Titles: The Night and The Riot
Author: Anatoly Marienhof
Culture: Russian
Type: Imaginist Poetry
Date Finished: 12th July 2010
The Night is a short poem by Anatoly Marienhof, a foremost Russian writer of Imaginism, a poetic movement of the early 20th century that contained poems with “sequences of arresting and uncommon images...[using] metaphors, sometimes producing long chains of them in their poems”, about the impression he had of night. The Riot seems to reference the early Russian revolutions and Marienhof’s impressions of these.
TheNight
Upon reading the first two lines of this gently mind-expanding poem I was enlightened with the impression of directed, focused liberty in the power that the mind has to create and imagine. I have never read such poetry before, if any similar to this exists, and the unique chain of metaphors of the poem are both purely and deeply realistic in a fantastic sense, paradoxically. The poem runs:
“The night, like a tear, flowed out of an immense eye
and rolled down along the roofs upon the lashes.
Sorrow rose up like Lazarus
and raced in the streets to cry and blame everyone,
throwing herself around necks – and everyone flipped
and screamed: you're insane!
and with whoops of fear beat the eardrums
ringing like diamond cards.”

The poem is soft in its delivery, yet revolutionary in its content, and shows how the talented and correctly directed mind can picture a bizarre, imagined yet strong and grounded scene, and then describe it with language that shows the imagination clearly, yet with such a distorted frame.
TheRiot
To me this poem shows the trauma, ridiculousness and the hate endured by poets and average people alike during the time of Stalin and Lenin’s takeover of Russia. The Bolshevik revolutionists were brutally violent and destructive, inventing means to suppress humanity. The poem is:
The riot's crimson finger pokes
Into the map
of both hemispheres:
“Here! Here! Here!”
Death gropes every hole
like a broom.
Hey there, you! Against the wall, all – prisoners.”
And the earth, like a butcher's apron
covered in human, as though in a bull's, blood.....
“Christ has risen!”

It is direct, probing and a realistic impression and description of the arbitrary revolutionary patterns and is drawn from this into a poem with perfect sanity in imagination, from my point-of-view. In a very sincere way this kind of poetry was necessary for the world, as it sensitively and justly suffered the entire problem of humanity in this age, and such suffering cannot be successfully endured by a human being, and so such poets always die early in life, with most Imaginists dying between the age of 25 and 60, as opposed to more thick, earthly and grounded poets like Goethe and Hesse, who lived past 80.