They Are Drinking Here Again Brawling Sobbing - Analysis

A tavern chorus as national elegy

This poem turns a scene of drunken noise into a grim diagnosis: the brawling, singing room is not an escape from history but the place where history comes back as nausea, rage, and stubborn love. The opening is almost documentary—drinking, brawling, sobbing—yet the speaker hears in the accordion not entertainment but amber woes, a music thick with old grief. What these men “hark back” to is not simply nostalgia; it is a whole vanished moral weather, a Russia, a Moscow of other days, invoked like a lost homeland inside the homeland.

The speaker’s chosen blindness

Against this collective din, the speaker describes a private, almost shameful strategy: I duck my head, eyes foundering in wine. He is not the detached moralist who condemns the room; he is implicated, drinking too, deliberately turning away rather than look fate in the face. That line makes the poem’s emotional tension clear: he knows there is something he ought to face, but he also knows that looking directly at it might be unbearable. The brief phrase I think of something else sounds like a self-defense mechanism—momentary amnesia purchased by alcohol—yet the poem keeps pulling him (and us) back to the thing he’s trying not to see.

Blue months and the smell of death

The poem’s most piercing claim arrives quietly: something that we have all lost forever. Instead of naming politics or leaders, Yesenin names time itself as a lost possession: my dark blue May, my pale blue June. Those colors make the loss sensuous and intimate, like seasons remembered through the body rather than ideology. And then, abruptly, the poem contaminates the feast: corpse smell dogs this carousal. The verb “dogs” is crucial—death is not a single event but a persistent follower. The revelry becomes frantic not because the men are carefree, but because they are trying (like the speaker) to outrun an odor that won’t stop returning.

Folk music with missing parts: Volga and secret police

The poem’s bitter humor—today’s a great day—is immediately undercut by what the “great day” contains: homemade vodka, a noseless accordionist, and songs not only of the Volga but also the secret police. That pairing is devastating. The Volga stands for vastness, memory, and a Russia imagined as natural and eternal; the secret police stands for surveillance, fear, and the state’s intrusion into the most ordinary life. The accordionist’s missing nose makes the body itself a historical record: this is folk culture literally maimed, still performing. Even pleasure has to be filtered through injury, and even the river-song is haunted by coercion.

October as blizzard, courage as a boot-knife

When the men grumble that bony October caught them in its blizzard, the Revolution is not presented as dawn but as weather that freezes and strips flesh. “Bony” suggests famine and death, and the “blizzard” suggests disorientation—an event that makes people lose their bearings. In this cold aftermath, the poem gives a frightening definition of bravery: courage has gone back to whetting the knife from its boot. Courage is no longer moral clarity or sacrifice; it is readiness for street violence. The contradiction is sharp: the men are simultaneously broken and re-arming, nostalgic and dangerous, grieving a lost Russia while sharpening themselves into instruments of another catastrophe.

Rebellion in the throat, pity in the eyes

Yesenin makes hatred almost physical: it shifts in the eyes, while rebellion grates in raised voices. Yet the poem refuses to let this anger feel heroic. These men pity the young and foolish whose blood flamed up and burned away. The image of blood as a brief, self-consuming fire suggests a generation spent quickly—passion converted into ash. So the room contains two kinds of time: the old men’s long, sour endurance, and the young men’s swift extinction. The pity is not gentle; it is the exhausted compassion of survivors who suspect the same waste is about to repeat itself.

A question that can’t be answered soberly

In the middle of this communal misery, the poem suddenly turns outward and intimate: Where are you now and why so far? The “you” is left unresolved—lover, friend, God, the lost Russia itself—which makes the question feel like a reach for anything uncorrupted by the room. When the speaker asks, Do we shine brightly for you, it’s as if he’s imagining the revelers as a distant signal fire. But what kind of beacon is a tavern where vodka is medicine and songs include the secret police? If they “shine,” it may be the harsh shine of desperation, not pride.

Civil War as lingering disease

The accordionist becomes a concentrated emblem of the era’s damage: he is on a vodka cure for his clap caught in the Civil War. The phrasing is both darkly comic and profoundly sad. A “cure” made of vodka is obviously no cure; it is another method of forgetting. And the fact that he “caught” the disease in the Civil War makes history feel like contagion: political upheaval translates into bodily harm, shame, and chronic pain. The poem suggests that after such events, even private afflictions carry a public timestamp.

The hinge on No.: refusing silence, fearing what rises

The most dramatic shift is the final refusal: No. It’s a blunt interruption of despair and a rebuttal to the idea that what’s lost is simply gone. the lost Russia will not be silenced, the speaker insists, but the next line complicates any easy patriotism: the rot feeds a wild courage. Russia’s resurgence is not purely noble; it is nourished by decay. The closing address—Oh Russia, my Russia—sounds like love, but it is love spoken with teeth clenched, aware of what that love might unleash. When Russia is pictured as rising in Asia, the image carries both expansion and displacement, as if the nation is reorienting itself away from familiar Europe and toward a harsher, more volatile destiny.