Analysis of the poem "Fantasy" by Balmont
Balmont - an outstanding symbolist poet Silver Age. One of his works is the poem “Fantasy,” written in 1893. The poet describes the sleeping person in it winter forest, putting into the description the whole game of lyrical imagination, all the shades of his own fleeting impressions. Behind the rapidly changing images of the forest night - unfettered creative person poet.
The lyrical hero in most of the poem is only an observer. Only at the end of the second stanza does he become more active, a series of rhetorical questions. Here the mystical overtones of the work also appear: behind the “quiet groans” of the trees, the poet distinguishes the “spirits of the night”, their “thirst for faith, thirst for God.” The lyrical hero feels in the slightly trembling outlines of the forest something mysterious, unearthly, inaccessible to human understanding.
The lyrical plot of the poem is silence, calm, drowsiness, giving way to movement (“these are the spirits of the night rushing”) and a tinge of anxiety, sadness (“someone’s mournful prayer”, “what is tormenting them, what is troubling them?”), growing with every moment ( “Their singing sounds more and more loudly, the languor in it is more and more audible”). Then a calm doze “without torment, without suffering” sets in again.
Natural elements - wind, blizzard, forest - are enlivened by personification. In the poem, everything moves, feels, lives: “living sculptures”, the forest “calmly slumbers”, “heeds the murmur of the wind”, “filled with secret dreams”; “the moan of a blizzard,” “the pines are whispering, the spruce trees are whispering,” and so on.
Balmont’s images are vague, devoid of clear outlines, airy: “the outlines tremble slightly,” “the murmur of the wind,” “light rain flows,” “sparks moonlight».
“Fantasy” is permeated with a rainbow play of light. Everything is buried in “sparks of moonlight”, “light rain”; even dreams are clear and bright.
“Fantasy,” like many of Balmont’s works, is characterized by musicality. The flow of sounds creates the impression of gentle murmur and splashing. Often repeated hissing w-sh-sh-h, whistling s-z, consonants l-r-m-n. Musicality is also achieved by repeating certain words: moon, radiance, singing, trembling, prophetic, dozing, listening, groaning. Rhymes are used even within lines: statues - radiance, dozing - listening, snowstorms - eating, remembering - cursing. Balmont often resorts to anaphors: whisper - whisper, someone's - someone's, exactly - exactly, this - this, what - what, everything - everything, thirst - thirst, rushing - rushing.
To emphasize mystery, melodious drowsiness, romance, and sometimes anxiety, Balmont uses means of expression language. The poem begins with the oxymoron “living statues,” immediately setting the reader up for the desired perception. The poem is full of epithets (slumbers - calmly, sweetly, through - secret, groan - quiet, branches - slender, prayer - mournful, trunks - prophetic and fabulous, dreams - clear and bright) and comparative turnover(“like living statues”, “like a star sparkling”, “like light rain flowing”, “like a worm”). Very often Balmont uses personification, and in the second stanza he uses rhetorical questions.
The general impression is his spontaneity in perceiving the world around him, his ability to lyrically express subtle shades of his spiritual mood. Reading "Fantasy", you get pleasure from the musicality of the verse, deep artistic expression, painting wonderful, extraordinary pictures in the imagination.
// / Analysis of Balmont’s poem “It’s Late”
Love did not favor K. Balmont. There was a time when this feeling tore the poet in half between two lovers. Poems from this period are different depressive state lyrical hero and a gloomy background. This includes the work “Late”, created in 1903.
The theme of the analyzed verse is the fading of love. The author shows how awareness of the impossibility of love affects a person’s state of mind. He claims that without a bright feeling, the world becomes dark.
At the center of the poem is a lyrical hero, recalling a sad rendezvous with a former lover. His thoughts take the reader to the midnight hour. During sad thoughts, a man remains in a house from which distant towers are visible. He notices that the city's sleep is terrible and mysterious.
Gloomy night landscape- just a prelude to the description state of mind lyrical hero. He succinctly characterizes his feelings with the unusual adverb “painful and offensive.” He further admits that all this is due to the fact that at the beginning of the emergence of feelings, the lovers did not notice the spiritual impulse, and now it is too late to love, as well as to think about love. However, the hero does not go deeper into why this happened. The last line emphasizes the man's regret and sounds like an incantation: "It was late, late, late."
