Poem found here: Reading Anna Karenina
More about the Poet: Karina Borowicz
I haven't read Anna Karenina. Does this make this analysis pretty useless, most likely. These are my thoughts and analysis of a poem, opinions not fact.
I'm reading two different narratives -- the constructive narrative of the author Tolstoy, and the attempt to help by Karenina. But something is incomplete in both their process to make a complete failure.
Tolstoy's story -- middle aged man apprenticing himself to be a boot maker and the line that sticks out to me is, "Blisters, he knew, are holier than ink stain." This metaphor intertwines physical painful but prideful badges of hard work "blisters" versus the overthought, quickened carelessness of "ink stain." Both symbolizes, to me, the pains of creation and the happiness of the failures of it. So when "The boots were ugly and they pinched." I expected a contrast.
But Karenina is not portrayed as a foil to Tolstoy. "Yet she copied Karenina by hand / how many times? It was his words he loved," The fantasy, the story he created for her. In real life, it seems he cannot please Karenina, but the fantasy world he makes for her through word, "the page's purity" is what she wants.
The way the poem pads on that words are the only this Karenina desires, the more that Tolstoy and Karenina come of as imperfect working to be perfect and never achieving it -- a Sisyphean ideal on both desire: physical or fantasy.
"If he were a man made only / of words she'd give her whole self to him."
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