Aleksandr Blok’s “O Spring Without End” immediately presents itself as allusive and

indicative of some notion beyond the written words. Already in the poem’s title we have
a peculiar epithet: “Spring Without End.” Of course Spring is under no natural
circumstances endless; its recurring transition into summer is a banal commonplace. So
then the modifying phrase “Without End” indicates one of two things: either something
has altered ‘Spring’ in the narrator’s conception such that its terminal nature has been
annulled, or Spring in this poem serves as a metaphor for something more rightly
understood as endless.
The first stanza confirms our latter hypothesis:

O Spring without end, without limit—

endless and limitless dream!
I recognize and salute
you, Life, with the clang of my shield!

Here we see Spring equated with no less than three different phenomena: dreams, life,
and war. The first two are direct metaphors, the word dream used as interchangeable with
Spring in the poem’s first phrase, so too with ‘Life.’ Then third we have the clang of the
narrator’s shield, which indirectly but quite suitably indicates the act of going to battle
with life, Spring, the dream. What then do these metaphors do? We see that Blok’s work
in this first stanza is not to describe similarities between worldly phenomena, but rather
to magnify three transitory occurrences: a dream, a battle, a season, so that each is
enlarged to the size of the largest phenomenon we may sensibly know: life. So then life is
not simply akin to any of these three phenomena, for it encompasses them; instead, we
might say that the impression of metonymy itself is what produces for us ‘Life,’ or even
that this life is no more that the various correspondences between these commonplace
worldly phenomena and a vaguer, divine, all-encompassing phenomenon that each of
them may evoke.
We can now look at two early essays on Symbolism, Mellarme´’s 1897 “Crisis in
Verse” and Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s “On the Reason for the Decline . . .” (1892).
Mellarme´ states explicitly that poetry must move away from mere description toward
allusion, and indeed there is not a stanza in Blok’s poem, hardly a line, that is not allusive
to a substance greater that the one concretely named. “Some pure self-expression,”
Mellarme´writes, “trumpeted heavenward with skill, awakes a palatial form—the only
inhabitable one—on whose absent stones the book closes perfectly . . . . In literature,
allusion is enough; the essence is distilled and embodied in some idea.”
Do we not see the invocation of this life-essence in Bloks poem, the “trumpeting
heavenward” of worldly images, only to complete the erection of some ideal impalpable
palace? To look at another stanza:

I welcome remote country villages

and the wells rising under the towns,
the firmament’s star-studded space
and the slaves’ bitter sweat in the mines.
Blok does not describe here the towns, the slavish work, or the heavenly expanses. What
is evoked by these disparate images is only the suggestion of their esoteric connection:
their forming a substance which is not themselves, nor even any longer composed of
them, but which is rather the abstract and supernatural conception that comes from the
recognition of their strange, simultaneous existence, a recognition whereby from the
flowers of these images, “something other than the visible petals arises musically, the
fragrant idea itself, the absent flower of all the bouquets.”
Here then we see how the symbol, as Merezhkovsky said it should, “pours from
the depths of reality.” The unsaid is the true poem; Blok’s “spring without end” seeps
through each individual image but is not entirely present in any of them. Thus we have
that Blok’s god’s name is unspoken, though we might hope to understand it as
Merezhkovsky understands symbolism, as “something that shines all the way through,
like the thin walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is burning.” And,
recognizing that in this fourth stanza we have not exactly a country village but literally
deserts in the Russian (pustynye), contrasted two words later with wells (kolodtsy)—this
contrasted opposition occurs several times in the poem)—it becomes evident that it is
precisely the disparateness of images that make them apt symbols, each infused with the
name of an unknown god.
What then is the product of this congealing of disparate images into one entity?
The poem itself. The battle alluded to is the poet’s against the often vulgar, often tortuous
natural world, but this battle, this dream, the title’s endless Spring, is welcomed—the
frustration of never quite reaching the divine, but the ecstasy and ensuing despair of the
attempt are all necessary for the poet’s creation. The final stanza:

I look and I measure your venom

with my own hatred, curses and love:
your torments, your ruin—I know them—
no matter: I welcome you, Life!

The poem welcomes the trials of life because it is only through them that he may create
his new world, So explains Bely, with his emphasis on the magic of the word, so explains
Mellarme´: “with several words the line of verse construct a completely new word . . .
and sso you feel the surprise of never having heard such a fragment of speech, whilst, at
the same time, your recollection of the object named bathes in a new atmosphere.”
Such is the task of Symbolic verse. Looking at the original Russian of these last
line produces us with even more delight in this revelation:

za muchen’ya, za gibel’—ya znayu—

bcyo ravno: prinimayu!

So our last line reads literally: “it’s all the same: I welcome you!” Despite then the
torment of the battle, we know that all life’s wounds and all its triumphs are but gristle
for the mill. They are all potential symbols to be used for the poet’s attempt to realize the
divine; all these images, from deserts to skies to labor to laughter—it’s all the same, it’s
all symbolic. What then does Blok’s life, his Spring without end, bring about? Only the
poem, only “O Spring Without End.”