In the poem "It's Late" K. Balmont uses artistic media, to recreate the experiences of the lyrical hero, his bitter thoughts about the current situation. The text contains metaphors: “it was late in our thoughts”, “midnight sang”, “the dark sleep of the houses”, “dreams... the consonance sounded out”, “midnight struck in our thoughts”. They are not only a means of psychologism, but also a tool for creating a landscape. Epithets complete the picture: the houses are “gloomy”, “the distance of heaven... starless”, “blissful frenzy”.
Also in the poem you can notice assonances that further depress the depicted pictures: “midnight sang in our thoughts” (p-l-p-l), “the consonance sounded without blissful frenzy” (s-z-z-z-s-s ). The poet expresses the bitter irony of belated love using paronomasia: “the consonance has faded away.” In the last stanza, the paronomasia “was-beat” creates the effect of a hammer, which hits the head with heavy blows when the hero reaches the peak of experience. Complex paths, assonance, playing with words that sound similar are all signs of symbolism.
Despite the semantic complexity and versatility of the artistic design, the composition of the work is simple. It consists of four quatrains with a cross female rhyme. Poetic size- Balmont’s favorite anapaest. The thoughts of the lyrical hero are smooth and painful, so the poet does not use exclamatory or interrogative syntactic structures.
K. Balmont’s poem “It’s Late” is an example of symbolist intimate lyricism, however, the experiences of the lyrical hero are so strong and transparent that they do not require additional decoding, like most poems by representatives of symbolism.
Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont is one of the first symbolist poets in Russia. Although, in general understanding, his work could not be squeezed into the framework of one specific direction. Works created at the beginning creative path, can rather be attributed to impressionism. This style is characterized by the description of fleeting bursts of emotions that have no deeper meaning.
His work is also considered decadent. literary movement who came from France. The term that underlies its name means decline, loss of meaning. However, from the pens of talented decadent poets came works that opened up new horizons of poetry. In general, one can observe in them the path of searching for new values. Later this direction is combined into one with symbolism.
In part, Balmont's works can be attributed to this movement. And he is also considered a symbolist. After all, his poems are full of images that go beyond the ordinary earthly, and even beyond the framework of human experiences.
Fame did not come to Konstantin Dmitrievich immediately, although he began writing poetry at the age of nine. However, not a single publishing house recognized or wanted to publish his very first creations.
When his poetry became more meaningful and deep, he became one of the most widely read literary figures of the early 20th century. In addition, he was able to have a huge impact on the development of Russian culture, opening up new spaces for creativity. His poems became brilliant and poetic. The despondency that reigned in them earlier was replaced by bright colors. Subsequent translations were also successful. However, the rise was again followed by decline.
In general, Balmont’s work can be characterized as a desire to express what cannot be expressed. This was distinctive feature all symbolists. The decadent notes of pessimism that reign in a considerable part of his works give them a special coloring of renunciation of the world and existence, the desire to hide from reality. At the same time, he also took away special place in life and the word, and its masters - poets.
“The Wounded” is one of the characteristic poems of this stage. In this work, the poet reveals the problem of 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 (form short poem, which appeared in the UK, based on playing out nonsense). Traditionally, a limerick has five lines, with canonical form the end of the last line repeats the end of the first. Thus, using a pentaverse in his poem, the author enhances the mood hopeless situation your hero.
"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 perish like smoke) and Latin catchphrase Consumor aliis inserviendo, which translated into Russian means “By shining on others, I burn myself.” However, unlike the 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.
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 verbose and unpleasantly noisy, even cacophonous, which are far from poetry and reveal breakthroughs and failures into 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 without reason 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 the air currents of the wind, Balmont turns his poems into a collection of words for precisely this reason. And this definition must be accepted not only in its bad, negative sense, but also in its positive sense. 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 this world; their subtle interweavings 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 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 as if babbling, trembling, babbling, filling dark feeling heart to me,” and on the pale bust of Pallas sat, sat “the sinister, the black Raven, the 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 cannot withstand 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 and 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 a wealth 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 - 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 “among 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. A theoretical ataman, a bandit of poems, Balmont does not have 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 from under that northern sky, under which he 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, 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, in the general structure of his spirit were, if not always natural and necessary, then still legal, 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 poems are replaced by a verbose and pale tirade of a supposedly 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 out his poems with quotation marks and from two words into 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 big 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.