Monographic analysis of Konstantin Balmont's poem "Roadside Herbs". Monographic analysis of Balmont’s poem “roadside herbs” Roadside herbs Balmont analysis

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont

Sleep, half-dead withered flowers,
Never having recognized the flowering of beauty,
Near the well-worn paths they grew up. Creator
Crushed by an unseen heavy wheel.

At the hour when impossible dreams come true,
Everyone can go crazy, only you can’t,
A cursed path lies near you.
Here, half broken, you lie in the dust,
You, who could look brightly into the distant sky,
You could find happiness like everyone else,
In feminine, untouched, girlish beauty.
Sleep, you who have looked at the terrible dusty path,
Your equals will reign, and you will sleep forever,
Dreams deprived by God at the holiday,
Sleep, you who have not seen the flowering of beauty.

“Roadside Herbs” is included in the “Milky Way” cycle of the collection “Let’s Be Like the Sun”, according to contemporaries, one of the best creations of K. D. Balmont. The poem itself is also considered practically a masterpiece of poetry. It was first published in the magazine “New Life” in 1900.

The work can be classified as a lyrical epitaph, since it is addressed to dying broken herbs, an image that is undoubtedly a symbol. Compositionally, the poem is divided into four stanzas, and the words that open the first stanza are repeated in the last. This technique is called anaphora, with its help the lines seem to close on themselves.

Maksim Gorky

Like Alexei Maksimovich (Gorky’s real name), Balmont is touched to the depths of his soul by the fate of these unfortunate people, abandoned to the mercy of the elements of entire masses of people.

Considering the content from this point of view, one can find a large number of metaphors and allegories in the poem. The road along which these inconspicuous herbs grow, the “sworn path” is history itself. Throughout its entire course, the most significant role was played by the great leaders, who paved the way for themselves, often at the cost of human sacrifice. Thousands and thousands of ordinary people worked for the benefit of these heroes, remaining forgotten and faceless for new generations. Their hands created a world that was ruled by the strong, while these people themselves lived and died in unbearable conditions, like stems “crushed by an unseeing heavy wheel.”

At the hour when everyone celebrates the birth of spring,
At the hour when impossible dreams come true...

In all likelihood, we are talking about important victories achieved when no one expected success. Or about some achievements, for example, about the peasants gaining freedom in 1861. But even then they could not celebrate in the full sense, because the price of this freedom was exorbitant.

K. D. Balmont softens the image of death, calling it a dream. “Sleep, you who have not seen the dawn of beauty,” he calls, closing the poem in a circle. The author understands that for such people there is no way out of the cycle of life. They will be born again, serve as illustrious heroes, and die nameless on the sidelines of history, like roadside grass covered with the dust of time.

At the beginning of the century, Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was the most popular of Russian poets. “Who is equal to me in my singing power? Nobody, nobody,” he proudly declared. The special musicality of the verse, the “singing power” with which Balmont expressed the experiences of the lyrical self, the mood of the time, he owed to the unprecedented success among the reader and recognition from Chekhov. Tchaikovsky, Gorky, Bryusov, Blok, Annensky.

Balmont came from a noble family, grew up on an estate near Shuya, Vladimir province, and was early captivated by the “sad beauty” of Central Russian nature (I wouldn’t take “ten of Italy for it,” the poet wrote). A participant in revolutionary circles, Balmont was expelled from the gymnasium and university; high philological culture and knowledge of many languages gave him self-education that lasted his whole life. Korolenko became Balmont’s literary “successor,” who wished self-discipline for the young man’s gift. But Balmont did not heed this advice; creating “with joyful haste,” he fell into verbosity and repeated himself countless times. The poet's legacy is extremely uneven; Among the dozens of books of his lyrics in poetry and prose, not all of them have stood the test of time.

Balmont published his first, student “Collection of Poems” in 1890. He turned to symbolism after meeting Bryusov in 1894, then becoming one of the first in the circle of poets of the Scorpion publishing house. The melancholic “autumn” lyrics of nature and love (collection “Under the Northern Sky.” M., 1894 and “In the Boundless.” M., 1895) were replaced in Balmont’s book “Burning Buildings” (M., 1900) by “dagger words” an individualist hero who tried on a fashionable Nietzschean mask (“I don’t care whether a person / Is good or bad...”). The image of the Russian decadent, the “brother” of Baudelaire and E. Poe, the shocking contempt for the generally accepted, the makeup of the “devil artist” often prevented us from seeing the other face of Balmont the poet, whose dominant feature Annensky considered was “tenderness and femininity.” In Balmont’s poems, next to the “flowers of evil,” “roadside grasses” grew, “crushed by an unseeing heavy wheel,” this symbol of the fate of the disadvantaged, inspired by Nekrasov. In an effort to be a “Spaniard” who longed for “crimson flowers,” Balmont sometimes came to the brink of bad taste (the notorious “I want to be daring, I want to be brave... I want to rip your clothes off”); The “morning” motifs of his love lyrics turned out to be more sincere and more durable.

