Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice.
Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice. Profound, poetic, and deeply personal, this attraction was immortalized in his 1989 essay Watermark.
In this work, Venice emerges not only as a city of exile and reflection but as a transcendent, metaphysical experience. For Brodsky, it was more than just a destination; it was a realm where time dissolved into water and language found its most lyrical expression.
Exiled from Russia and adrift in the West, Brodsky discovered in Venice a sanctuary of silence and introspection, a place that mirrored his own melancholic and timeless inner landscape. His annual visits to the lagoon city became rituals of renewal, culminating in Watermark – a poetic love letter to Venice and a mosaic of 48 short chapters. Each recalls a specific episode from one of his many visits, written with both precision and intimacy and captures his enduring spiritual and aesthetic connection to this unique place.
Joseph Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, for his “all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.”
Finally, the post has been illustrated with images that hopefully align with Brodsky’s themes and motifs in Watermark.
In this developing series in the category of “The Literature of Venice”, we dive deeper into literary works about Venice; focusing on each chosen author’s approach , and highlighting a selection of their illuminating quotes about this historic city.
Biography
Watermark: A City Seen Through Poetry and Metaphysics
Key Themes, Motifs and Quotations
How does ‘Watermark’ compare to other works about Venice?
LINKS (internal-external)
<<< A realm where time dissolved into water and language found its most lyrical expression >>>
“Beauty, a fait accompli by definition, always defies the future,” “Every city has its form, and Venice’s is water.”
Biography – Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice.
Joseph Brodsky (b. May 24, 1940, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. (now St. Petersburg, Russia) – d. January 28, 1996, Brooklyn, New York, USA.
He grew up during World War II and educated himself by voraciously reading Russian and Western literature. By his late teens he was writing poetry in both Russian and English, marked by philosophical depth and formal precision. His early verses already revealed a restless intellect and a profound sense of exile.
In 1964, Soviet authorities arrested Brodsky for “social parasitism” after he declined a state-assigned job. His trial gained international attention, and in 1972 he was expelled from the USSR. He first moved to Vienna and later to New York, where he built a bilingual career, publishing poetry and essays while teaching at prestigious universities.
Brodsky was the first U.S. poet laureate to design a national program, to make poetry accessible to Americans of all backgrounds. His program called for the installation of poetry in airports, hotel rooms, and supermarkets around the country.
His poetry addresses personal themes and treats in a powerful, meditative fashion the universal concerns of life, death, and the meaning of existence. Despite what may be assumed from his exile, his writing was not overtly political but was instead unsettling to Soviet officials because of its overarching themes of antimaterialism and praise for individual freedom.
Brodsky’s early works, originally written in Russian, include “Stikhotvoreniya i poemy” (1965; “Verses and Poems”) and “Ostanovka v pustyne” (1970; “A Halt in the Wasteland”). These, along with other pieces, were translated by George L. Kline in “Selected Poems” (1973), which features the renowned “Elegy for John Donne.”
His key works, written in both Russian and English, include the poetry collections “A Part of Speech” (1980), “History of the Twentieth Century” (1986), and “To Urania” (1988), as well as the essays in “Less Than One” (1986). Notable posthumous publications feature the collections “So Forth” (1996) and “Nativity Poems” (2001), along with the children’s poem “Discovery” (1999). Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 for his “all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.”
His essay collection, Watermark, published in 1989, reflects his enduring fascination with Venice’s decaying charm and beauty and made up to two decades of visits, only in Winter.
In 1991 and 1992, he served as U.S. Poet Laureate, championing the importance of poetry in public life. He died in 1996 of a heart attack, leaving a legacy as a bridge between Russian and Western literary traditions.
Joseph Brodsky is buried on Isola di San Michele, the cemetery island in Venice. Interestingly, he had declined to be buried in Russia, but had left no explicit burial wishes on his death. His wife, Maria Sozzani, chose Venice’s San Michele cemetery. Once again, Brodsky was an outsider – for as a Jew, he could not be buried in the Eastern Orthodox section, so he was placed in the Protestant area. His grave lies in the Recinto Evangelico section – a serene and storied resting place that has become a pilgrimage site for admirers of his poetry.
