“Swallows (Nature’s idle spy...)” by A. Fet

Great ones about poetry:

Poetry is like painting: some works will captivate you more if you look at them closely, and others if you move further away.

Small cutesy poems irritate the nerves more than the creaking of unoiled wheels.

The most valuable thing in life and in poetry is what has gone wrong.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Of all the arts, poetry is the most susceptible to the temptation to replace its own peculiar beauty with stolen splendors.

Humboldt V.

Poems are successful if they are created with spiritual clarity.

The writing of poetry is closer to worship than is usually believed.

If only you knew from what rubbish poems grow without shame... Like a dandelion on a fence, like burdocks and quinoa.

A. A. Akhmatova

Poetry is not only in verses: it is poured out everywhere, it is all around us. Look at these trees, at this sky - beauty and life emanate from everywhere, and where there is beauty and life, there is poetry.

I. S. Turgenev

For many people, writing poetry is a growing pain of the mind.

G. Lichtenberg

A beautiful verse is like a bow drawn through the sonorous fibers of our being. The poet makes our thoughts sing within us, not our own. By telling us about the woman he loves, he delightfully awakens in our souls our love and our sorrow. He's a magician. By understanding him, we become poets like him.

Where graceful poetry flows, there is no room for vanity.

Murasaki Shikibu

I turn to Russian versification. I think that over time we will turn to blank verse. There are too few rhymes in the Russian language. One calls the other. The flame inevitably drags the stone behind it. It is through feeling that art certainly emerges. Who is not tired of love and blood, difficult and wonderful, faithful and hypocritical, and so on.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

-...Are your poems good, tell me yourself?
- Monstrous! – Ivan suddenly said boldly and frankly.
- Do not write anymore! – the newcomer asked pleadingly.
- I promise and swear! - Ivan said solemnly...

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov. "Master and Margarita"

We all write poetry; poets differ from others only in that they write in their words.

John Fowles. "The French Lieutenant's Mistress"

Every poem is a veil stretched over the edges of a few words. These words shine like stars, and because of them the poem exists.

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok

Ancient poets, unlike modern ones, rarely wrote more than a dozen poems during their long lives. This is understandable: they were all excellent magicians and did not like to waste themselves on trifles. Therefore, behind every poetic work of those times there is certainly hidden an entire Universe, filled with miracles - often dangerous for those who carelessly awaken the dozing lines.

Max Fry. "Chatty Dead"

I gave one of my clumsy hippopotamuses this heavenly tail:...

Mayakovsky! Your poems do not warm, do not excite, do not infect!
- My poems are not a stove, not a sea, and not a plague!

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

Poems are our inner music, clothed in words, permeated with thin strings of meanings and dreams, and therefore, drive away the critics. They are just pathetic sippers of poetry. What can a critic say about the depths of your soul? Don't let his vulgar groping hands in there. Let poetry seem to him like an absurd moo, a chaotic pile-up of words. For us, this is a song of freedom from a boring mind, a glorious song sounding on the snow-white slopes of our amazing soul.

Boris Krieger. "A Thousand Lives"

Poems are the thrill of the heart, the excitement of the soul and tears. And tears are nothing more than pure poetry that has rejected the word.

“Swallows” Afanasy Fet

Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.

So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.

And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?

Isn’t it me, a meager vessel,
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements,
Trying to get at least a drop?

Analysis of Fet's poem "Swallows"

The image of a swallow, which in poetry is more often associated with the soul than other birds, is found at different stages of the development of Russian poetry - from the work of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin to the works of Nikolai Mikhailovich Rubtsov. One of the main singers of nature, Afanasy Afanasievich Fet, did not ignore him either. In particular, the image was reflected in the poem “Swallows,” written in 1884. The first stanza of the text creates a serene and contemplative mood. The lyrical hero, who calls himself an idle spy of nature, enthusiastically watches the flight of a lancet swallow over the pond. Everything changes literally in one moment, when the adverb “scary” appears in the second stanza. On the one hand, the observer worries about a bird flying too low above the water. On the other hand, fear for her reminds the character of the emotions he has to experience when he comes into contact with eternity. In Fetov's poetry, rapid flight is often compared with moments of inspiration and creative search, which can be observed in the text under consideration. In addition, Afanasy Afanasievich often contrasts the vast sky with the limited space of the Earth. This antithesis goes back to the romantic dual world. For Fet, it acts not only as a tribute to the literary tradition, but also relates to the poet’s personal life. The fact is that he was both a subtle lyricist, an adherent of the so-called pure art, and a strong business executive, practically an exemplary landowner.