The poet experienced a rise in creative and political activity on the eve of the first Russian revolution. His best collection, “Let's Be Like the Sun” (M., 1903), captured in cosmic metaphors the poet’s experience of unity with the life-giving forces of existence and uniquely expressed the major public mood. Balmont’s satires on “Nicholas the Last”, which circulated in the lists (“Little Sultan”, “Our Tsar is Mukden, our Tsar Tsushima”), as well as his hymns to the revolutionary workers in the Bolshevik newspaper “Novaya Zhizn”, published by Gorky’s “Znanie” and The book “Poems” (St. Petersburg, 1906) confiscated by the police forced him to go into exile until 1913.

Balmont’s enthusiastic, “spontaneous” nature turned out to be close to the “philosophy of the moment” that arose in a rapidly changing world (“I am burned by every minute, / I live in every betrayal”). The impressionability of the “wind-like” lyrical hero was answered by the techniques of subjective impressionism

with its spontaneity of self-expression, the volatile unsteadiness of the return and the “sudden line” that was in a hurry to “say in an instant “Stop!””. But also Vyach. Ivanov noted that, despite all the variety of artistic guises, Balmont the romantic remained faithful to the beauty of the impulse to the “mountain peaks” of creativity and was irreconcilable to the “cowardice of the spirit” and the “servility of slaves.”

The essentially improvisational art of Balmont, who understood “poetry as magic” (as he called his 1914 lecture), was alien to everything rational. “Creator-child,” Tsvetaeva wrote admiringly about Balmont, contrasting his Mozartianism with Bryusov’s Salierism. Balmont was rarely given stylization; “an overseas guest,” according to Tsvetaeva, he remained even in the sphere of Russian folklore (for example, in the collection “The Firebird.” M., 1907). Nevertheless, a number of books were devoted to variations on the themes of the poetry of the peoples of the world, from the ancient Aztecs to the Western Slavs (for example, “Egyptian” poems in the collection “Glow of the Dawn.” M., 1912). A passionate traveler, Balmont visited all continents; he is one of the prominent Russian translators (works of Calderon, Shelley, E. Poe, Kalidasa, Rustaveli and many others). But the breadth of creativity interfered with its depth. In the collections of the 1910s (“Ash. Vision of a Tree.” M., 1916; “Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon.” M., 1917), the mastery of verse did not return Balmont’s poetry to its former strength. Only in the very latest poems, prompted by homesickness, did her soulful image appear. Having left Moscow in 1920 (as it seemed to him then, not for long), the poet spent more than twenty years in a foreign land and died poor, half-forgotten and half-mad in one of the suburbs of Paris.

Publisher: Balmont K. Poems. L., 1969. (“The poet’s book.” Large series).

* * *

I dreamed of catching the passing shadows,
The fading shadows of the fading day,
I climbed the tower, and the steps trembled,

And the higher I walked, the clearer I saw
The more clearly the outlines in the distance were drawn,
And some sounds were heard around,
All around me there were sounds from Heaven and Earth.

The higher I rose, the brighter they sparkled,
The brighter the heights of the slumbering mountains sparkled,
And it was as if they were caressing you with a farewell radiance,
It was as if they were gently caressing a hazy gaze.

And below me the night had already fallen,
Night has already come for the sleeping Earth,
For me the light of day shone,
The fiery luminary was burning out in the distance.

I learned how to catch the passing shadows
The fading shadows of the faded day,
And higher and higher I walked, and the steps trembled,
And the steps shook under my feet.

GULL

A seagull, a gray seagull, rushes about with sad cries
Above the cold depths of the sea.
And where did you come from? For what? Why are her complaints
So full of boundless melancholy?

Endless distance. The inhospitable sky frowned.
Gray foam curled on the crest of the wave.
The north wind is crying, and the seagull is crying, crazy,
A homeless seagull from a distant country.

FOREST HERBS

I love forest herbs
Fragrant,
Kisses and fun
Non-refundable.

Bell calls
Distant,
Over the stream of sleeping willows
Half asleep.

Outlines of faces flashed
Unknown,
Shadows of fairy tales that deceived
Incorporeal.

