“Black Sea” Fyodor Tyutchev
Fifteen years have passed since then,
A whole series of events took place,
But faith did not deceive us,
And the Sevastopol roar
The last sound we hear is the thunder.The last and thunderous blow,
He burst out suddenly, life-giving,
The last in the harsh struggle
Now the word has only been spoken,
That is the word of the Russian Tsar.And everything that happened so recently
The blind was raised by enmity,
So brazenly, so arbitrarily -
Before the honesty of His sovereign
Everything collapsed on its own.And now - “free element” -
Our dear poet would say, -
You make noise like in the days of yore,
“And you roll blue waves,
And you shine with proud beauty!..”Fifteen years kept you
Violence in Western captivity,
You didn't give up and grumbled,
But the hour has struck - violence has fallen:
It sank like a key.Calls me again and forces me to get to work
Your native Rus' is your wave,
And to the discord that God will judge,
Great Sevastopol awakens
From an enchanted dream.And what are you doing during it?
Hid the bad weather from abuse
Into your sympathetic bosom,
You will give it to us, and without damage -
Immortal Black Sea Fleet.Yes in the heart of the Russian people
This day will be holy
He is our external freedom,
He is the Peter and Paul Vault
Will illuminate the grave canopy...
Analysis of Tyutchev’s poem “Black Sea”
A distinctive feature of Tyutchev's poetics is the abundance of foreign policy motives. Their appearance is explained by the author’s many years of diplomatic activity, as well as the originality of his worldview. The poet was convinced of the special mission of Russia, capable of uniting the Slavic peoples around itself.
The poem, which appeared in March 1871, was a poetic response to the significant success of the Russian diplomatic service. Chancellor Gorchakov achieved the abolition of the so-called neutralization, according to which Russia was prohibited from having a navy in the Black Sea. Some researchers point to the merits of Tyutchev himself, who was under Gorchakov and influenced the leader’s decisions.
The specific nature of the lyrical situation is indicated by the toponyms appearing in the title and text, as well as the chronological landmark that reveals the beginning. The last remark is complicated by a historical allusion that refers to the sad results of the Crimean War.
Miscalculations of the past forced the lyrical “we” to fight, the successful completion of which is marked by the “final blow” of the Sevastopol guns. The last word that determined the solemn picture of the present belongs to the charismatic ruler, the Russian Tsar. His image, designed in the spirit of odic traditions, is endowed with exceptional power: hostile forces that harbored aggressive ideas retreat before him. The resistance of an enemy engaged in an ideological war is metaphorically likened to the work of a builder or architect. An honest and fair royal word is capable of destroying buildings erected by daring and deceitful arbitrators.
Positive changes bring liberation and a rebirth to life. The military port and fortress, like a fairy-tale princess, awakens from an “enchanted sleep.” Pushkin’s quotes included in the analyzed text serve as a picturesque sketch illustrating Tyutchev’s philosophical ideas. The free sea element becomes a symbol of the new life of the Sevastopol fortified city, demonstrating its promising potential. The Black Sea Fleet is awarded the epithet “immortal” - not subject to “damage” and time.
The work ends with another allusion: the triumph of the present will bring peace to the soul of Emperor Nicholas I, whose death coincided with the news of the defeat of Russian forces in the Crimean campaign.
“How good you are, O night sea...” Fyodor Tyutchev
How good you are, O night sea, -
It’s radiant here, grey-dark there...
In the moonlight, as if alive,
It walks and breathes and shines...In the endless, in the free space
Shine and movement, roar and thunder...
How good it is, you are in the solitude of the night!You are a great swell, you are a sea swell,
Whose holiday are you celebrating like this?
The waves rush, thundering and sparkling,
Sensitive stars look from above.In this excitement, in this radiance,
All as if in a dream, I stand lost -
Oh, how willingly I would be in their charm
I would drown my entire soul...
Analysis of Tyutchev’s poem “How good you are, O night sea...”
