Most gratifying to my dreams
Beautiful monsters of China.
The dragon is the lord of the sun and spring,
The unicorn is an emblem of perfection,
And the phoenix is the image of a royal wife,
A fusion of power, brilliance and bliss.
I love a monotonous dream
In the creations of Chinese artists,
Beauty frozen like frost,
Like the frost of dreams that sparkles without melting.
Symmetry is their basic law.
They draw the distance - like an ascent,
And it’s sweet to me that their terrible dragon -
Not a hellish spirit, but a symbol of pleasure.
And the wonderful refinement of tones,
Fractured in the difference of consonants,
Penetration into the mystery of the fundamentals,
Azure in azure, red on red!
And indifference to the image of people,
Predilection for animal species,
Weaving into a strict knot of all passions,
The fire of the mind sliding through the paintings!
But more than all this, they have
I love the space of lyrical heat.
I love to comprehend through a light, gentle verse
The boundless despair of peace.
To ancient manuscripts at a late hour
Feeling a common calling,
I was rummaging between the scrolls - and just
Chwang-Sang-ga read the story.
There is a vague someone there - I don’t know who -
Dropped words of sadness and oblivion:
"The Great Nothing is senseless,
In it, you and I flash for a moment.
The night passes - and light breathes in the grove,
Two birds, huddled together, slept nearby,
But with the brilliance of the day that friendship is no more,
And each one flies to its own delights.
Behind the darkness is life, behind the cold is April,
And again the dark cold of expectation.
I will break the melodious pipe.
I'm going to the West, my dreams are dead.
The insensitive Great Nothing
Earth and sky are the vault of a silent temple.
I sleep quietly - I am the same and no one,
My soul is the airiness of incense.”
<Февраль 1900>
Detailed analysis of Balmont's poem "Great Nothing"
In February 1900, one of the most interesting lyrical works of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was born - “The Great Nothing”, which in fact can hardly be called a poem. “The Great Nothing” is considered a microcycle consisting of two works: “My soul is a deaf all-god temple” and “To ancient manuscripts...”. They are more often published together than separately, but many people mistake them for one poem consisting of two parts.
This lyrical work is part of the “Consciousness” cycle and was first published in the collection of poems “Let’s Be Like the Sun” in 1903. Konstantin Balmont dedicated both “The Great Nothing” and the entire collection to his friends. The poem was written under the influence of that period of the poet’s life when Balmont became interested in Chinese and mythology.
Analyzing this lyrical work line by line, first of all let’s pay attention to the title. "The Great Nothing" is a concept in Song era Chinese mythology, which is discussed in the poem:
The insensitive Great Nothing
In it, you and I flash for a moment...
The insensitive Great Nothing
Earth and Heaven are the vault of a silent temple.
The Great Nothing in Chinese mythology is a symbol of the Great Emptiness, eternity, and the goal of knowledge.
In terms of genre, both poems of the microcycle "The Great Nothing" represent different genres of lyric poetry: "My soul is a deaf, all-god temple..." is classified as an ode, since it contains motifs of sublimity, triumph and praise, while "To ancient manuscripts ...." is an elegy with elements of sadness.
The oriental theme, the theme of beauty and harmony of images of Chinese mythology are leading in the poems “The Great Nothing”:
I love a monotonous dream
In the creations of Chinese artists...
The theme of admiration for Chinese culture is conveyed by various literary means in the texts of both poems. For example, in the first poem the author uses images mythical monsters East, to show “predilection for animal species”:
Dragon, lord of the sun and spring,
Unicorn, emblem of perfection,
And the phoenix, the image of the royal wife,
A fusion of power, brilliance, and bliss.
Konstantin Balmont creates wonderful work, turning to mythological subjects and images. Konstantin Balmont admires these “beautiful monsters” - this is what the poet himself calls the images of creatures from myths, using the technique of an oxymoron, which emphasizes the unusual attitude towards the characters of legends, their brightness as heroes. Oxymoron is used by the poet several times in the lyrical work to show the beauty of contrast oriental culture, and it looks and sounds undoubtedly beautiful, unusual: a terrible dragon is a symbol of pleasure, in a different consonant, despair of peace.
In the lyrical work of Konstantin Balmont "The Great Nothing" epithets are used several times, giving the word emotionality, sonority and a vivid description: frozen beauty, marvelous sophistication of tones, light gentle verse, dark cold.
