Railway Station Poem Analysis

Akhmatova’s ‘Dedication’ and Tagore’s ‘Railway Station’ are two poems that delve into how the object of love becomes the object of pain. ‘Dedication’ is a dedication to the women of Russia who withstood hardship for news of the loved ones, even when they knew the news was a tragic one. ‘Railway Station’ is a desolate poem that looks at how humanity has lost connection in the modernised society and how this pain is caused by this knowledge. In this essay I will argue that ‘Dedication’ and ‘Railway Station’ both demonstrate that love can turn into anguish and at the same time how love is an emblem of strength and humanity. ‘Dedication’ shows how love can make the women in the poem able to endure extreme hardship in the years of Yezhov terror, the time when the poem was set. Diction of “obsessive” depicts how care and worry for their loved ones have consumed the women, so much so that everything else- the sun, the passing of time, etc., have all faded into the background. The pace of the poem slows down with use of caesura in “we don’t know it, we’re obsessive”, perhaps to reflect the slow, torturous suffering of the women who are never given the closure

Through the use of eclipses in “yet goes...swaying...she can still walk,” the poet describes how the woman strives to stand up again after a complete collapse, showing their prevalence despite all odds. At the beginning of the poem, images like “the mountains bow” and “the great river does not flow” indicates how large forces of nature have become subdued by this tragedy, implying how justice is on the side of the women. At the end of the poem, imagery like “into the blizzards of the permafrost” depicts cold and tough atmospheres. This suggests both natural harsh weathers and the severity of social and political tensions at that time. For the women to battle this for “two years” already means they have triumphed against the