The first version of the poem “How good are you, O night sea...” appeared on the pages of the literary and political newspaper Den in 1865. After publication, Tyutchev expressed dissatisfaction. According to him, the editors published the text of the work with a number of distortions. This is how the second version of the poem arose, which became the main one. Readers became acquainted with her in the same 1865 thanks to the magazine “Russian Messenger”.
The work is dedicated to the memory of Elena Alexandrovna Denisyeva, Tyutchev’s beloved, who died in August 1864 from tuberculosis. The death of the beloved woman, with whom the affair lasted for fourteen years, was extremely difficult for the poet. According to contemporaries, he did not try to hide the severe pain of loss from those around him. Moreover, Fyodor Ivanovich was constantly looking for interlocutors with whom he could talk about Denisyeva. According to some literary scholars, it is the dedication to Elena Alexandrovna that explains the lyrical hero’s address to the sea as “you” in the first quatrain. It is a well-known fact that the poet compared his beloved woman to a sea wave.
The poem is divided into two parts. First Tyutchev draws a seascape. The sea in his depiction, like nature in general, appears animated, spiritual. To describe the picture opening before the lyrical hero, personifications are used: the sea walks and breathes, the waves rush, the stars look. The second part of the work is very short. In the last quatrain, the poet talks about the feelings experienced by the lyrical hero. He dreams of merging with nature, completely immersing himself in it. This desire is largely due to Tyutchev’s passion for the ideas of the German thinker Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). The philosopher affirmed the animation of nature and believed that it has a “world soul.”
The works of Fyodor Ivanovich, dedicated to nature, in most cases represent a declaration of love for it. It seems to the poet an unspeakable pleasure to have the opportunity to observe its various manifestations. Tyutchev equally enjoys admiring a June night, a May thunderstorm, a snow-covered forest, and so on. He often expresses his attitude towards nature using exclamatory sentences expressing delight. This can be seen in the poem in question:
The sea is bathed in a dim glow,
How good you are in the solitude of the night!
Tyutchev is a difficult poet. Some of his poems seem to be a description of nature or the inner world of a person, but in fact it is a reaction to certain events in the poet’s life. This is “The Sea and the Cliff.”
At first glance, this is landscape poetry. The sea is raging, tearing, rushing, it is angry and full of rage. It seems as if hell is burning underneath him, and this makes him go on a rampage. In the first stanza there are many verbs describing the wildness of the sea, and this creates dynamism and liveliness of the picture perceived by the reader.
In the second stanza, another hero of the poem appears - the cliff. The waves hit it, making terrible, almost infernal sounds. What about the cliff? He doesn’t care about the hatred of the water element. The cliff is not captured by the evil energy of the sea. Its calmness and grandeur are described with adjectives, which only enhances the impression.
In the third stanza, the battle between an irresistible force and an immovable object continues. The waves seem to have a personal grudge against the cliff. They go at him in battle. But no matter how hard the waves hit the stone, any attack is repelled by the strength of granite.
In the fourth stanza, Tyutchev calls on the cliff to wait an hour or two. The waves will stop raging and the sea will calm down. The stone giant will still stand majestically - invulnerable, invincible. And the waves realize their defeat and turn from a howl to a gentle whisper.
What does the poem actually mean? It was written as a reaction to political events in Europe. A series of uprisings swept across countries to change the government. The event was called the “spring of nations.” And during the uprisings, words of hatred towards the Russian Empire were heard. Tyutchev could not ignore this.
The invulnerable cliff is the Russian Empire, and the crazy waves are the rebel peoples of Europe. Calling on the cliff to wait, the great poet is actually addressing Russia. But the poem “Sea and Cliff” can be read without knowing its second bottom. Being political, it is also valuable in itself as landscape poetry.
Picture for the poem Sea and Cliff
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Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev - poet-philosopher, poet-psychologist. A special feature of Tyutchev’s lyrics about nature is the poet’s ability to depict nature as a living, spiritual, multifaceted world, a world of unity between man and nature.