The author uses all kinds of comparisons to express liveliness, drawing a parallel with beautiful China: Beauty frozen like frost/Like the frost of dreams that sparkles without melting, the distance is like ascent.
It is impossible not to notice the numerous personifications in both parts of the poem “The Great Nothing”. By reviving everyday things and objects, Konstantin Balmont shows their irreplaceable role in the culture of the East, their beauty. Thanks to the personifications with which almost every phrase is imbued, the lines of the work literally breathe life:
My soul is a deaf all-god temple,
Shadows breathe there, growing dimly.
Most gratifying to my dreams...
... Beauty frozen like frost...
...The fire of the mind sliding through the paintings!..
...Night passes, and light breathes in the grove...
...I'm going to the West, my dreams are dead...
The poems of the microcycle "The Great Nothing" are written in iambic pentameter, this gives dynamism and sonority to the lyrical works of Konstantin Balmont. Masculine rhyme lyrical work gives it some melodiousness. The method of communication is cross rhyme.
The lyrical hero of Balmont's poems in the first part talks about the incredible beauty of Chinese culture, its myths, artists and creativity in general. Here admiration and solemnity are easily revealed. The second part of the work “The Great Nothing” shows the reader lyrical hero on the other hand, he reflects philosophically on the Great Emptiness, on eternity, on the cycle of life. The conclusions of these arguments are the main ideas of the poems.
In the work of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont, the microcycle “Great Nothing” occupies, perhaps, one of most important places, which, unfortunately, cannot be said about the place of the work in Russian literature as a whole.
// / Problems and style of Balmont’s works
Poetry Silver Age created only bright creative personalities, among whom is Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont. This man brought a lot to the world with his hard work. world literature. He is a poet, an essayist, and a translator. Balmont lived in times Soviet Union, but his work was far from custom-made, serving the good of the party, but deeply individual. For this reason, the author’s activities were not particularly recognized by the authorities. But the author’s melodic, mysterious poems reached the hearts of many people. Literary heritage Balmont is impressive - 35 lyrical collections and 20 books. The author wrote a lot, but, surprisingly, in a light style. It is also interesting that he never “squeezed” poetic lines out of himself, and practically did not correct the poems. Poetry was easily born in his head and simply transferred to paper. This is a sign of real talent.
The style of Balmont's works is as individual as he himself. Being a charismatic, bright personality, the poet made a deep impression, especially on women. Hence his numerous novels, although he still considered one woman - his second wife - to be his muse.
Start literary path Balmont's work is marked by a certain inheritance of the romantic style with its characteristic signs of sadness, loneliness, and melancholy. In the future, the author will become one of the most important figures in the development of Russian symbolism. This trend in literature reflected the poet’s worldview. He believed that the world could be understood through sensations, relying on the first movement of the soul, and not as a result of analysis or rational reasoning. According to Balmont, realists are too attached to reality, which serves as a creative anchor, while symbolists see a dream in life and go beyond the boundaries of the tangible.
The volumes of poems “Silence” and “In the Boundless” are significant during the period of Balmont’s formation as a symbolist poet.
The poet’s author’s style also lies in the fact that his “I” is not identified exclusively with himself, but seems to be socialized. That is why Balmont’s lyrics are so heartfelt, connected with associating oneself with others. The author's poems are filled with light and energy, which are transmitted to the reader.
When Balmont's talent reached its apogee, his creativity acquired the author's optimism, sunshine, and fieryness.
The language of Balmont’s works is rich in intonation, it is similar to music, painting, and also evokes many shades of mood in people.
Balmont's "psychological lyrics" are full of hints and individual symbols. His poems about women are especially interesting. The author's first marriage was unsuccessful, so his attitude towards women was controversial. In this he was close to another poet - Charles Baudelaire. Balmont expressed this in his poem “To Baudelaire.” For Baudelaire, a woman is an angel and a demon; for Balmont, she is “a child accustomed to playing.”
When creating poetry, the poet used the musical and onomatopoeic properties of speech. For example, in the poem “Horses of Storms,” the frequent use of the sound “r” is reminiscent of thunder.
Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont is a special Russian poet, whose poetry of symbols never ceases to amaze readers.
