From thee I wait for life.”
It was not, however, until the present century was well begun, that Georgian poetry abandoned the “Oriental inconsequence” to which I have just referred; the literary awakening which began about sixty or seventy years ago was largely due to the work of Western poets, such as Byron, with whom the Georgians became familiar chiefly through Pushkin and Lermontov. Prince Alexander Chavchavadze (1786–1846), a general in the Russian service, was the founder of the modern school; his song is all of love and wine. The influence of Western romanticism is still more clearly visible in the earlier productions of Baratashvili (1816–1846), but he succeeded in throwing off the gloomy misanthropy of his youth, and had the courage to acknowledge that he had been deluded by that “evil spirit” of Byronism.
To Prince Giorgi Eristavi fell the task of familiarizing his countrymen with the poetical literature of Europe. He was exiled to Poland for his share in a plot against the Russian government, and spent his leisure in studying Mickiewicz, Schiller, Petrarch, and Pushkin, selections from whose works he published in his native tongue. On his return to Tiflis he founded a National Theatre, for which he himself wrote many comedies. With Eristavi sentimentalism died, and the poets who succeeded him sought inspiration in patriotic ideals.
Prince Grigor Orbeliani (1801–1883), sang the past splendour of his fatherland, and bewailed the low estate to which it had fallen. In his “Ode to Tamara’s portrait” he beseeches the great queen to look down with pity on Georgia, and bless her sons with strength and wisdom; he despairingly asks:—
“Shall that which once was wither’d, ne’er again
Enjoy the fragrance of its former bloom?
Shall that which fell, for ever fallen remain,
O’erwhelm’d in an unchanging, cruel doom?”
His lines on the death of Irakli II. breathe the same spirit:—
“Ah! full of splendour were the fateful days