In the poem “Swallows,” creativity seems to be the artist’s attempt to scoop up at least a drop of “alien, transcendental element.” The hero of the work calls himself a meager vessel, that is, a mortal creature whose earthly life is incredibly short. He is fully aware of his own helplessness in trying to express the inexpressible. However, it never occurs to him to give up poetic activity. Throughout his entire creative career, Fet himself was engaged in the selection of words and images to describe phenomena and feelings that are extremely difficult to describe. In the work “Who has a crown: the goddess of beauty...” (1865) there are the following lines:
...And that one of your eyes expresses
The poet cannot retell this.
In one of the poems from 1887, the hero exclaims: “How poor our language is!..”. Like the character in “Swallows,” Fet understood that he was “daring on the forbidden path,” but at the same time he never gave up trying to find suitable words for the above-mentioned expression of the inexpressible.

ANALYSIS OF THE POEM BY A.A. FETA “SWALLOWS”. PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, EVALUATION

The poem “Swallows” was written by A.A. Fet in 1884. Its main theme is the incomprehensibility of the creative process and inspiration. It contains both elements of landscape and elements of philosophical reflection.

The composition of the poem is based on a comparison of a natural phenomenon and the process of human life. The swallow’s flight “over the evening pond”, its “boldness” remind the poet of the nature of inspiration as something transcendental, far from everyday life.

Compositionally, we can distinguish two parts in the poem. The first part is a picture of nature, a description of the flight of a swallow that completely captured the lyrical hero. Here we see the gradual development of the theme. At first he simply denotes a phenomenon - his constant interest in nature:

Nature's idle spy,

I love you, forgetting everything around you,

Watch out for the lancet swallow Over the evening pond.

Then the phenomenon becomes more specific - now we clearly see this evening landscape. At the same time, the hero here also denotes his own feelings:

So I rushed and drew -

And it’s scary that the surface of the glass will not grab the lightning wing with an alien element.

The following lines are a kind of culmination, a turning point in the development of the theme. The lyrical hero turns his thoughts to inspiration. And this is the second part of the work. We see that the creative process for him is a miracle, a mystery, something that goes beyond everyday life:

Isn’t it me, a meager vessel,

I dare to take the forbidden path,

Alien, transcendental elements,

Trying to get at least a drop?

The poem is written in iambic, quatrains, cross-rhyme, the poet uses various means of artistic expression: metaphor and rhetorical question (final stanza), epithet (“meager vessel”, “lightning wing”), anaphora (“And again the same boldness And the same dark stream").

Works for comparison: V.A. Zhukovsky “The Inexpressible”, F.I. Tyutchev “Silentium”, A. A. Akhmatova “Creativity (“It happens like this: some kind of languor...”)”

Skrepa: The motive of the incomprehensibility of the creative process; the motive of the artist’s audacity, striving to convey living life in colors and words; inspiration as a sacrament.

| Dark Side | Pupil (176), closed 5 years ago

A. Fet "Swallows" 1884
exactly 1884
please also answer the questions. can the words daring and dare be considered the key words of the poem, since they connect the swallow and the hero;
what other poems about inspiration and its power over man and the world do you know and how do they resonate with Fetov’s

Gulshakh Sage (16831) 5 years ago

Fet’s poem describes the impressions of a man - an “idle spy”, closely watching the flight of a swallow (in Dahl’s dictionary, “spy” means a secret scout, spy, sent observer, spy)

Nature's idle spy,

I love you, forgetting everything around you,

The image of a swallow, symbolizing the thirst for spiritual food in the Christian tradition, is associated with a person’s reflections on the meaning of life and the nature of inspiration:

So I rushed and drew -

The alien element did not grab the Lightning Wing.

And again the same boldness And the same dark stream - Isn’t this the inspiration of the human I?
I know Bryusov’s poem “In response”, there are lines there

Forward, dream, my faithful ox!

Perforce, if not willingly!

I'm near you, my whip is heavy,

I work myself, and you work too!