IN highest degree uneven. Along with poems that are captivating with the musical flexibility of their sizes, the richness of their psychological range, from the most delicate shades to passionate energy, the courage and freshness of their ideological content, you often find in him stanzas that are wordy and unpleasantly noisy, even dissonant , which are far from poetry and reveal breakthroughs and failures in rational, rhetorical prose. In general, there is a lot of unnecessary stuff in his books, too a large number of words; it is necessary to make a selection from them, to instill in the author the rules of aesthetic economy; if he had not been so wasteful and so hospitable to himself, it would have been much better for both us and him; a shortened Balmont would have more clearly demonstrated his high merits.
Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont, photo from the 1880s.
The instability and incompleteness of his skill is probably explained by the fact that, in the eyes of the poet, as he himself says in the poem “Twist”,
Thoughts move alive,
Like a sketch of a nomadic cloud,
Always a little bit wrong.
When grammar is drunk
Without violating the measure, -
The soul is carried up like a whirlwind
Into those ghostly spheres
Where in the dance are all sizes...
It’s not only Balmont’s grammar that is drunk, and therefore the structure of his capricious lyre is not maintained: the author is drunk with words, intoxicated by their sound beauty. He listens to them rapturously, he weaves them into his favorite “melody”, strings a necklace of beautiful or artificial aliterations, rings them, plays - sometimes a flute is heard, sometimes like a piano... Waterfalls and cascades flow, wildly and thunderously fall from a height or cross in “a trickle, a trickle” and slow lines freeze in some quiet inner Amsterdam, in the elegiac peace of a backwater, and then you hear how “a string breaks invisibly from heaven to earth.” Or in the melancholy of the Polovtsian steppes
The sound of the zurna rings, rings, rings, rings,
The stems are ringing, the feather grass is singing, singing, singing,
The sickle of times burns, through a dream it burns, burns,
The tearful moan grows, grows, grows, grows.
But since poetry is something other than Balmont’s timpani, flutes and violins, since words are not only sounds, then, often neglected by our writer in their logical nature, in their ideological nature, they take revenge for this by creating something unintelligible and unnecessary, some kind of random concatenation of thoughts. For Balmont it doesn’t seem to matter, he doesn’t care what the word means, what concept it dresses in its phonetic, its airy clothing. A poet of the air, careless of meaning, he blithely allows the content to reveal itself, without his writer's help, simply from the combination of sounds that they give, form some theme in their pattern - does it matter what? Enchanted by words, hypnotized by their melodious power, he lets go of the reins and surrenders to the will of the wind, with which it is not for nothing that he so often and admiringly compares himself. “The free wind”, he does not think about Baratynsky’s saying that “the wandering wind is precisely “unwilled” and that “the law is laid down for its flying breath.”
Lawless, more in music than in thought, scattering himself in air jets wind, Balmont turns his poems into a collection of words precisely for this reason. And this definition must be accepted not only in its badness, but also in its negative sense, but also in a positive way. For the typed words can accidentally come into beautiful and deep combinations - are, in the language of the author himself, alien to the beauty of “pearls torn from the strings”? Isn’t it possible to type words just as letters are typed? In the general unity, in the republic of the world, everything is connected with each other, and words form precisely nervous system of this world; their subtle plexuses will always have some meaning, some hint of meaning; therefore, in joining one word to another, there is no need to observe special logical scrupulosity - it is enough to rely on your instinct as a poet and trust in the wisdom of the sound itself. That is why, a writer-typesetter, a stringer, Balmont could not justify every word.