Everything that beckons and deceives
We are a mystery
And it hurts my heart forever
Secretly sweet.

MOISTURE

An oar slipped from the boat.
The coolness melts gently.
"Cute! My dear!" - It’s light,
Sweet at a glance.

The swan swam away into the darkness,
In the distance, turning white under the moon.
The waves are caressing towards the oar,
Lily is fond of moisture.

I involuntarily catch it with my ears
The babble of a mirror womb.
"Cute! My dear! I love!.."
Midnight looks from the sky.

DAGGER WORDS

I will speak daggers.

I'm tired of sweet dreams
From the delights of these whole
Harmonic feasts
And the melodies of lullabies.
I want to tear the azure
Calm dreams.
I want burning buildings
I want screaming storms!

The intoxication of peace -
Sleeping the mind.
Let the sea of heat flare up,
Let the darkness tremble in your heart.
I want different rattles
For my other feasts.
I want dagger words
And dying exclamations!

PREACHERS

Sonnet

There are many streams in this sublunary world,
The keys sing in caves where it is dark,
Ringing like a spirit on a seven-string lyre,
About the fact that the spirits are destined to sing.

* I will speak sharply (literally: “I will speak with daggers”). - Hamlet (English).

The ringing of bells is our only pleasure,
We are spirits of worldly strings at a noisy feast,
But you, the enemies, cannot understand us,
For rivers in flood, wider channels are needed.

Priests of elementary theorems,
Do you expect sermons from a poet?
I will preach a sermon for the benefit of the world -

Not the boredom of words long known to everyone,
And with the sonnet’s sonorous fullness,
Not found by anyone yet!

ROADSIDE HERBS

Sleep, half-dead withered flowers,
Never having recognized the flowering of beauty,
Near the well-worn paths, nurtured by the creator,
Crushed by an unseen heavy wheel.

At the hour when everyone celebrates the birth of spring,
At the hour when impossible dreams come true,
Everyone can go crazy, only you can’t,
A cursed path lies near you.

Here, half broken, you lie in the dust,
You, who could look brightly into the distant sky,
You could find happiness like everyone else,
In feminine, untouched, girlish beauty.

Sleep, you who have looked at the terrible, dusty path,
Your equals will reign, and you will sleep forever.
Dreams deprived by God at the holiday,
Sleep, you who have not seen the flowering of beauty.

May 1900.
Biarritz

SAINT GEORGE

Saint George, having killed the Dragon,
He looked around him sadly.
He could not hear the dull groan,
I could not be light - only loving the light.

He is light-hearted, in the name of God,
He aimed his spear and raised his shield.
But there were so many, many thoughts -
And he, having slain, is slain, silent.

And the saint's horse with its hoof
He hit the edge of the path angrily.
He arrived here along a beaten path.
Where to from here? Where to go?

Saint George, Saint George,
And you have tasted your highest hour!
You were delighted before the strong Serpent,
Before the dead Serpent you suddenly went out!

VERBLESS

There is a tired tenderness in Russian nature,
The silent pain of hidden sadness,
The hopelessness of grief, voicelessness, vastness,
Cold heights, receding distances.

Come at dawn to the slope of the slope, -
Coolness smokes over the chilly river,
The bulk of the frozen forest turns black,
And my heart hurts so much, and my heart is not happy.

Motionless reed. The sedge does not tremble.
Deep silence. The wordlessness of peace.
The meadows run far, far away.
There is fatigue throughout - dull, dumb.

Enter at sunset, like into fresh waves,
Into the cool wilderness of a village garden, -
The trees are so gloomy, strangely silent,
And the heart is so sad, and the heart is not happy.

As if the soul was asking for what it wanted,
And they hurt her undeservedly.
And the heart forgave, but the heart froze,
And he cries, and cries, and cries involuntarily.

* * *

I am the sophistication of Russian slow speech,
Before me are other poets - forerunners,
I first discovered deviations in this speech,
Singing, angry, gentle ringing.

I am a sudden break
I am the playing thunder
I am a clear stream
I am for everyone and no one.

The splash is multi-foam, torn and fused,
Gemstones of the original land,
Forest roll calls of green May -
I will understand everything, I will take everything, taking everything from others.

Forever young, like a dream,
Strong because you're in love
Both in yourself and in others,
I am an exquisite verse.

FROM THE CYCLE “FOUR TONES OF THE ELEMENTS”

* * *

I came to this world to see the sun
And a blue outlook.
I came to this world to see the sun
And the heights of the mountains.

I came to this world to see the sea
And the lush color of the valleys.
I have concluded the worlds in a single gaze,
I am the ruler.

