"'For what? Man's youth enjoys bird's licence.
Who is there that can love restrain?
In turn, joy brings to all sufficance.
What has been once comes ne'er again.'"
This does not satisfy Alèko, who kills Zemphìra and her lover, after which the old father implores him to leave their free, kind world and return to civilisation.
Pushkin next writes a Mazeppa of his own, the epic of Peter the Great, but not idealised as Byron's was.... The heroine Marỳa leaves her lover and becomes insane when her father is executed.
This stern, objective fragment of an epic, falling into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses, and cupids, was like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan and executed by a god ... it is not surprising that it met with little or no appreciation. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a style as concise as Pope's and as concentrated as Browning's dramatic lyrics. It revealed an entirely new phase in his style: hitherto it had seemed as shining and luscious fruit, now it became a concentrated, weighty tramp of ringing rhyme.
Pushkin has been accused (not by the Russians) of sentimentality ... a charge that can be confuted by quoting almost any of his lines at random.
Does this, for instance, reek of sentimentality?—
"To see you every hour that flies,
To follow where your footsteps wander—
Your lip's faint smile, your turn of eyes,
On these my thirsting love to squander,
To listen to your voice, to grasp
By man's soul woman's consummation,
To pine for you, wither and gasp,
This is a life's supreme elation."
Or this?—
"Just what I was before, the same I am to-day,
Light-hearted, ever prone to fall in love again."
Or this Tenth Commandment?—