Russian poets of the twentieth century. Konstantin Balmont. Lecture by Vladimir Smirnov
It is not difficult for him to pronounce them, he does not weigh them, he does not take responsibility for them. He loves his words, but does not respect them. He has idleness of speech, and he often fails in his careless handling of words and meaning. Because of the intoxication with sound, even the sincerity of confession and the authenticity of expressions become doubtful. You don’t always believe Balmont, and it seems that he is not upset by this. And if anything incomprehensible is discovered in his poems, he will refer to the fact that “the course of a living thought, like the outline of a nomadic cloud, is always slightly incorrect”... And therefore he boldly subordinates the flow of his ideas to the suggestion of sounds; if he says “leadership,” then “parenthood” will certainly come up naturally under his pen, and if a loving couple embracing is “two beauties,” then she is now “two wasps,” and if “great,” then next to it is “faceless”; even such a consonance as “since in the face” is needed... Sometimes what he does for the sake of rhyme and melody treacherously entangles him, but sometimes it helps him, contributes to the meaning; words flock together happily and amicably, words are intertwined, and in the context of the poem it sounds as beautiful as it sounds clever that “herbs are boa constrictors”; or that a tired, skeptical, inappropriate best man, holding the crown over the young bride, at the newlywed’s shoulder, “over her transparent veil,” bows “with a gloomy, inappropriate, unsuccessful dream”; or what, in " Vorone» Edgar Poe, “the curtains of purple trembling emitted a kind of babbling, trembling, babbling, filling my heart with a dark feeling,” and on the pale bust of Pallas sat, sat “an ominous, black Raven, a prophetic Raven.”
In general, Balmont does not subject himself to any self-discipline. Not the Automedon of his chariot, he, unfortunately, speaks the truth when, in Fairy Tales, he tells us how he writes poetry:
...........................................
But I don't meditate on the verse.
In vain. Poems cannot be created by reflection, but they can and should be tested. Having abandoned this, the unreflective poet discovered in himself a fatal lack of artistic stinginess and artistic rigor. Not restrained, not at all a classic, he loosened his words and often chooses and especially connects them with each other - without internal necessity. His words and their combinations are interchangeable, and sometimes they do not stand up to close scrutiny and demanding criticism. And the bad thing is that they have to be explained and defended, that they do not speak for themselves. This vagueness and fundamental unjustification of many of Balmont’s works is also due to the fact that he makes magnificent promises, but fulfills less than he promises. His own herald, he seems to precede himself and very loudly trumpets the sonorous fanfare of his prefaces and words, characterizes himself, here and there proclaims his artistic credo. But it is so general that it becomes meaningless, and its poetic formulas, too broad, do not commit to anything. He generally loves broad scope, splendor, luxury, or panache, so that all this is even tiring and almost borders on bad taste. The poet abuses precious stones, all kinds of brightness; Meanwhile, he could do without it - it would be tasteless to illuminate the Rhine Falls with sparklers. Jewels and an abundance of colorful spots invade his paintings, which should enchant precisely with their unpretentiousness and simplicity:
Our North is more beautiful than Egypt.
Well. The bucket is ringing.
Sweet clover sways.
Chrysolite burns in the heights.
And the bright ruby of the sundress
More inviting than all the pyramids.
And the river under the roof of fog...
Oh, heart! How my heart hurts!
Do the soul of this poem and the heart, the aching heart of the poet befit, do peridots and rubies suit them? Hardly. But Balmont cannot renounce them, because he has already raised himself this way, he has accustomed his eyes and mouth to the richness of colors and expressions. Almost always he raises his voice and in this voice deliberately enhances his boldness and courage. It is sweet for him to utter “dagger words”, to rant in literature, to send challenges, even if no one touches him; he mints, commands in verse, one word from another, separates one pair of words from another with energetic dots; he makes noise, he almost screams, he gets excited and exclaims abruptly. Balmont is not only lyrical - he is immodest and talks a lot about himself. Poet outwardly increasing, admirer capital letters, he inspires himself with geographical and other exoticism, and one must consider grave sin on his part, his usual proclamations: “I hate humanity, I am running away from it in a hurry” (and yet haste did not keep him from pleonasm...); “I have never been like everyone else”; “This is a terrible curse, this is horror: to be like everyone else”: he cannot understand that there is nothing terrible in this similarity with everyone else, he is not able to accept simplicity, rise to it, cannot rise to the ordinary. Familiar with the sun, moon and elements, at home among them and “amongst the elemental chaos”, experiencing the gravity of height and beauty, he does not penetrate deeply and lovingly into everyday life and does not sanctify it, as befits a poet. Spaniard, hidalgo, caballero, lover of scarlet and spice, singer of double flowers, carnations and poppies, he not only has a temperament, but, unfortunately, also