in writing — / Your full beauty, precisely because I miss you.

The centuries pass; war rumbles; / Revolution arises, villages burn…

In a desert land, of stunted, scanty growth, / On soil cracked by sweltering heat, / The Poison Tree — like some menacing sentinel — / Stands — alone in all the universe.

Here’s a taste of Polish poetry: Adam Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets, some of my personal favorites…

We drink the chalice of existence / With blindfolded eyes, / Moistening its golden rim / With our tears.

And many, many years later, / Your voice again began to trouble me. / All night I read Your testament, / And came to life again, like one stirred from a stupor.

Today the church is empty; / The deserted school is locked, / The empty field unharvested…

Not long will be the trace I leave / In the feeble memory of man. / But that is a mere phantom of existence, / Obscure, false, and empty — / What need have I of it?

Sin is to live without daring or dreaming, / Neither esteemed nor persecuted. / Sin is to know neither horror nor hope / And to be accepted, but not loved.

Blok’s 1908 poem revisits a decisive battle in Russian history, in an apocalyptic tone; he and many in his generation felt that Russia again stood at a fateful turning point in history.