Other renowned cultural figures include: Ezra Pound, the American poet and critic, known for his influential role in modernist poetry (and whom he disliked as a poet and also because of his work as a fascist propagandist) ; Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian ballet impresario who founded the Ballets Russes; and Igor Stravinsky, the revolutionary Russian composer of The Rite of Spring.
L. “Gondola with Reflections”. Direct and reflected light, captured at the water’s interface. R. “Sunset over a quiet canal in Cannaregio”. Brodsky returned to Venice like a pilgrim; seeking silence and aesthetic clarity.
Watermark: A City Seen Through Poetry and Metaphysics. Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice.
Few writers have captured the soul of a city with the intimacy and philosophical depth that Joseph Brodsky brought to Venice.
Each winter, beginning shortly after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1972. Brodsky returned to Venice like a pilgrim; seeking silence and aesthetic clarity. The city’s off-season emptiness, its muted light and echoing alleys; offered him a kind of spiritual solitude, a reprieve from the noise of the world.
Watermark is a lyrical meditation on Venice, rendered in prose that often feels like poetry. Composed during around two decades of Brodsky’s winter visits to the city, it was published in 1989 and released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States.
It’s not a conventional travelogue but a poetic essay that blends memory, place, and philosophical reflection. Brodsky’s prose evokes Venice as both a physical and metaphysical space – a mirror of time, identity, and artistic consciousness.
In Watermark, he writes not as a tourist but as a poet in exile, attuned to the city’s rhythms and its resistance to modernity. Venice, with its decaying beauty and suspended temporality, becomes a mirror for Brodsky’s own meditations on mortality, memory, and the passage of time.
His prose glides like a gondola through fog – lyrical, elliptical, and rich with metaphor. The essay is less a travelogue than a love letter to a city that defies definition – a place where architecture becomes thought, and water becomes language. Brodsky’s Venice is a city of thresholds: between land and sea, past and present, presence and absence. To read Watermark is to enter a space where poetry and place converge, where the physical dissolves into the metaphysical. A place where time dilates and the self dissolves into reflection.
“Classic view from the Molo across the Basin, to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore at Sunset”. The embodiment of timeless beauty
Key Themes, Motifs and Quotations. Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice.
1. Venice as a Metaphysical Landscape
Brodsky’s Venice is not merely a city, it’s a state of mind. He visits only in winter, when the fog and silence strip the city of its tourist veneer. This seasonal choice reflects his preference for introspection and solitude. Venice becomes a mirror for the soul, a place where time slows and reflection deepens.
- “Venice is a winter city of cold water and colder stone, haunted by echoes and reflections”
- “I go there in winter because it looks for me without any pretence, when the lagoon folds itself in sleep.”
- reflections.”
- “Venice is the city of two-dimensional but not of two-dimensional vision. In the rest of the world you live behind your face; in Venice your face is your background.”
- “The eye in this city acquires an autonomy similar to that of a tear. The only difference is that it doesn’t sever itself from the body but subordinates it totally.”
- “A departure from this place always feels final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever,”
2. Water as Time and Consciousness
Water is the essay’s central metaphor. Canals are not just physical features but psychological conduits. They carry the weight of history, the fluidity of thought, and the inevitability of decay.
- “I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water … to watch the emergence of a new cupful of time from it.”
- “Water is the image of time itself, the element of change.” It’s mutable, reflective, and omnipresent just like memory.
- “Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals.”
- “Each canal is a ribbon that ties the present to the past, carrying both memory and anticipation on its surface.”
- “In Venice the water does not merely lap at your feet – it laps at your thoughts.”
“View of the entrance to the southern Grand Canal Maggiore in Fog”, taken from from the Campanile on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. In late Autumn and Winter, sea mists (La Nebbia) roll into Venice; caused by cold alpine air from the north meeting the warmer lagoon waters. For Brodsky – a place where memory and mist intertwine.