talks about it. In different ways he repeats his famous “I want to be daring, I want to be bold,” and these statements, and not manifestations of self-will, expose his lack of real courage and real audacity. He wants to be brave more than he really is brave. He glorifies albatrosses, sea and other robbers - he himself would be flattered to be known as the robber of Russian poetry, but one feels that he is not as terrible as he portrays himself. The theoretical ataman, the bandit of poems, Balmont does not have a calm and confident strength; he is brave, threatens that he will be an executioner, but rather he is meek and thinks with horror about the guardsmen, laments that “as soon as he took a step in the forest, an ant was crushed”; he is amused by fairy tales and various birds, and a white snowflake, and flax, and cornflowers in rye, and blue, and cute miniatures. True, all this small and sweet stuff just amuses him, and it’s not that he loves it innocently. He definitely does all this credit. He somehow weaned himself from simplicity, quite successfully instilled in himself all kinds of unusualness, deliberately left behind that northern sky, under which I once sang simpler and more Russian songs. Now his statements are sincere that he loves the “creaking of the universal axes” in the world; he really fell in love with freaks, hunchbacks, “crooked cacti, henbane shoots,” all the stepchildren, all the stepdaughters of stepmother nature, everything that is irrational and insane, everything that is born in a wild orgy child, and horrors, and vampires, and broken lines, and the superstition of amulets, chimeras on the cathedral Notre Dame of Paris and chimeras of living reality; He gives true praise to tigers, leopards and a mysterious race of cats. He has a fiery sensuality, all impulses of voluptuousness, “thirsty at least”; Foggy with eroticism, he saw how “anemones languished drunk in the fog” and “rhododendrons, like a host of fairy skirts, swayed invitingly, a hot mouth beckoning” - and often for him “their mouths were open like grenades.” Hot, fiery things inspire him; according to his cosmogony, “the world was born out of anger,” and if he composes hymns to fire, which he likes more than anything in the world, then there is no hypocrisy in this fire worship; and if he wants to be like the sun, then he really goes towards it with all the tremors of his being. Balmont also has an accusatory fire, a fire of conscience, a fire as a reproach. In a deeply inspired autobiography, in a poetic confession “ forest fire", in places reaching Dantean horror and pathos - like a forest fire, like a "veil of an impenetrably tangled forest" it is life that is being burned that is depicted; and the poet turns to his past, he is tormented by torments of conscience, “overdue deadlines” - all this pain of life’s delays, the fatal untimeliness of our repentance, the irreparability of mental mistakes; and as the lathered horse carries the rider into the thicket of the forest, what once shone with an “airy-blue flame” now “suddenly turns into black smoke.”
Oh, the faded reality that has become a fairy tale!
Oh, butterfly wings from which the dust has been erased!..
Such lyrical revelations, however rare in Balmont and more often supplanted by the artificiality of beautiful self-hypnosis and self-deception, also show that sophistication is not innate for him and that if he searched for himself for a long time in different distances, then he can only find himself in his homeland, where he I saw that “there is a tired tenderness in Russian nature, a silent pain of hidden sadness.” But his wanderings, external and internal, general order his spirit were, if not always natural and necessary, then still legitimate, because the final settlement must overcome the instincts of wandering. It is not for nothing that the idea of twists and variability is so inherent in his poetry. Many-sided, mobile, fluid; Heraclitean “everything flows”; the wandering of clouds, which, perhaps, only somewhere “in the vicinity of Odessa”, over the “desert of scorched sands” pass “in a boring crowd”, bored, loitering vagabonds of the universe, but in general rush around the world, tireless, insatiable in their curiosity: all this captivates Balmont with the overflow of changes, and for him not only “words are chameleons,” but all life is good only in the rainbow dance of solar motes, in the play of various moments, in the eternal change of internal and external ephemera.
However, his lightness and frivolous mobility are often hampered by the fact that he is too conscious of them, that he is not at all alien to intellectualism and does not reflect only on poetry; how the burden falls on his poetry is the element of philosophical reasoning or rationality. Balmont's wind hides some kind of heaviness in its ethereal folds. Hence the awkward combination of imagery and abstraction, all these countless words with “awn” - all sorts of “revelry, mystery, pearliness, fivefoldness, explosiveness, stardom” and even “stellar milkiness”... Hence the spots of prose: for example, frequent word times in the sense if, as soon as, or “close yourself, as in a prison, in one idea,” or “dressed in a different form,” or “ brief moment can give us... the whole sky,” or “he fell asleep between the majestic mountains, amazing correct form his". Hence, as in the poem “Child,” the heartfelt and heartfelt lines, the simple cry of a father’s complaint and bewilderment:
But I can't see the pain
A child with a fading face,
Watch him clench his hands
Before the coming end...
