Contests obscenely our estate.
12
Soon Olga's happy voice and beauty
No longer cheered the family group.
A captive of his lot and duty,
Her lancer had to join his troop.
Dame Larin's eyes began to water
As she embraced her younger daughter
And, scarce alive, cried out goodbye.
But Tanya found she couldn't cry;
A deathly pallor merely covered
Her stricken face. When all came out
Onto the porch and fussed about
While taking leave, Tatyana hovered
Beside the couple's coach below,
Then sadly saw the lovers go.
13
And long she watched the road they'd taken,
As through a mist of stifled tears. . . .
Now Tanya is alone, forsaken!
Companion of so many years,
The darling sister whom she'd nourished,
The bosom friend she'd always cherished
Now carried off by fate, a bride,
Forever parted from her side.
She roams in aimless desolation,
Now gazes at the vacant park. ...
But all seems joyless, bleak and dark;
There's nothing offers consolation
Or brings her smothered tears relief;
Her heart is rent in two by grief.
14
And in the solitude her passion
Burns even stronger than before,
Her heart speaks out in urgent fashion
Of faraway Eugene the more.
She'll never see him . . . and be grateful,
She finds a brother's slayer hateful
And loathes the awful thing he's done.
The poet's gone . . . and hardly one
Remembers him; his bride's devotion
Has flown to someone else instead;
His very memory now has fled
Like smoke across an azure ocean.
Two hearts, perhaps, remain forlorn
And mourn him yet. . . . But wherefore mourn?
15
'Twas evening and the heavens darkled.
A beetle hummed. The peasant choirs
