[Although] Pasternak's earliest images of life are feminine images, they are not associated with human incarnations of life, but rather with the personification of abstract forces: Nature …, the Life Force or Life …, both feminine nouns. Indeed, in [My Sister, Life], personification is a favorite device used to emphasize the poet's sense of personal involvement with Nature and Life. It comes as no surprise to find love poems and nature poems addressed to Life, for Pasternak's earliest love poetry is more often dedicated to the Life Force than to a human being. The few exceptions in My Sister, Life which are addressed to a woman portray her more as an object, as another natural phenomenon, than as a female person, as a woman with whom the poet can share his emotional life. And she is always associated with Nature: she is either imagined as (and transformed into) one or more natural phenomena, or she awakens to find herself in a natural environment which she does not fully appreciate. Her human qualities are ignored or even repudiated. Furthermore, Nature rather than a human female protagonist seems to serve as Pasternak's prerequisite for love. And, at least in this collection, love can be consummated only in nature, real or imagined, for there alone the poet can be at one with life. Life, moreover, is almost always presented through nature imagery, in particular water imagery—a raindrop, spring showers, flooding, pouring, splashing, rushing, etc. (pp. 390-91)
Human love relationships, on the other hand, are portrayed primarily as means to the poet's communion with the Life Force. In the poem, "Out of Superstition,"… the poet views his beloved through the prism of nature, that is, in kissing her lips he finds "violets," in admiring her dress he hears it "chirp, like a snowdrop/To April: 'Hello!'" And, upon entering his tiny room, he finds it appears to him like "a box with a wild orange tree," its walls look brown as an "oak tree." In the final lines of this poem, the poet also comes to associate his beloved with the Life Force, for she reveals to him the essence of his own life…. Hence, in My Sister, Life, Pasternak's images of nature, life and love are intimately related. Love is presented as a means to achieving communion with Life; while nature or a natural environment is a prerequisite to love, and in turn, to communion with Life. (pp. 391-92)
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