This cry is more like a sigh. If Bryusov was ever truthful - to the bottom, then it was in this sigh. From strength, from veins, like an ox - what is this, the work of a poet? No, his dream! Inspiration + ox labor, here is a poet, ox labor + ox labor, here is Bryusov: an ox pulling a cart.

Source: Poems by Fet, Bryusov, Dahl's dictionary

Analysis of FETA's poem "SWALLOWS"

ANALYSIS OF THE POEM BY A.A. FETA “SWALLOWS”. PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, EVALUATION

Nature's idle spy,

I love you, forgetting everything around you,

Watch out for the lancet swallow Over the evening pond.

Then the phenomenon becomes more specific - now we clearly see this evening landscape. At the same time, the hero here also denotes his own feelings:

So I rushed and drew -

And it’s scary that the surface of the glass will not grab the lightning wing with an alien element.

I dare to take the forbidden path,

Alien, transcendental elements,

Works for comparison: V.A. Zhukovsky “The Inexpressible”, F.I. Tyutchev “Silentium”, A. A. Akhmatova “Creativity (“It happens like this: some kind of languor...”)”

Skrepa: The motive of the incomprehensibility of the creative process; the motive of the artist’s audacity, striving to convey living life in colors and words; inspiration as a sacrament.

Searched here:

analysis of the poem feta swallows
feta poem analysis
analysis of the swallow's poem

Afanasy Fet - Nature's idle spy (Swallows)

Prirody prazdny soglyadatay,
Lyublyu, zabyvshi vse krugom,
Sledit za lastochkoy strelchatoy
Nad vechereyushchim prudom.

Vot poneslas i zachertila, -
I'm afraid, because I'm glad glass
Stikhiyey chuzhdoy ne skhvatila
Molniyevidnogo kryla.

I again to zhe derznovenye
I ta zhe darknaya struya, -
It's not like that
I love you?

Ne tak li ya, sosud skudelny,
Derzayu na zapretny put,
Stikhii chuzhdoy, zapredelnoy,
Stremyas khot kaplyu zacherpnut?

Ghbhjls ghfplysq cjukzlfnfq,
K/,k/, pf,sdib dct rheujv,
Cktlbnm pf kfcnjxrjq cnhtkmxfnjq
Yfl dtxtht/obv gheljv/

Djn gjytckfcm b pfxthnbkf, -
B cnhfiyj, xnj,s ukflm cntrkf
Cnb, but the graphic connection with the original ST sound complex is certainly preserved here. The phonetic appearance of the word “disappeared” is skillfully played out in the last stanza of the poem: “involuntarily”, “cry”, “field”, “tumbleweed”, “jumps”.

The rhythmic and melodic features of the poem find their correspondence in its intonation and syntactic structure, which is also divided into two parts. The first and second stanzas are distinguished by relatively even and calm intonation; there are no exclamatory sentences or sharp syntactic shifts (anges); as a means of intonation-syntactic connection between the first and second stanzas, the repetition of function words is used - the particle “everything” and the conjunction “yes”, as a result of which a certain symmetry of syntactic construction arises. In the second part, the intonation-syntactic symmetry of stanzas (3 and 4) is much more pronounced. At the same time, the means of creating it is different. This is an intonation roll call in the initial verses of the third and fourth stanzas. In the second part of the poem we are faced with sharp angebemans (Cf: “As if in fright / Screaming ...”; “You will go out - involuntarily / It’s hard ...”; “Tumbleweed / Jumping like a ball”). Moreover, in the last stanza, in connection with concentration single-part sentences and syntactic shifts, strong pauses appear within lines, and the number of logical stresses increases, which leads to a slowdown in tempo and an increase in intonation emphasis (emphasis). All this is combined with the use of syntactic parallelism (“You’ll come out...; “Look..." ), as well as the technique of repetition, the deliberateness of which is emphasized and strengthened by rhyme (“field” - “Tumbleweed”), make the ending exceptionally expressive in terms of intonation.

B.M. Eikhenbaum writes that highlighting the musical side, melody and phonics in A. Fet’s poems leads to a weakening of the semantic “material-logical” side of the word in them. This statement echoes the assessment of A. Fet’s language by his contemporaries, who reproached the poet for the “illogicality” and “irregularity” of speech.

