Poetry
Дивлюсь я на небо
Not translated into English
Mykhailo Petrenko · 1841
Synopsis
A man looks at the sky and wonders why God did not give him the wings of the falcon: he would leave the earth to go, beyond the clouds, in search of his share of happiness and to ask the stars and the sun for a little tenderness. Fate has not loved him since childhood; an orphan, he is only a servant to it, a stranger to fate as to men, and only the distant sky seems to him to be his homeland.
Context
The poem was published in 1841 in the Kharkiv almanac Snip under the title Nedolia, with an epigraph from Lermontov, then in 1848 in Metlynsky's collection. In 1876, a Lviv journal presented it as an unpublished work by Shevchenko, who had copied it into his album. Set to music by Lyudmyla Aleksandrova and arranged by Vladyslav Zaremba, it became a song long believed to be a folk song; on 12 August 1962, the cosmonaut Pavlo Popovych sang it in orbit.
Who it is for
Six short quatrains, in anapaests; they are better read by listening to them, the melody having become inseparable from the text.
Prizes and reception
One of the first two songs sung in space, and one of the best known in the Ukrainian repertoire, often believed to be a folk song.
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