The purpose of my work: to comprehend the philosophical meaning of the poem “How good you are, O night sea”, to identify the expressive means with which the author expresses this meaning.
The sea attracts with its unpredictability and uniqueness. It can be both calm and raging. The sea leaves no one indifferent, which is why I chose for analysis the poem by F. I. Tyutchev “How good you are, O night sea.”
Tyutchev’s natural world is based on the world of elements. In the poem "A. A. Fetu,” the poet defines his poetic gift as the property of “smelling, hearing water.” The poet’s favorite element is the “water element.”
This poem is about the night sea, its beauty, infinity. Looking at him, the lyrical hero experiences excitement, joy, and confusion. He wants to drown his soul in the charm of the waves, to become a part of the sea. We can talk about parallelism in the description of the landscape and the state of the lyrical hero in the first stanza: “In the moonlight, as if alive, it walks, and breathes, and it shines,” and in the fourth: “In this excitement, in this radiance, All like in a dream I stand lost."
Compositionally, the poem consists of two parts.
Part I – stanzas 1-3 – a detailed image of the night sea.
Part II – stanza 4 – human feelings.
The lyrical hero does not observe the seascape from the shore, but is depicted as part of this nature: a landscape drawn by Tyutchev inside and outside a person.
In this excitement, in this radiance,
All as if in a dream, I stand lost
The hero’s desire comes down to only one thing: to find complete harmony with nature, to merge with it:
Oh, how willingly I would be in their charm
I would drown my soul
This is, in my opinion, the main idea of the poem.
The beginning of the poem is typical for Tyutchev: “How good you are, O night sea” opens with a metaphorical image of the night sea. The first stanza contains characteristic images of Tyutchev's poetry: night, moon, stars, sleep. To feel the full depth of these lines, I imagine a picture: the sea in the moonlight, billowing waves
Analyzing the “dictionary” at the lexical and morphological levels, I made the following conclusions:
Abstract nouns: space, radiance, solitude, swell, excitement, sleep, charm, holiday, soul, height help convey the state of nature and man.
And adjectives, among which the key ones are infinite, free, great, in combination with the noun “space” creates an image of something immense, large, limitless.
Tyutchev contains unexpected epithets and metaphors. Here too, the glow of the night sea is called dim.
There are many pronouns in the poem, more than half of them are personal (you, it, I, them). They give the poem emotion and sincerity.
For the poet, nature is a special space, inaccessible to the human mind; it has its own mysterious life. Therefore, the author’s favorite technique is the spiritualization of the natural element, its humanization:
In the moonlight it’s like it’s alive,
It walks and breathes and shines
In another of his poems, Tyutchev speaks about nature: “It has a soul, it has freedom, / It has love, it has a language” (“Not what you think, nature”). Nature as a living being is extremely unpredictable and this captivates the author.
The comparison “as if alive” emphasizes Tyutchev’s thought about nature as a living being:
In the moonlight, as if alive,
Personification is also confirmed by the verbs: walks, breathes, shines:
It walks and breathes and shines
And the stars are sensitive (epithet), like a living human soul. Of course, the animation of nature is quite common in poetry. “But for Tyutchev these are not just metaphors and personifications; he accepted and understood the living colors of nature as his fantasy, but as truth,” wrote V.S. Solovyov.
Verb forms, thundering and sparkling, reinforce the motif of the raging elements.
The verb “shines” can be called “colorful,” and together with “colorful” adjectives: radiant, bluish-dark, lunar, dim, they help visually imagine the picture of the night sea.
The comparison “like in a dream” creates the impression of unusualness, I would even say, the fantasticality of what is happening: “In this excitement, in this radiance, I stand lost as if in a dream.” This fantasticality is created by light and brilliance. This is confirmed by the lexical series: radiant, in the moonlight (3 times), glittering, shine, sparkling, stars.