I defeated cold oblivion
Having created my dream.
Every moment I am filled with revelation,
I always sing.

Suffering awakened my dream,
But I am loved for that.
Who is equal to me in my singing power?
Nobody, nobody.

I came to this world to see the sun,
And if the day goes out,
I will sing... I will sing about the sun
At the hour of death!

HUSH HUSH

Hush, hush, take off the clothes from the ancient idols,
You have prayed too long, don't forget the past light.
The debunked greats, as before, have proud lids,
And the composer of prophetic songs was and is a poet.

The noble winner will be equal to the vanquished,
Only the lowly is arrogant with him, only the savage is cruel with him.
In the peal of abusive shouts, be clear-sighted, cool-blooded,
And then I will tell you that in you there is a sage and a king.

Blossom, bloom multicolored, sovereignly,
Unleash all the wealth of your hidden youthful powers,
But in your prime, don’t forget that death, like life, is beautiful,
And what a regal grandeur of the cold graves.

* * *

My curses are the reverse face of love,
The delight of blessing is secretly heard in them.
And my hatred hurries through quenching,
Again, accepting love, ignite a fire in the blood.
I will curse you for the baseness of shallowness,
But I am glad to know that the shallow river
Having accepted my snow and ice, it will be deep again,
When the fire of spring creates rays and singing.

When the soul has goals, longing screams in the soul,
And my heart longs for boundless freedom.
To wake up the slave, I hurt him with pain,
Even though my soul is more tender than river reed.
Chu, the song swept across the free expanse,
The crazy splash of a wave full of love,
It’s as if a ringing sound is heard: “Live! Live! Live!” -
Then the ice rings brightly, surrendering to the water field.

HUMANS

A modern man, short, weak,
Small owner, lawyer, hypocritical family man,
All cowardly, all two-faced, scowling, scrupulous,
His whole soul, little soul, is as if made of wrinkles.

Eternally should and should not, this is impossible, but this is possible,
Legal marriage, demand and purchase, sleepy appearance, coffin of hearts.
You can play cards, you can distort your thoughts - carefully,
It is obviously unwise to rob, but shear the sheep.

Monotonous, monosyllabic, like the chants of a cannibal:
He stubbornly pulls two or three notes, pulls endlessly,
The unfortunate beast exists from lunch to lunch,
To eat, he will kill his wife and kill his father.

This one sings the same song - only he’s enlightened,
He will formalize it, he will write it down, he will lock the door.
Pale-minded, free detective, weak heart, sleepy eunuch,
Oh, if only you, the millionth, could suddenly disappear!

HOW I WRITE POEMS

A sudden line is born,
Another one immediately stands behind her,
The third one flashes from afar
The fourth laughs, running over.

And the fifth, and after, and then,
From where, how much - I don’t know myself,
But I don't reflect on the verse
And, really, I never make it up.

<НА СМЕРТЬ М. А. ЛОХВИЦКОЙ>

Oh, what melancholy, what in the dying silence
I did not hear the breathing of the singing soul,
That I wasn't with you, that I wasn't with you
That alone you went into the blue ocean.

OUR KING

Our king is Mukden, our king is Tsushima,
Our king is a bloody stain,
The stench of gunpowder and smoke,
In which the mind is dark.

Our king is a blind misery,
Prison and whip, trial, execution,
The hanged king is twice as low,
What he promised, but didn’t dare give.

He is a coward, he feels with hesitation,
But it will happen - the hour of reckoning awaits.
Who began to reign over Khodynka,
He will end up standing on the scaffold.

PERUN

Perun has a mighty stature,
Pleasant face, golden mustache,
He owns a damp cloud,
Like a young maiden.

Perun's thoughts are quick,
Whatever he wants, so now.
Showers sparks, throws sparks
From the pupils of sparkling eyes.

Perun has sultry passions,
But, having achieved his goal,
What he loved - he tears into pieces,
He burned the cloud - and he was gone.

MORE BEAUTIFUL OF EGYPT

Our North is more beautiful than Egypt.
Well. The bucket is ringing.
Sweet clover sways.
Chrysolite burns in the heights.

At one time, Konstantin Balmont was as popular as Blok. Young people wrote down lines from his poems in their diaries and quoted him as saying that it was impossible not to love him. Neither himself nor his work. Devoting himself completely to his creativity, he could not imagine himself outside of love. Absorbed by everyone's attention, the poet was the embodiment of posing and childish spontaneity, which is clearly expressed in Balmont's poem “Roadside Herbs.”

Where did all this come from?