3. Memory and Nostalgia
Brodsky’s reflections often drift into personal memory—his childhood in Leningrad, his exile, his encounters in Venice. The city becomes a mnemonic device, triggering recollections that are both intimate and universal. He explores how physical spaces shape identity, suggesting that the city is not just a backdrop for life, but an integral part of who we are.
- “I remember one day – the day I had to leave after a month here alone … I suddenly felt: I am a cat. A cat that has just had a fish. … I was absolutely, animally happy … Yet the cat in me lingered; had it not been for the cat, I’d be climbing the walls now in some expensive institution.”
- “The city is not just a backdrop for life, but an integral part of who we are.”
- “Walking along the Riva dei Schiavoni, I sometimes feel I have already crossed these stones in another life.”
- “Venice grants me the privilege of being accommodated by my own memory: rooms and bridges become vessels for remembrance.”
4. Language and Style
His prose is densely poetic, filled with allusions, metaphors, and philosophical musings. Reading Watermark feels like conversing with “an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty interlocutor,” as one reviewer put it. The essay’s structure is nonlinear; more a mosaic of impressions than a narrative. Each passage is a vignette, a moment suspended in time.
- “The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.”
- “An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.”
- “I see Venice with my eyes closed.”
- “Words float on these canals, slosh against the stones; they sink and resurface, changed in shape and sound.”
- “My essay must be a mosaic of impressions – each fragment a note in an endless Venetian fugue.”
5. The Writer’s Vocation
Brodsky subtly weaves in reflections on the role of the writer. He speaks of “libertà negativa”, a kind of selflessness born from solitude and artistic devotion. After two weeks in Venice, he says, “You become broke and selfless, like a Buddhist monk,” suggesting that the city strips away ego and materialism, leaving only the essence of thought and language.
- “Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia … this is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long … for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen.”
- “Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility...”
- “After two weeks in Venice, you become both broke and selfless, like a Buddhist monk.”
- “Libertà negativa: the negative freedom of solitude that makes the writer at once invisible and all-seeing.”
- “Here one learns to write with absence: the absence of crowds, the absence of noise, the absence of self-importance.”
“Walls of San Marcuola Church, Cannaregio, Venice in Winter”. In Brodsky’s damp winter climate, the exposed Venetian brickwork under layer(s) of plaster stucco, often grows yellow to red, iron containing micro-organisms. In dry months, the effect seen, would be muted and far less noticeable. L. Left and centre you can make out a humanoid head and an animal-like figure weilding a club, in a backround of red, suggesting fire. The Christian symbolism of a small devotional niche (“edicole sacre“) appears under attack, suggesting the notion of “Heaven and Hell”, depicted on the walls of the church. R. Further along, you can see areas of exposed brickwork with overgrowth of micro-organisms, that suggest the island structure of Venice. The walls also clearly show previous modifications to the church, together with a newer and rather out of place, small entrance addition. In the dry seasons, these striking colour effects disappear, as the overgrowth of the organisms on the brickwork dies off turning grey, and then tends to drop off.
6. Art, Architecture, and the Sublime
Venice’s aesthetic richness – ts palazzos, bridges, and churches; becomes a canvas for Brodsky’s philosophical inquiry. He’s less interested in cataloguing sights than in exploring how beauty shapes perception. The city’s grandeur and erosion mirror the human condition: fleeting, fragile, and sublime.
- “It really does look like musical sheets, frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innumerable obbligati of bridges … the whole city … resembles a gigantic orchestra, with a restless chorus of waves, with the falsetto of a star in the winter sky.”
- “In the morning this light breasts your windowpane … ‘Depict! Depict!’ it cries to you … Perhaps art is simply an organism’s reaction against its retentive limitations.”
- “The upright lace of Venetian façades … and the anarchy of water that spurns the notion of shape.”
- “Venice’s palaces are graveyards of their own glory: you can almost hear bricks whispering their vanished grandeur.”