I draw attention to the words of high style “shine”, “radiant”. They create the solemnity of the moment.
The lexical repetition of “how good you are” conveys the enthusiastic, joyful mood of the lyrical hero. He admires the night landscape. Together with him, the stars from above watch the sea: “Sensitive stars look from above” Tyutchev’s favorite vertical movement from the sky. They admire what is happening on earth. The motif of earth and sky is often found in Tyutchev’s poems. Two infinities arise - heavenly and sea. The space is open vertically, and two infinities are connected by the presence of a person: “In this excitement, in this radiance, As if in a dream, I stand lost.”
The poet twice calls the sea element "swell"\. Swell - light ripples on the water surface. But it is great, that is, something can and does arise from it, as in Tyutchev: the swell of the sea becomes a sea element. It contains indescribable space, and infinity, eternity, such immensity that it takes the breath away of any person, the soul instantly opens up to the unprecedented harmony of the natural world and one so wants, one sincerely wants to merge with this majestic, even imperious, mother nature:
Oh, how willingly I would be in their charm
I would drown my soul
“Great swell, sea swell”
Here “great” and “sea” are construal synonyms.
I draw your attention to the line: “here it’s radiant, there it’s bluish-dark”
Short adjectives denote a variable attribute, the attribute “now”, in combination with “opposite” adverbs “here - there”, they emphasize the variability of the sea, its changing essence.
It is impossible not to notice the combination of words “celebrating a holiday.” In this case, tautology is a stylistic device that enhances the reality of speech.
“Tautological combinations in the text stand out against the background of other words; this makes it possible, by resorting to tautology, to draw attention to particularly important concepts.”
The anaphora “how” with the meaning “to what extent, to what” and its promotion to the first place indicates the lyrical hero’s admiration for the seascape.
The image of a moving, rippling sea is created by alliteration [g] and [r] convey roar, movement, and [s] creates noise. Indeed, you can hear a noise similar to thunder. Sibilants also perform an onomatopoeic function. They are sometimes called “dark” consonants. They correspond to the general color background of the poem, because Tyutchev’s sea is at night. And the assonance [o] is associated with the sea, waves.
The sound organization of the text (according to Zhuravlev’s table) “works” to create the main image of the poem - the sea. The predominance of sounds and, u+yu, s create the color scheme of the sea. I – blue, light blue; u+yu – dark blue, blue-green; s – black.
I come to the conclusion that Tyutchev’s sea is either light blue, blue-green, when it is in the moonlight and in the shining of the stars, then dark blue when it is “drenched in a dull radiance,” and even black when the waves rush and rage, worried.
To intonationally and logically emphasize the highlighted phenomena, an expressive stylistic figure is used - polyunion. Coordinating conjunctions and are usually repeated. We read from Tyutchev: “Shine and movement, and roar, and thunder”; “and breathes and shines”; "rattle and sparkle." Thus, the union shows a moving, changing element.
And the repetition of the particle would strengthen the desire of the lyrical hero to merge with the sea element.
The 3rd stanza has the character of a direct appeal to the sea. “Against the background of various syntactic means of address, it stands out for its expressive coloring. The emotional sound of an appeal in a poetic text often achieves vivid pictorial power. In addition, when addressing people there are often epithets, and they themselves are tropes - metaphors.” Tyutchev’s appeals are supplemented with the epithets “night sea”, “the sea bathed in a dull radiance”, and the metaphor “you are a great swell, you are a sea swell”. Their expression is emphasized by the interjection “o”.
The inversion “about the night sea” “pushes forward” the key words and enhances the impression of a moving element: “It walks and breathes and shines”
An interrogative sentence with an appeal: “Swell, you are great, you are a swell of the sea, / Whose holiday are you celebrating like this?” sounds like a frank conversation between the lyrical hero and the elements of the sea and is aimed at comprehending the meaning of existence. And the exclamation - “how good you are in the solitude of the night!” strengthens the motive of admiration and desire to be part of it.
