Henningfeld is a professor of English at Adrian College where she teaches poetry, literature, and critical theory and writes widely for a variety of educational publications. In this essay, Henningfeld examines Akhmatova's use of imagery and allusion in developing the themes of isolation and loss throughout her poem.

Although she was born in the last year of the nineteenth century, Akhmatova is in every way a child of the twentieth century. Her poetry placed her at the center of the modernist movement as it developed in Russia, and her life encompassed some of the most difficult, invigorating, and brutal years of Russian history.

Akhmatova's life, like her verse, frequently reveals the paradoxes of living in the twentieth century. Although widely acknowledged as one of the greatest of all Russian poets, Akhmatova and her work nonetheless remained largely inaccessible to Western readers until the last years of the...