At the same time, deviations from the norm in the context of A. Fet cannot be considered as speech errors; in the overwhelming case, they are aesthetically determined. In parallel with the weakening of linguistic semantic connections, the objective-material side of words, hypersemantization occurs, the emergence of its own system of meanings, subject to internal artistic logic.

A typical example of a “violation of the norm” in the poem “The Swallows Are Missing” is the use of the form “dawn” (“And yesterday dawn All the rooks flew…”). The grammatical context (relationship with the adverb “yesterday”) dictates the perception of this word form in its temporal meaning, but there are lexical and semantic restrictions here. The temporal meaning for the word “dawn” is secondary (unlike the words “morning”, “evening”) and appears normally, only in its prepositional forms (cf. “from dawn”, “at dawn”), while the non-prepositional form “ dawn” is perceived, rather, in a series of forms of the instrumental case of words of objective semantics, used in the adverbial meaning: “the space within which movement occurs.” Wed. “field”, “forest”, “sea” (walk, swim).

The combination of spatial and temporal categorical meanings in the form of “dawns” gives grounds to consider it as a kind of “grammatical metaphor”. simultaneously associated with the pictorial and expressive planes (the image of a flock of rooks against the background of dawn and the image-experience of passing time). This grammatical metaphor gives us the key to understanding a significant part of the poem’s word patterns, which have a dual figurative and expressive character.

Thus, the comparison of a flock of rooks with a net seems purely figurative, but in the context of the poem its verbal and expressive side turns out to be no less important: the word “net” evokes in our minds the idea of captivity, captivity. The theme of bondage is also hidden in the words “sleep” and “falls” (verbs with impersonal reflexive and passive reflexive meanings), in which the moment of compulsory action in the absence or passivity of the subject comes to the fore. A similar function is performed by the use of the singular form “leaf” instead of “leaves”, which creates the image of a continuous multitude, an unformed, undifferentiated mass, in which the possibility of any separateness, individuality and thereby freedom is lost.
What is hidden in the first part “between the lines”, remaining outside the “bright field of consciousness” of the reader, in the second part is brought out and becomes more accessible to perception. Thus, the motive of bondage receives direct expression in the phrase: “If you go out, it’s against your will. It’s hard, even if you cry.”

The image of a tumbleweed embodies the experience of life as an endless and aimless wandering across the earth. Tumbleweeds, like leaves, are dead versions of birds. Free, rapid flight, the symbol of which is the word “swallows” (commonly “lasta” literally means “flying”) is contrasted with a parody of flight: “jumping like a ball.”

The most important phrase for understanding the meaning and pathos of the poem is “It would be better if I were glad to meet the snow and blizzard!” At first glance, here we have a traditional continuation of the landscape theme. However, we are talking here not just about waiting for winter (cf. Pushkin: “That year, the autumn weather stood for a long time in the yard. Winter was stinging, nature was waiting,” but about an active desire to meet hostile elements and even an irrational desire to engage in battle with them ( cf. phraseological unit: “beat chest to chest”).

The explosion of the lyrical hero’s feelings may seem unexpected, outwardly unmotivated against the backdrop of the peaceful content and relatively calm background of the previous poems. The transition from the call for a fight with the winter elements to the description of the “hasty flight of the cranes to the south (“As if in fright, Screaming out in fright, the Cranes are flying to the south”) looks equally poorly motivated. The weakening of external logical connections is compensated by lyrical pressure, unity and harmony of the rhythmic and intonation-metric structure. These structural bonds at the same time initiate the emergence of new semantic connections - a deep, subtextual level. In this case, we have a clear illustration of M. Maeterlinck’s statement: “Next to the necessary dialogue there is almost always another dialogue that seems superfluous. You will see that the merit and duration of this useless dialogue determines the quality and inexpressible significance of the work.”

It can be assumed that the sharp rhythmic and melodic difference between the 12th and 13th verses (Cf. 21+21+1 and 65; the difference in the consonant pattern is also significant) reflects some internal breakdown. Behind the images of snow and blizzard there arises the image of death, of death: life seems to be captivity, compulsion, liberation from which is expected in death, and voluntary death, but the suicidal impulse is replaced by fear (the nervous tongue-tiedness of the phrase is noteworthy: “as if from fear”). The chanting of the sound combinations re - ru - ra in the stressed position in verse 12 (“I am glad to meet with my breast”) refers us to the sound image ra - ar of the initial verses and through it to the rooks, who act as messengers of death in Fet.

