Eight lines poems/stanzas by Mandelstam. A few observations

Abstract

The article attempts to describe the place and role of the eight lines stanzas in Mandelstam’s work on the basis of quantitative analysis of the poet’s texts. Two main octastich forms are considered – poems of eight verses and strophes of eight verses. The use of different types of them in different periods of Mandelstam’s creative work, regularities of variation and tendencies of development of that poetic form are analyzed. Observations are made concerning rhyme, metre and strophic structure, as well as the possibilities of cycling single eight lines stanzas. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the variation of eight lines forms in the poet’s creative work during his creative biography implies both the presence of variants with formants of unity and variants in which the standard quatrain or other internal strophic structure is preserved. The two highlighted eight-lines forms (strophes of eight verses and poems of eight verses) vary widely in terms of meter. The most comprehensively presented are two-syllabic syllabic-accentual meters; the metric of the 8-strophes is more than that of the 8-form oriented to two-syllabic meters, and the number of the three-syllabics in the 8-forms is almost double their number in the 8-strophes. The latter can serve as an indirect confirmation of the fact that, by constantly and emphatically varying the meter, Mandelstam emphasizes a relative “firmness” of the very shape of the octastich. That primarily concerns, of course, the 8-forms, since in the 8-strophes, apparently, there is a greate influence of the classical tradition, which implied the predominant orientation of the 8-strophes to two-syllable meters. However the author sees the poet’s great interest in the development of the resources of the eight lines form as a modern poetic one, and not as a traditional form of reproduction of the previous rules of its construction.