Love Letters Poem by gershon hepner

Lensky takes Onegin to meet Olga,
his fiancée. Tatiana falls
in love, and so, what seems quite vulgar,
writes him a letter that her love recalls.
Contrary to what she hopes he tells her
most tactfully, though somewhat condescending,
he doesn’t love her, and his tone repels her,
as does the message that his words are sending.
Lensky takes Onegin to a ball
where flippantly he flirt with Olga, till
the pride of Lensky leads to Lensky’s fall
whom in a duel Onegin comes to kill.

Reading all Onegin’s books, Tatiana
discovers that like them he is a fiction,
so love that from her that he used to garner
has no more value than a fifth edition.
Enlightened thus, she knows that she should never
have put into a letter to Onegin
her declaration. She becomes so clever
that when he goes to her, pathetic, beggin’,
she’s able proudly to declare that though
she loves him still, she won’t abandon
her husband, to whom she’s prepared to show
full loyalty, betraying none in tandem.

The moral Pushkin hopes that we will draw
is maybe not the one that I extract:
love letters women write do not ignore
if you are based on fiction and not fact.


8/13/08