The most amazing thing about this poem is the obvious envy, which, in retrospect, sheds new light on the whole text from the last three lines. Paolo and Francesca are envied completely carefree, without the slightest fear of the storm of hell that drives the couple around in Dante's inferno in eternal torment. And that with a symbolist poet with mystical and yes, religious motifs, such as Alexander Block (1880 to 1921) was. His poetry is by no means pious, but anything but carefree. With him, passions are always underlaid by the feeling of the near abyss.
He is undisputedly one of the most important Russian poets.
In his lifetime his fame bordered on idolatry.
When he died in the cold, alien Petrograd, in the fifth year of the revolution, shortly after he had said in his famous speech about Pushkin: "A poet dies because he has no more air to breathe", his death was for many a sign of general catastrophe, of final disappointment in the revolution.
Anna Akhmatova wrote of his funeral that “our sun, which went out painfully”, had been brought to the cemetery.
Too bad the days of Paolo and Francesca are over
But the year is 1908. A lively winter day. A nonchalant lady comes into the room of a Homme de Lettres, brings cold air, perfume and disorder, speaks too much and too loudly, but tries to adapt to the poet's room stylistically and asks to read Shakespeare to her. Every man has his weak point, the lady has great intuition and does exactly what can impress him. Does she suspect that he would think of Paolo and Francesca, who only understood their love after reading it together?
Block's private life has been so well researched in literary studies that one can name a woman's name for almost every one of his love poems. My six-volume edition from 1971 is provided with illustrations, so I have known them since childhood, the effective faces of the beauties photographed in black and white, and the stories that are so that you never know who you feel more sorry for, the poet or with his muses. But none of the women seem to fit this poem. The relationship with his then lover was two years old and almost finished, while the poem suggests the possible beginning of a love. Another woman from this period wanted von Block nothing less than the meaning of life, but he refused to reciprocate the sixteen-year-old girl's infatuation,and in another poem demanded that she flee from him and the poisoned atmosphere of the Petersburg bohemian circles. The mutual erotic tension was based on an ideological desperation and far from the carefree ease that breathes in this Wintersday poem, which incidentally belongs to the first Russian free verse.