So, we'll go no more a roving the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find 'the sword wearing out the scabbard,' though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine." The poem seems to have been suggested in part by the refrain of a Scottish song known as "The Jolly Beggar." The Jolly Beggar was published in Herd's "Scots Songs" in 1776, 41 years before Byron's letter, and goes partially
The Bronze Horseman (poem) is male and the Neva female. Higher authority is represented most clearly by Peter. What is more, he represents it in a way which sets him apart from the mass of humanity and even (so Pushkin hints, as we shall see) from such run-of-the-mill autocrats as Alexander I. Only in the first twenty lines of the poem does Peter appear as a living person.The action then shifts forward abruptly by a hundred years, and the rest of the poem is set in a time when Peter is obviously long since dead. Yet despite this we have a sense throughout of