Home › Literature › Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s When the Weather Clears

Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s When the Weather Clears

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 9, 2025

Boris Pasternak
When the Weather Clears

A dish-like lake, serene and spacious,
Converging stormclouds overhead
And there, beyond, the alpine glaciers,
Lustrous and stark, sublime and dread.

The lighting alters and the woods
Go through a constant change of color,
Now burning, now beneath a hood
Of heart-oppressing, ash-like dolour.

When at the end of rainy days
The heavy clouds abruptly pass
What festive blue the sky displays
And how triumphant looks the grass.

The wind dies down, the distance clears,
Bright sunshine floods the hills and plains
And then the foliage appears
Like paintings seen through stained-glass panes.

So from illuminated chapel-windows
Saints, hermits, tsars and bishopry
Each in his brightly shining nimbus
Look out upon eternity.

I too am sometimes blessed to hear them,
The distant echoes of the choir,
As if inside a vast cathedral
The earth’s expanse in grand attire.

My world, my universe, my nature,
Your livelong service to the end
With a believer’s palpitation,
With tears of gladness I’ll attend.

The poems in this volume, Pasternak’s posthumously published last collection, were written shortly after those published as The Poems of Dr. Zhivago, and the two books are similar in tone: meditative and devotional.

A mood and a premise, rather than a story or cycle, structure this final grouping. The 41 poems express many of Pasternak’s characteristic themes: explorations of the sources of creativity and the role of the poet and his work in society, and they explore the relationship between God and humankind.

Although the late poems are like the early poems in presenting nature imagery, this final book differs in the near absence of passionate love poems. The passion of these poems is instead a hunger for personal and artistic genuineness.

“Fame,” for example, rejects renown as a suitable artistic goal, and “In All My Ways” proclaims authentic life to be the end of the artist. “Wind: Four Fragments on Blok” celebrates the power of Aleksandr Blok, who is as much a force of nature as the wind from which the poem takes its title, for social and academic acclaim, according to Pasternak, did not generate Blok’s greatness.

Several poems are based on the poet’s life, as “Wind” is. “In Hospital” describes the sensations of an old man in a medical ward and draws on incidents from Pasternak’s heart attack in 1952. The speaker tells what he sees as he is taken into a crowded hospital and left alone; this agony, the man comes to understand, is a part of God’s love and wisdom.

Another loosely autobiographical composition, “Bacchanalia,” meditates on authentic experience, as does “In All My Ways.” This vaguely narrative work begins with its speaker passing a church in a snowstorm so heavy that it keeps people from seeing one another. His destination is the theater, where Maria Stuart, a play Pasternak translated, is being staged.

The Scots queen, like the people at church, knows that loss is the measure of life. At the party that follows the performance, the speaker meets a young dancer with whom he enjoys a brief and intense connection. This momentary and authentic union binds them as if they were blood relatives, even though the activities of the morning remove the traces of the night before.

“Bacchanalia” is diverse in its images but unified in its quiet reflective tone, just as the book as a whole is diverse yet unified. This last group of Pasternak’s poems serves both as his aesthetic manifesto and his artistic testimony.

Bibliography
Dyck, J. W. Boris Pasternak. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Gifford, Henry. Pasternak: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Pasternak, Boris. In the Interlude: Poems 1945–1960. Translated by Henry Kamen. London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Rudova, Larissa. Understanding Boris Pasternak. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.