Balmont’s poem “Roadside Herbs,” however, like many of his other works, does not leave readers indifferent. Balmont is a poet, prose writer, symbolist, translator, essayist and simply an outstanding representative of the poetry of the Silver Age. Biographers and writers tirelessly build theories about how the poet wrote, what techniques he used, and what symbols he used to denote certain events. They want to know where all this sincere and ingenious stuff came from. But theories are powerless against the aspirations of the human soul.

“A sudden line is born (...)

From where, how much, I don’t even know,

But I don't reflect on the verse

And rightly, I never make things up.”

The poet himself answered these questions; he simply wrote, guided by creative impulses. In one of his letters he put it this way: “I am lucky and write. I want to live and live, live forever. I wrote more than a hundred new poems, it was real fabulous madness.” He never planned his creative activity, but simply wrote, from this his desire to live and love for the world was born. Many of his works appeared suddenly, even for himself. “Roadside Herbs” by Balmont is one of these poems.

"Great poet

As Balmont's contemporaries say, he was a poseur. He liked to take on a thoughtful look and pretend to be a real writer, a genius of poetic thought and a connoisseur of literary prose. But the proudly raised head and even Balmont himself caused a cheerful and good-natured childish laugh.

Balmont’s work “Roadside Herbs” can be considered a rhymed embodiment of one of the poet’s poser poses. But here the reader will not encounter false pathos. Thanks to his poetic talent and desire for beauty, Balmont created a work of high harmony from a poser-verse.

In the first quatrain of the work “Roadside Herbs,” Balmont appears to the reader in the image of a great poet, a wise philosopher, an all-seeing genius who is on the same level with God. But that's just how it seems. Talking about how one cart wheel can mutilate the life of a beautiful, not yet blooming flower, Balmont draws the reader's attention to himself as a poet-philosopher.

Childishness

And at the same time, the poet feels childishly sorry for the flowers. After all, only a child can perceive the withering of flowers with such sorrow and seriousness. Therefore, when analyzing Balmont’s “Roadside Herbs,” it is clear that in the second stanza the poet focuses on the tragedy of nature and human conflict.

This is how, when freedom of thoughts and feelings is prohibited, tragedy and conflict are born. As an avid symbolist, he shows that modern society is doing wrong by dictating conditions that infringe on the human essence. Also in this stanza there are echoes of mysticism that were so familiar to the symbolist poets of that time. Fatum. A deplorable set of circumstances that makes roadside grass dry and a person unhappy is an integral part of this world. Balmont writes about this.

Towards the sun

Just as a child does not want to accept cruel reality, so the poet tries to direct the reader towards the light. When analyzing Balmont’s poem “Roadside Herbs,” you can notice how in the third stanza the lyrical hero tells the reader that the time has come to make a choice: to remain lying in the dust and look at the sky, never having had time to bloom, or to go towards the sun.

And something mystical is felt in these lines, as if, hiding behind a good-natured, perky childish smile, the author hands the reader a strange conspiracy and predicts that only those who dare to go towards the light will live well. In the fourth and last stanza, Balmont says that those who rose from the dust are destined to reign, but not those who neglected their prime.

Balmont's poetry was often attributed magical properties. A story was once told that a freezing woman recited a poem by Konstantin Dmitrievich by heart and was able to warm up. Perhaps there is some truth in this, only there is no mysticism here, the poet simply knows how to touch the human soul, how to make it warm up, perk up and set off on a long journey.

“Roadside Herbs” Konstantin Balmont

Sleep, half-dead withered flowers,
Never having recognized the flowering of beauty,
Near the well-worn paths they grew up. Creator
Crushed by an unseen heavy wheel.
At the hour when everyone celebrates the birth of spring,
At the hour when impossible dreams come true,
Everyone can go crazy, only you can’t,
A cursed path lies near you.
Here, half broken, you lie in the dust,
You, who could look brightly into the distant sky,
You could find happiness like everyone else,
In feminine, untouched, girlish beauty.
Sleep, you who have looked at the terrible dusty path,
Your equals will reign, and you will sleep forever,
Dreams deprived by God at the holiday,
Sleep, you who have not seen the flowering of beauty.

Analysis of Balmont's poem "Roadside Herbs"

What exactly is hidden behind the image of crippled stems, everyone feels in their own way. Considering that this work is dedicated to Maxim Gorky, it can be assumed that behind this symbol lies the image of peasants, weak and small people, those who are under the close literary attention of the latter. Like Alexei Maksimovich (Gorky’s real name), Balmont is touched to the depths of his soul by the fate of these unfortunate people, abandoned to the mercy of the elements of entire masses of people.