LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)
“

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.

— Boris Pasternak

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades." in the context of "LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Boris Pasternak" (Quotes) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Boris Pasternak

About Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak Борис Леонидович Пастернак (10 February 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian poet and writer famous for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago. His first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it in his name in 1988.