Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

A Nereid

1799 –

1837

^{translated from the Russian by}^{Babette Deutsch}^and^{Avrahm Yarmolinsky}

Among the glaucous waves that kiss gold Tauris’ beaches
I saw a Nereid, as dawn flushed heaven’s reaches.
I barely dared to breathe, hid in the olive trees,
While the young demigoddess rose above the seas;
Her young, her swan-white breast above the waters lifting,
From her soft hair she wrung the foam in garlands drifting.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, born on June 6, 1799, in Moscow, was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic Movement.

About Alexander Pushkin

Themes

About this Poem

“A Nereid” was translated and published by Babette Deutsch and her husband, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, in Modern Russian Poetry: An Anthology (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921). In Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from around the World (Greenwood, 2016), edited by scholars Anne E. Duggan, Donald Haase, and Helen J. Callow, they write, “[Pushkin’s] interest in and deep knowledge of folk traditions, songs, lyrics, and proverbs, as well as myth, is also manifested in several poems." In their introduction to Pushkin’s poetry, Deutsch and Yarmolinsky write, “He is an over-shadowing figure [of Russian poetry], and his work is an essential part of Russia’s literary endowment.”

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

A Winter Evening

^{translated from the Russian by}^{Martha Dickinson Bianchi}

Alexander Pushkin

1910

Arion

^{translated from the Russian by Seamus Heaney}

We were all there in the boat;
Some of us tightening sail,
Some at the heave and haul
Of the oars, vessel and load
Deep surging, our passage silent,
The helmsman buoyed at the helm.
And I, taking all for granted,
Sang to the sailors.
A wind
Struck then, a boiling maelstrom.

Alexander Pushkin

2022

The Civil Power

^{translated from the Russian by Seamus Heaney}

When the great event was happening on the cross
And the racked godhead perished in extremis,
Then, at that solemn moment, on either side
Of the life-abounding tree, two women stood
Steadfast and in pain:
The Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene.
But nowadays beneath that blessed crossbar
What you see’s not holy women but two guards

Alexander Pushkin

2022

Poems

Page submenu block

A Nereid

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up