.........................................
Watch how it fights without outcome
There is a wordless struggle in it!
No, it would be better if all nature
Locked up in black coffins.
................................
No, torture my child
I don't want, I don't want, -
these exciting verses are replaced by a verbose and pale tirade of a seemingly heavenly, higher response to human grief - and here the lethargy of meager speculation, and rhetoric, and such prose as “the last atom of the circle was still missing” upsets us... Balmont often also dries his poems in quotation marks and from two words in intricately composed words, and such turns of speech, such techniques that somehow make logical ends meet, satisfy grammar, even rhyme - but not poetry. He doesn’t feel, for example, what to say, it’s hard to say about lilies: “imbued with firm determination” - this means ruining all the poetry and all the lightness of the lily. In general, does a cloud reason, does a nightingale sing abstractions, does Balmont become bookish?
So, he does not have sufficient strength to accordingly transform a thought into his favorite sound - he does not sound thoughts, but words, or, conversely, he hears thoughts, but then the words do not sound. In his poetry there is no holistic and internally complete content, no highest organicity. Its sophistication is secondary, derivative, but its simplicity is not original; neither here nor there is it entirely natural. Only sometimes the scattered temple of his abundant words is ideally restored, and then the flickering of some truth is visible. It is wise and calm to reveal the inseparability of thought and sound, their cosmic unity, hiding somewhere in the final depths; he also failed to reveal the ultimate unity of native and foreign, ordinary and exquisite, nature and culture. But what he can do is a great joy for Russian readers. Balmont overestimates himself, but he really has values. The music of our poetry will lovingly include his sonorous name in its notes. The treasury of our subjects will still accept the bright quirks of his moods, the flow from simple to sophisticated, his homeland and exoticism, his art and even artificiality. And they will often and sweetly listen to this songbird. For there is no doubt that although he excites himself, exaggerates, distorts and as if injects some kind of anesthesia into his soul, an artificial paradise Baudelaire, but even without that there lives in him a living soul, a talented soul, and, intoxicated with words, delighted with sounds, he passionately drops them from his melodious lips. He is not strict with himself, and the wind to which he likens his poetry will carry away without a trace many, many of his unsuccessful songs and immature thoughts; but precisely because this wind will scatter his chaff, all the more beauty will forever remain from Balmont.
Based on articles by Yu. I. Aikhenvald.
“The Wounded” is one of the characteristic poems of this stage. In this work, the poet reveals the problem of the internal conflict of the individual, and therefore it rightfully belongs to philosophical lyrics. Genre: lyric poem.
The word "wounded" means having some kind of injury, but in in this case This is not about mechanical damage, but about psychological trauma:
The main theme of the poem is the conflict between a person and his inner “I”. Balmont's lyrical hero drives himself into the framework of non-existent problems, creates his own world of sadness and suffering, he cannot take a sober look at the world around him and live his life happily, enjoying every day. The following lines speak about this:
I am inseparable from this universe,
I created the world with all its suffering.
And, trembling all over from unbearable pain,
Living with yourself in captivity...
Compositionally, the work is divided into four parts (post-strophically), with the first and fifth parts consisting of 5 lines, and the second and third - 4.
This, along with repetition, speaks of the ring composition of the work.
I am struck to death by my consciousness,
I am wounded in the heart by my mind.
I am wounded to death by my mind.
It is noteworthy that pentaverse in Russian versification is usually found in the form of a limerick (a form of short poem that appeared in Great Britain, based on playing on nonsense). Traditionally, a limerick has five lines, with canonical form the end of the last line repeats the end of the first. Thus, using pentaverse in his poem, the author enhances the mood of his hero’s hopeless situation.
"Wounded" is written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme of the second and third stanzas is cross, and the first and last are of the ABAAB type. This is not the end, continued below.
Useful material on the topic
- K.D. Balmont "I caught the passing themes with a dream"
Balmont uses alternating female and male rhymes, which adds melody and smoothness to the poem.
