Summary of “Cranes”
The theme of the last war always found and continues to find its reflection in modern poetry, and every poet in his own way comprehends and experiences it, giving birth to images in which his own ideas of the war were embodied.
Rasul Gamzatov also devoted a lot of lines to the military theme. One of the most famous of his poems, which brought the poet national glory and love, was the poem “Cranes”. It is dedicated to the fallen soldiers who remained on the “bloody battlefields” of the battles of the Great Patriotic War. From the first lines of the poem the reader feels the genuine sadness and pain felt by the poet, reflecting on the fate of the dead soldiers. Pain resembling a distant and piercing crane cry…
It seems to me at times that soldiers,
From the bloody fields that have not come,
Not once in the earth did this fall,
And they turned into white cranes.
Appealed in white cranes soldiers today cry out to our
… It’s not so often and sadly We stop talking, looking at the sky.
Seeing how “a wedge of cranes flies across the sky”, the poet presents how weary soldiers are walking along the white fields. Those who after the long road of war will not be destined to return home. And the cranes in their screaming seem to be called by their names – the names of famous and unknown heroes, whose place is now not in the earthly, but in the heavenly order among the proud, majestic birds floating in the sky.
The poet feels his union with a flock of cranes and reflects that, perhaps, he himself, beyond the threshold of his life, will take his place among these white birds. He ponders that there will come a day when he will call from heaven all the people dear to him who have remained on earth, referring to their memory and heart:
A wedge flies, a wedge flies across the sky –
Flies in the fog at the end of the day.
And in that formation there is
The day will come, and with the crane pack I’ll swim in the same gray mist,
From under the sky like a bird call to All who you left on earth.
The poem “Cranes” was put to music by the composer Jan Frenkel and became a song.
This song, no doubt, can be called folk song, since there is no person who has never heard it and which it would not have impressed with its deep sadness, lyricism, wisdom of lines, beauty of images.
The poem has become a song because his lines touch the soul of anyone – and the past field of battles of a front-line soldier, in the memory of which the images of fallen friends, calling him from an endless distance like white cranes, and us, who know about war only from books and films.
The poem “Cranes” can be called a kind of requiem (divine service for the deceased) dedicated to the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. Soldiers who died in the war, but stepped into immortality, left in the memory of descendants, in our memory. And the cranes that float across the sky still call to all those who live on the earth, disturbing and filling our souls with high and bright sorrow.
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