To All and Everything
Read 'To All and Everything' by 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
No.
It can’t be.
No!
You too, beloved?
Why? What for?
Darling, look -
I came,
I brought flowers,
but, but... I never took
silver spoons from your drawer!
Ashen-faced,
I staggered down five flights of stairs.
The street eddied round me. Blasts. Blares.
Tires screeched.
It was gusty.
The wind stung my cheeks.
Horn mounted horn lustfully.
Above the capital’s madness
I raised my face,
stern as the faces of ancient icons.
Sorrow-rent,
on your body as on a death-bed, its days
my heart ended.
You did not sully your hands with brute murder.
Instead,
you let drop calmly:
“He’s in bed.
There’s fruit and wine
On the bedstand’s palm.”
Love!
You only existed in my inflamed brain.
Enough!
Stop this foolish comedy
and take notice:
I’m ripping off
my toy armour,
I,
the greatest of all Don Quixotes!
Remember?
Weighed down by the cross,
Christ stopped for a moment,
weary.
Watching him, the mob
yelled, jeering:
“Get movin’, you clod!”
That’s right!
Be spiteful.
Spit upon him who begs for a rest
on his day of days,
harry and curse him.
To the army of zealots, doomed to do good,
man shows no mercy!
That does it!
I swear by my pagan strength -
gimme a girl,
young,
eye-filling,
and I won’t waste my feelings on her.
I'll rape her
and spear her heart with a gibe
willingly.
An eye for an eye!
A thousand times over reap of revenge the crops'
Never stop!
Petrify, stun,
howl into every ear:
“The earth is a convict, hear,
his head half shaved by the sun!”
An eye for an eye!
Kill me,
bury me -
I’ll dig myself out,
the knives of my teeth by stone — no wonder!-
made sharper,
A snarling dog, under
the plank-beds of barracks I’ll crawl,
sneaking out to bite feet that smell
of sweat and of market stalls!
You'll leap from bed in the night’s early hours.
“Moo!” I’ll roar.
Over my neck,
a yoke-savaged sore,
tornados of flies
will rise.
I'm a white bull over the earth towering!
Into an elk I’ll turn,
my horns-branches entangled in wires,
my eyes red with blood.
Above the world,
a beast brought to bay,
I'll stand tirelessly.
Man can’t escape!
Filthy and humble,
a prayer mumbling,
on cold stone he lies.
What I’ll do is paint
on the royal gates,
over God’s own
the face of Razin.
Dry up, rivers, stop him from quenching his thirst! Scorn him!
Don’t waste your rays, sun! Glare!
Let thousands of my disciples be born
to trumpet anathemas on the squares!
And when at last there comes,
stepping onto the peaks of the ages,
chillingly,
the last of their days,
in the black souls of anarchists and killers
I, a gory vision, will blaze!
It’s dawning,
The sky’s mouth stretches out more and more,
it drinks up the night
sip by sip, thirstily.
The windows send off a glow.
Through the panes heat pours.
The sun, viscous, streams down onto the sleeping city.
O sacred vengeance!
Lead me again
above the dust without
and up the steps of my poetic lines.
This heart of mine,
full to the brim,
in a confession
I will pour out.
Men of the future!
Who are you?
I must know. Please!
Here am I,
all bruises and aches,
pain-scorched...
To you of my great soul I bequeath
the orchard.
To All and Everything Summary and Analysis
Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem moves like a public outcry and a private confession at once. It begins in the wreckage of a love affair, with the abandoned lover stumbling out into the street, but the emotional wound quickly expands into something far larger: a furious indictment of betrayal, hypocrisy, cruelty, and the social order that tolerates them. What starts as the shock of rejection becomes a roaring monologue in which personal pain is converted into revolt.
The poem's progression is deliberately volatile. The voice swings from wounded intimacy to prophetic menace, from self-mocking grandiosity to apocalyptic imagery, and then finally to a solemn appeal to the future. The speaker imagines himself as a martyr, a rebel, an avenger, even a beast or force of nature, yet these masks do not fully conceal the raw hurt beneath them. The closing gesture is crucial: after all the rage and theatrical defiance, the poem turns outward toward later generations, offering them not revenge but the spiritual harvest of his suffering. That tension between destructive anger and generative self-giving gives the poem its strange, powerful shape.
