Leaving - Analysis

Exile as a fantasy of self-erasure

The poem’s central claim is grimly simple: the speaker imagines leaving not to be reborn, but to be used up. His first impulse sounds like a desire for freedom, yet it immediately curdles into self-punishment. He’s “tired of living” among “boring fields” and “buckwheat fragrant,” and he declares he’ll “leave my home for ever” to become a “thief and vagrant.” That last phrase matters: he doesn’t picture a new craft or a new love, but a life defined by dispossession. The “home” he rejects is also the only landscape he knows how to describe vividly, which makes the departure feel less like liberation than like a staged disappearance.

A mind that expects betrayal

Once the speaker steps into motion, his imagination keeps assigning him the role of someone to be harmed. He will “walk through silver curls of life” hunting a “miserable dwelling,” a search that sounds less like adventure than like choosing discomfort on purpose. Then comes the sharpest personal blow: “My dearest friend will whet his knife / on me.” The violence is intimate and casual, as if the friend uses him as a sharpening stone. When he adds, “The reason? There’s no telling,” it’s not innocence; it’s fatalism. He assumes betrayal without needing an explanation, as though being turned on is simply what happens to him in the world he’s leaving for.

The road is beautiful, and that makes it worse

The poem keeps pairing pastoral beauty with social rejection. A “winding yellow road” crosses a “sunlit field of flowers,” but the scene doesn’t open into possibility; it delivers another expulsion: “the girl whose name I cherish so / will turn me out of her house.” The tenderness of “cherish” collides with the bluntness of being turned out, and the house becomes a symbol of withheld shelter. The speaker’s Russia is not ugly; it’s radiant, fragrant, and familiar. That beauty doesn’t comfort him, though. Instead it throws his loneliness into higher contrast, as if the land can be generous while the human world remains closed.

The turn: coming home to die

The poem’s real hinge arrives when the speaker says, “I will return back home to live,” only to follow it with, “I’ll hang myself upon my sleeve.” Returning is not a reconciliation; it’s a final arrangement. The phrasing “upon my sleeve” makes the suicide oddly domestic, almost like hanging a garment on a hook, as though death will be just another everyday gesture performed in view of others. Even the timing is aestheticized: “on a green evening it will happen.” The color “green” should suggest life, but here it frames the moment of self-destruction, tightening the poem’s main tension: the speaker craves the home he rejects, and he chooses the home as the stage for his own removal.

A plain burial under tender trees

After death, the poem’s images soften, but the softness is not mercy so much as indifference. “Silky willows by the fence” bend “gently,” and the only sharp sound is “dogs’ barking.” The speaker is “unwashed,” “buried plainly,” reduced to a body handled without ceremony. The fence matters: it marks the boundary of the homestead, and the willows lean over it like witnesses who can only bow. Friendship, which earlier held a knife, now stands nearby as background noise. The imagined community remains present, but not consoling; it is simply there while the speaker is put into the ground.

Russia continues: the most brutal comfort

The final lines widen the lens until the speaker’s drama becomes almost irrelevant. The moon “float[s] up in the sky,” “dropping the oars into the water,” a dreamlike, drifting image that makes time feel like a river no one steers. Then the poem lands on its hardest truth: “As ever, Russia will get by / and dance and weep in every quarter.” The country is pictured as emotionally extravagant, capable of opposite motions at once, but also resilient enough to absorb one more vanished person. In that ending, the speaker’s longing and self-hatred meet: he wants to escape his land’s stasis, yet he also wants proof that the land can survive without him. The poem grants that proof, and it feels less like solace than like the final erasure he has been rehearsing all along.