- “The city is a canvas painted by decay, every façade a testament to beauty’s imperanence.”
- “To walk beneath these arches is to feel history arch back at you, as solemn and vast as a cathedral.”
How does ‘Watermark’ compare to other works about Venice?
Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark stands apart in the rich tradition of literary portrayals of Venice. While many writers have romanticized or dramatized the city, Brodsky’s approach is more introspective, metaphysical, and deeply personal. Here’s how Watermark compares to other notable works:
Brodsky vs. Henry James: Mystery and Memory
In works like The Aspern Papers and Italian Hours, Henry James portrays Venice as a city of faded elegance and psychological complexity, filled with secrets, aging nobility, and moral uncertainty. Brodsky, on the other hand, views Venice not as a backdrop for a story but as a reflection of the soul, focusing on its metaphysical essence rather than narrative. Both authors explore Venice as a city of memory, with James emphasizing suspenseful storytelling and Brodsky embracing lyrical introspection.
James: “Venice is a city one loves to dream about.” Brodsky: “Every city has its form, and Venice’s is water.”
Brodsky vs. Lord Byron: Romanticism and Decay
Lord Byron depicted Venice in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a “strange dream upon the water,” evoking a city of sensuality, decay, and poetic melancholy. Brodsky, on the other hand, embraced Venice’s fading grandeur with a stoic and almost spiritual reverence, focusing on silence, solitude, and the passage of time during his winter visits. While Byron’s Venice is dramatic and impassioned, Brodsky’s is reflective, philosophical, and devoid of spectacle.
Brodsky vs. Thomas Mann: Death and the Sublime
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice portrays the city as a symbol of aesthetic obsession and moral decay, with the protagonist’s downfall reflecting Venice’s stifling heat and deterioration. Brodsky, while also focused on mortality, sees beauty in the city’s erosion, adopting a tone that is more accepting and even celebratory of its fleeting nature. Both works explore death, but Mann’s approach is tragic and psychological, while Brodsky’s is poetic and transcendent.
What Makes Watermark Unique?
Its form is that of a prose poem or reflective essay, avoiding the structure of a novel or narrative. His many visits were made in Winter emphasizing its solitary charm, while many associate Venice with the lushness of spring or summer. His tone is stoic, lyrical, and contemplative, steering clear of dramatic or romantic overtones.
“The canals whisper in winter, their voices muted by the cold air that settles like a veil over Venice. The city, stripped of its usual throng, stands austere and unembellished, its solitude amplified by the season. Frost traces delicate patterns on the windows of ancient palazzos, echoing the intricate lacework of time’s passage. The stones, damp and slick underfoot, reflect the pewter sky, turning the streets into mirrors of somber beauty. Gondolas drift, not as romantic vessels but as solitary figures cutting through the gray waters, their silence profound. Winter reveals Venice’s bones—the strength beneath the ornament, the melancholy beneath the charm. Here, in the off-season’s embrace, the city sighs with the weight of history, inviting reflection rather than revelry. It is a place to walk alone, to hear your thoughts mingling with the lapping water, to feel the stoic beauty of a world pared down to its essence. Venice in winter does not dazzle; it resonates, a quiet hymn to endurance and grace“.
LINKS (internal–external)
In this developing series in the category of “The Literature of Venice”, we dive deeper into literary works about Venice; focusing on how each chosen author tackles common themes, and highlighting their most illuminating quotes about the city.
The Literature of Venice (Introduction)
Henry James and the Allure of Venice
See my unique “Depicting Venice” series of composite images and learn how they were conceived and made. The are several ways to order the images into a block. The fascination is in its unpredictability.
“Depicting Venice – Ian Coulling”
Photographing Venice – Transforming decaying walls into art.
Venice – Great Poetry and Images
55 MINS. VIDEO Joseph Brodsky: A Maddening Space.
GoodReads: Joseph Brodsky Quotes (Author of Watermark)
Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice
Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice Joseph Brodsky’s Love for Venice