Tone in To All and Everything
Mayakovsky's tone is fierce, theatrical, and repeatedly self-dramatizing, but it also carries flashes of tenderness, shame, and prophetic seriousness. The mood for the reader is turbulent and unstable: one moment the poem feels like a quarrel shouted in the street, the next like a visionary speech rising above the city, and then like a bleak confession offered to history. That contrast between personal heartbreak and monumental rage creates a tense emotional pressure that never fully settles.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in To All and Everything
- Rejection and betrayal - The poem begins with intimate abandonment, and the speaker experiences romantic rejection as an existential blow that shatters his sense of order and trust.
- Rage as self-defense - Fury becomes the speaker's shield against humiliation; he inflates his pain into violent invective so that grief will not remain helpless.
- Love and cruelty - The poem keeps returning to the paradox that the deepest feelings can produce both devotion and bitterness, making love look inseparable from injury.
- Prophetic rebellion - The speaker casts himself as a defiant figure standing against false piety, social contempt, and moral complacency.
- Martyrdom and sacrifice - Religious images of suffering suggest that the speaker sees his own pain as part of a larger pattern of human cruelty and sacrifice.
- Art as legacy - The final address to future generations turns personal anguish into inheritance, suggesting that poetry can survive suffering and pass something on.
- Violence and transformation - The speaker repeatedly imagines himself changing shape, which makes anger feel like a force that remakes identity rather than merely expressing it.
Literary Devices in To All and Everything
- Free verse - The unrhymed, irregular lines create a jagged emotional rhythm that fits the poem's outbursts, pauses, and sudden shifts of feeling.
- Apostrophe - Direct address to the beloved, to God, to future people, and to imagined enemies gives the poem the feeling of a public confrontation.
- Hyperbole - The speaker's emotions are intentionally enlarged to extreme proportions, making personal hurt feel monumental and almost cosmic.
- Metaphor - The poem repeatedly turns feeling into bodily, animal, or natural images, allowing psychological states to become visible and physical.
- Allusion - References to Christ, Don Quixote, and Razin place the speaker within a tradition of suffering, idealism, and rebellion.
- Repetition - Recurrent cries and commands intensify the poem's urgency and make the voice sound incantatory, as if it cannot stop itself.
- Personification - The city, sky, sun, and night behave like living presences, enlarging the emotional landscape around the speaker.
- Imagery - Harsh street scenes, scorching light, and bodily pain create a world where inner and outer violence mirror one another.
Symbolism in To All and Everything
- Flowers - They suggest tenderness and the speaker's attempt at reconciliation, which is immediately undercut by accusation and loss.
- The drawer and silver spoons - This domestic detail symbolizes suspicion, false accusation, and the humiliating triviality of the conflict.
- Stairs - The five flights down mark the speaker's descent from intimacy into public turmoil and emotional exile.
- Ancient icons - The comparison links suffering to sanctity, suggesting severity, endurance, and a nearly religious intensity of feeling.
- Don Quixote - The reference symbolizes idealistic delusion mixed with heroic self-image, hinting that the speaker knows his own pose is exaggerated.
- Christ - Christ stands for suffering, burden, and the cruelty of bystanders who mock pain instead of relieving it.
- Razin - The outlaw figure evokes rebellion against authority and the speaker's desire to turn personal anguish into a larger insurgent legend.
- The orchard - The final gift symbolizes abundance, poetic inheritance, and the possibility that suffering can be transformed into something fruitful for the future.
Historical Context of To All and Everything
Mayakovsky was a leading figure in Russian Futurism, a movement that rejected inherited literary decorum in favor of speed, shock, urban energy, and a new poetic language suited to modern life. His work often combines public performance with emotional extremity, and this poem fits that pattern through its abrupt line breaks, forceful declarations, and dramatic shifts in scale.
Its references to religion, rebellion, the city, and collective future place it within the revolutionary atmosphere of early twentieth-century Russian literature, when poets were arguing not only about style but about the role of art in a rapidly changing society. The poem's mix of personal crisis and social rage reflects that broader modernist tendency to turn private anguish into a statement about history, power, and the fate of human beings in an impersonal world.
Poems Similar to To All and Everything
- A Cloud in Trousers - Vladimir Mayakovsky
- The Backbone Flute - Vladimir Mayakovsky
- The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot
- I, Too - Langston Hughes
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T. S. Eliot