In the analyzed text, the connection between the image of rooks and the theme of death is present hidden, but it receives its open expression in the late poem by A. Fet “Lounging on the armchair, I look at the ceiling” (1890), where the wavering shadows from the lamp evoke in the poet, broken by illnesses, immersed in thoughts about approaching death, a characteristic circle of associations:

“There is a trace of the autumn dawn in this flickering:
Over the roof, it seems, and the garden,
Unable to fly away and not daring to land
The rooks are circling in a dark herd.”

The next two stanzas begin with the words: “No, then there is the noise of wings, then horses have wings...” and “I am silent, lost, looking at the distant path...”

In the quoted quatrain we find a figurative series well known to us: evening - autumn dawn - a flock of rooks. Also noteworthy is the use here of the word “flicker”, etymologically related to the word “flickered” (both of these words go back to “fade”: “r” alternates with “l”, “k” goes with “c”.
The poem “Swallows Are Missing” is related in meaning to another work of late lyricism by A. Fet, in which the noun “Swallows” is included in the title, whereas in the analyzed text it is only part of the first line:

Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.

So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.

And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?

Aren't I, a meager vessel?
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements
Trying to cross out even a drop?
(1884).

As we see, in this text, swallows act as a symbol of balancing on the brink of life and death, and inspiration, a creative poetic impulse is associated with risk, forbidden paths and a daring challenge to God (the use of biblical words “meager vessel” here, i.e. made of clay, is indicative). ashes); at the same time, death “an alien and transcendental element” simultaneously frightens and attracts the lyrical hero.

Data on the semantics of its meter are of great importance for the analysis and interpretation of the text of the poem “The Swallows Are Missing.” In poetry, the opinion has long been established that each meter has its own semantic halo, is associated with one or another poetic tradition and therefore entails a certain range of themes and images. As already noted, the poem “The Swallows Are Missing” is written in trochaic trimeter, and this meter, according to the observations of M.L. Gasparov, became widespread in Russian poetry after the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov’s “Mountain Peaks”, which, in turn, repeats in its rhythmic pattern the first stanza of the German prototype - the poem by N.V. Goethe's "Night Song of the Wanderer". The sophisticated rhythmic and melodic organization of A. Fet's poem brings it closer to Goethe's text than to Lermontov's poem (note that N.V. Goethe was A. Fet's favorite poet). The motif of the path, the themes of life and death, developed in the poems of Lermontov and Goethe, receives an exclusively unique refraction in Fet.

Goethe's poem begins with the words “Over all the tops of the fields” (;ber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh) and ends with the verse “You too will rest” (Ruhest du auch). From “all the peaks” Fet has only one “mountain” left, above which instead of “peace” there are rooks. Goethe talks about the eternal peace that awaits a person at the end of his life's journey. The rooks in Fet’s poem, as already noted, act as messengers of death. The words “The swallows are gone” correspond to Goethe’s verse: “The birds have fallen silent in the forest (Die V;gelein schweigen in Walde).

The call to the wanderer “Wait” (Warte nur) implies the absence in his soul of the peace that reigns in nature. At the same time, this motive, muffled and barely audible in Goethe and Lermontov, gains crushing power in A. Fet’s poem, turning into an open rebellion against the world order.

It is noteworthy that Fet himself did not include the poem “Swallows Are Missing” in his collected works. There is reason to believe that in this poem the deepest aspects of the poet’s inner world, hidden not only from others, but also from himself, were involuntarily reflected. Indirect evidence of this can be the text of A. Fet’s posthumous note: “I don’t understand the deliberate increase in inevitable suffering. I voluntarily go towards the inevitable.” According to the testimony of the poet’s secretary Ekaterina Vladimirovna Fedorova, after A. Fet dictated this text to her, he tried to commit suicide with a knife. However, at the last moment, Fet (the following is a recording of E.V. Fedorova’s oral history), “breathing frequently, fell onto a chair with the word “damn.” Then his eyes opened wide, as if seeing something terrible: his right hand moved as if to make the sign of the cross and immediately fell. He died fully conscious.
.
A. Fet’s suicide note can also be considered as part of the poet’s “intertextual space”. The nature and sequence of the events described to a certain extent echoes the fourth stanza of the poem “The Swallows Are Missing”: a suicide attempt and fright at the end.