The work widely presents metaphors (“struck by my consciousness”, “wounded in the heart by my mind”, “I myself am perishing like smoke”, “the play of shadows born in the world by me”, “life is a dream”), epithets (“ghostly sea", "unbearable pain"). The first four lines of the first stanza begin with the pronoun “I,” which appears constantly throughout the poem, 10 times to be exact. One cannot help but notice the similarities between last line first stanza (A stream of fire, I myself perish like smoke) and Latin catchphrase Consumor aliis inserviendo, which translated into Russian means “By shining on others, I burn myself.” However, unlike Latin expression, the hero of the poem “burns” not for someone. Thus, all attention in the work is focused not on the relationship between man and society, but on internal conflict lyrical hero. In addition, the line of the third stanza (There is only thought, there is a ghostly sea) is borrowed from the title of Calderon’s 17th century philosophical drama “La vida es sue&覩”, which translated means “life is a dream. Most likely this is due to the fact that Konstantin Dmitrievich was involved in translations of many works of this Spanish playwright.
(Illustration: Sona Adalyan)
Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont is considered one of the brightest representatives of Russian symbolism, but the poet began in the romantic movement, under the influence of the authoritative poet Nadson in his time, late Tyutchev and Feta. Style feature Balmont always had a relaxed lightness, airiness of his lines; the poet claimed that he wrote down his works the first time and did not redo them, “tormenting” more successful lines. Another feature of Balmont’s work and life was his light, contemplative worldview, with touches of melancholy and optimism, attention to nature and its every breath, every movement.
Blok, considered one of the founders of symbolism and an authority in this direction, described Balmont’s work as “bright and life-affirming, like spring.” In fact, it had a deep range of shades - from the fiery, triumph of summer to the autumn orphanage and hopelessness of winter.
Just such a light and airy poem, well illustrating general trend The poet's creative work was the poem "Snowflake", published in 1903 and included in the collection "Only Love".
The main theme of the poem
The theme of the poem "Snowflake" is in a broad sense The beauty of nature is in every manifestation, even as microscopic as a snowflake. IN philosophical sense can be seen in the theme of the poem life path any living creature from its blossoming and development to its departure. But the main character In the poem, the author makes a snowflake - an essentially inanimate creature that is born somewhere in the sky in a way unknown to man, turns out incredibly beautiful and harmonious, makes a slow beautiful fall and melts.
Snowflakes are “produced” by nature itself, and they are the embodiment amazing symmetry, of course, if you carefully consider each of them. In most cases, a person does not consider snow, which for him is just precipitation, often disturbing comfortable life. That’s why the poet animates his snowflake - endows it with those qualities that only a person can have:
- courage (“so pure, so bold”)
- purposefulness (“it rushes easily, asks to land”),
- the ability to feel, the ability to experience emotions, to interact with the environment (“trembles”, “tossed up”, “consoled”, “cherished by the wind”).
The poet seems to make a discovery for everyone who reads the poem: snow is millions of snowflakes, each with its own life cycle, and each is crystal clear, like a newborn baby, like an angel (symbolistic traditions are evident). Expanded personification of a snowflake, highlighting it in a stream of falling snow - the main stylistic device of this poem.
The author's emotions are light sadness. Everyone knows what happens to the snow that reaches the ground - it melts, its beauty is not noticed. Was the snowflake's mission accomplished, and is there a purpose to its existence if the fast-moving wind carries it, defenseless, to certain death? The author doesn't know this, but a bold, pure snowflake could very well inspire someone to find beauty around them.
Structural analysis of the poem
Main artistic medium, with the help of which the central image of the poem is created, is an expanded personification. Snowflake is endowed human qualities and the ability to feel, therefore all the actions that she performs fit within the framework of personification.
The composition of the poem is circular - the first stanzas are repeated in the finale, and this, firstly, emphasizes the cyclicality, the cycle of living things in nature, and secondly, it is hushed up tragic ending life of a snowflake.
The poem consists of eight quatrains. Meter - iambic with stress omitted last syllable(pyrrhic), feminine rhyme, exact. Feminine rhyme gives a special softness to the sounding lines, and the musicality is imparted to them by the sound design - the abundance of sonorous “r”, “l”, “n”.
The author's palette is light and aimed at creating an innocent, crystalline pure image. It is no coincidence that the poem is included in the collection “Only Love”, because nature is entirely love and life, and the artist is the mirror that is able to catch and reflect a beautiful phenomenon.