Night, according to Tyutchev, is no less good than day; the stars shine brightly at night (“sensitive stars look from above”) and there are often revelations (the entire 4th stanza).
The sensitive soul of the lyrical hero listens to everything that happens on the night sea. The sea enchants, hypnotizes, puts you to sleep.
I was attracted by the form of the verb “sunk” in the second meaning: also meaning to destroy. I come to the conclusion: the lyrical hero is so fascinated by the holiday of the “swell of the sea” that he is ready to destroy himself for the sake of a moment to become a part of this holiday.
“Shine and movement, roar and thunder” are denominative sentences. Verbs in stanza II are not needed; their role is played by nouns. They create a dynamic picture.
Nekrasov noted Tyutchev’s extraordinary ability to “catch” precisely those features by which a given picture can arise in the reader’s imagination and be completed by itself. Ellipses and dashes allow the reader to complete the drawing. The ellipsis hides and complements the state of the lyrical hero, which cannot always be expressed in words. This is excitement, and uncontrollable delight, and bitterness, melancholy from the impossibility of physically merging with the sea element.
Conclusion. Conclusions.
Analyzing the poem, I come to the conclusion: expressive means of all levels of language “work” on the main idea of the poem: admiration for the night sea and the desire to merge with it.
We look at the sea through the eyes of Tyutchev, the lyrical hero is between two abysses and does not just peer into a natural phenomenon, but with all his soul is imbued with the state of the elements, it is internally close and understandable to man, akin to him.
Analysis of language levels helped me to better understand the meaning of Tyutchev’s poem, to “see” the picture of the seascape. Tyutchev’s nature is multifaceted, full of sounds and colors.
The human being has always strived and will strive to comprehend the highest truth, and for Tyutchev it consisted precisely in the knowledge of nature, in becoming one harmoniously composed whole-unity with it. Tyutchev, a creator of amazing talent, could not only hear and understand the language of nature, but also reflect its living, rich, vibrant life in his poetically perfect works, putting it into a laconic and clear form.
The peculiarity of creating the image of the sea in the analyzed poem is the depiction of nature not from the outside, not as an observer. The poet and his lyrical hero are trying to understand the “soul” of nature, hear its voice, and unite with it.
Tyutchev’s nature is a rational, living being. We learn from Tyutchev to understand it, feelings and associations arise in our souls, born of the poet’s lines.
This work was written in 1865, when the poet’s emotional wound from the loss of his beloved woman was still too fresh. We are talking about Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva, Tyutchev’s affair with whom lasted 14 years. Tyutchev took the death of his beloved very hard. It is a known fact that during his lifetime he compared Elena to a sea wave. It is precisely the address to the sea with “you” that gives reason to assume that the text of Tyutchev’s poem “How good you are, O night sea...” are words dedicated to the woman he loves. The sea is presented by the poet as a living creature, it breathes and walks. The word “swell,” which the author uses to describe the depths of the sea, gives the poem a note of hopelessness. He passionately wants to dissolve in this stormy element and drown his soul here. The poet contemplates the mysterious surface of the night sea and feels lost in this world.
You can study this wonderful example of Russian literature in a classroom lesson or leave it for students to study independently as homework. You can download it in full, and if necessary, read it in full online, on our website.
How good you are, O night sea, -
It’s radiant here, grey-dark there...
In the moonlight, as if alive,
It walks and breathes and shines...
In the endless, in the free space
Shine and movement, roar and thunder...
The sea is bathed in a dim glow,
How good it is, you are in the solitude of the night!
You are a great swell, you are a sea swell,
Whose holiday are you celebrating like this?
The waves rush, thundering and sparkling,
Sensitive stars look from above.
In this excitement, in this radiance,
All as if in a dream, I stand lost -
Oh, how willingly I would be in their charm
I would drown my entire soul...