It would be better if there was snow and a blizzard
Glad to meet you with breasts!
As if in fright
Shouting out to the south
The cranes are flying.

The appearance of the image of cranes in Fet, like the images of rooks and swallows, is not accidental. The meaning and function of this word image partly helps to understand the appeal to the letter of the poet L.N. Tolstoy dated September 28, 1880. In this letter, Fet describes how he, accompanying his wife Maria Ivanovna on her pilgrimage to the relics of St. Mitrophan of Voronezh, admired the graceful dance of unusually beautiful hand-held cranes in the monastery courtyard. At the same time, Fet notes: “I love only what dances charmingly in the crane, for the secret life, die Sache an sich, which only poets know for people.” And further: “And to everyone what pleases him. For Marya Petrovna - Mitrofania’s icons, and for me cranes, and I don’t even think about dragging her into the crane faith.”

So, the crane appears here as a symbol of the religion of earthly beauty, the sacrament of poetic creativity, equated to the sacraments of the Church. This pathos of worship of beauty and art permeates all the work and life of A. Fet. In the poem “The Swallows Are Missing” we see a perfect example of the “germination” of the plane of content and the plane of expression into each other. “The image becomes similar to what is depicted.” And the image of a flying bird encrypted in the rhythmic-melodic and intonation structure of the poem is the icon of the “crane faith” of Afanasy Fet.

Boris Bobylev. 2015
215052401120

“Swallows (Nature’s idle spy...)” A. Fet

“Swallows” Afanasy Fet

Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.

So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.

And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?

Isn’t it me, a meager vessel,
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements,
Trying to get at least a drop?

Analysis of Fet's poem "Swallows"

In the poem “Swallows,” creativity seems to be the artist’s attempt to scoop up at least a drop of “alien, transcendental element.” The hero of the work calls himself a meager vessel, that is, a mortal creature whose earthly life is incredibly short. He is fully aware of his own helplessness in trying to express the inexpressible. However, it never occurs to him to give up poetic activity. Throughout his entire creative career, Fet himself was engaged in the selection of words and images to describe phenomena and feelings that are extremely difficult to describe. In the work “Who has a crown: the goddess of beauty...” (1865) there are the following lines:
...And that one of your eyes expresses
The poet cannot retell this.
In one of the poems from 1887, the hero exclaims: “How poor our language is. " Like the character in “Swallows,” Fet understood that he was “daring on the forbidden path,” but at the same time he never gave up trying to find suitable words for the above-mentioned expression of the inexpressible.

Listen to Fet's poem Swallows of nature the idle spy

Topics of adjacent essays

Picture for the essay analysis of the poem Swallows of nature an idle spy

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet

Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.

So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.

And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?

Isn’t it me, a meager vessel,
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements,
Trying to get at least a drop?

The image of a swallow, which in poetry is more often associated with the soul than other birds, is found at different stages of the development of Russian poetry - from the work of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin to the works of Nikolai Mikhailovich Rubtsov. One of the main singers of nature, Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, did not ignore him either. In particular, the image was reflected in the poem “Swallows,” written in 1884. The first stanza of the text creates a serene and contemplative mood. The lyrical hero, who calls himself an idle spy of nature, enthusiastically watches the flight of a lancet swallow over the pond. Everything changes literally in one moment, when the adverb “scary” appears in the second stanza. On the one hand, the observer worries about a bird flying too low over the water. On the other hand, fear for her reminds the character of the emotions he has to experience when he comes into contact with eternity. In Fetov's poetry, rapid flight is often compared with moments of inspiration and creative search, which can be observed in the text under consideration. In addition, Afanasy Afanasyevich often contrasts the vast sky with the limited space of the Earth. This antithesis goes back to the romantic dual world. For Fet, it acts not only as a tribute to the literary tradition, but also relates to the poet’s personal life. The fact is that he was both a subtle lyricist, an adherent of the so-called pure art, and a strong business executive, practically an exemplary landowner.

...And that one of your eyes expresses
The poet cannot retell this.

In one of the poems from 1887, the hero exclaims: “How poor our language is!..”. Like the character in “Swallows,” Fet understood that he was “daring on the forbidden path,” but at the same time he never gave up trying to find suitable words for the above-mentioned expression of the inexpressible.