Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships halfway through:
This long brood, this crane train,
That once rose above Hellas.
Like a crane's wedge into foreign borders -
On the heads of kings there is divine foam -
Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena
What is Troy alone for you, Achaean men!
Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.
Who should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,
And the black sea, swirling, makes noise
And with a heavy roar he approaches the headboard.
.
This poem was published in the second edition of “Stone” (1916) and was dated by the poet in 1915. Like many of Mandelstam's poems, it does not have a title, but it may be the first word - “Insomnia.” This allows us to attribute this poem to the genre of “poems written during insomnia”, interesting examples which can be found in the literature of many countries. As for Russian literature, the first poem that comes to mind is Pushkin’s “Poems Composed During Insomnia.” But in modern Mandelstam, especially post-symbolist poetry, almost every significant poet has either one poem (Akhmatova, 1912; Andrei Bely, 1921; Pasternak, 1953), or a whole cycle of poems (Annensky, 1904; Vyacheslav Ivanov, 1911; M. Tsvetaeva, 1923) entitled “Insomnia” or “Insomnia”. Mandelstam's poem is not like any of them; Following this tradition, it nevertheless has its own unique characteristics.
We feel it from the very first line. It contains three nouns, each of which is an independent clause. Such verbless sentences can also be found in Russian poetry of the 19th century (the most famous example is, of course, Fet’s poem “Whisper. Timid Breath.”), but in post-symbolist poetry such sentences are found so often that we can talk about /65/
stylistic device (Block: “Night, street, lantern...”; Pasternak: “Clouds. Stars. And on the side - the road and Aleko”; Akhmatova: “Twenty-first. Night. Monday // Outlines of the capital in the darkness”)1.
There are such examples in Mandelstam’s poems of 1913-1914. The poem “Cinematograph” begins with the following lines: “Cinematography. Three benches // Sentimental fever.”, and another poem - “″Ice cream!″ Sun. Airy sponge cake. // A transparent glass with ice water.”
As can be seen from the above examples, such verbless sentences are used mainly in order to most colorfully and accurately describe the surrounding environment (landscape, city, interior) or (like Akhmatova) to give an idea of the date and time. Nouns are semantically related, each giving a new detail, creating a picture piece by piece, step by step. Mandelstam’s poem “Cinematograph” belongs to this type, but the poem “Ice cream!..” is a little different from it, and we do not immediately get a clear picture. Between the cry “Ice cream” (used in a colloquial form, literally conveying the exclamation of a street seller: “Ice cream!”) and the word “biscuit”, which are combined with each other, there is the word “sun”. The words in the line are connected by the meaning of the adjective “airy”, which, having an obvious connection with the “sun”, refers to in this case to the word "biscuit". It takes some time to connect these parts together, and then we will see a picture of a sunny St. Petersburg day, seen through the eyes of a child.
In the poem “Insomnia...” the description of time and environment is much more complex. The poet composes the picture not sequentially, but in large leaps. There are such large semantic gaps between the words that it is difficult to find associations connecting poetic images the first time. What do the words “insomnia” and “Homer” have in common? It is much easier, of course, to connect the words “Homer” and “sails”; and only in the second line does the relationship between these three key words from which the poem starts become clear. To get rid of insomnia, the poet reads Homer, or rather the “List of Ships” of Hellas. This is quite difficult reading before going to bed, and at the same time, reading the list of ships has an ironic connotation: people usually count sheep in order to fall asleep, but the poet counts Homeric ships.
The third line adds two comparisons characterizing the list of ships; both of them are original and unexpected. /66/
In the words “this long brood” we encounter an obsolete “this”: common in the poetry of the 18th century, in later times it became archaic. On the other hand, the word “brood” has completely different stylistic features and is usually used in relation to certain birds (“brood of ducks”, “brood of chickens”). “Long” in combination with the word “brood” also gives the impression of something unusual, since the last word usually refers to chicks huddled, for example, under the mother’s wing.
The ships sail to Troy and are therefore compared to a long line of birds floating on the water; Probably the reader's first association is a comparison with a family of ducks! We see that such a definition also has an ironic connotation. Here there is a stylistic discrepancy between the archaic, poetic word “this” and the rustic, in comparison with the previous, word “brood”, but, on the other hand, the connection between these incompatible, at first glance, words is felt: the sublime poetic turn is followed by a more “ down to earth” and simple. We cannot say with certainty what exactly the poet wanted to draw our attention to.
In 1915, when Mandelstam wrote this poem, there was a discussion in the literature about Homer's list of ships. Two years earlier, Apollo magazine published Annensky’s posthumous essay “What is Poetry?” One of the provisions of the article: poetry should inspire rather than assert certain facts. (Annensky cites Homer’s “List of Ships” as evidence.) From a modern point of view, a long list of unfamiliar names is tiring (and this is one of the reasons why the poet in Mandelstam’s poem chooses just such reading at night). But, on the other hand, “The List” has some kind of magical charm. This list can be used as an illustration of Verlaine’s lines “de la musique avant toute chose.” The names themselves no longer mean anything to the modern reader, but their unusual sound gives free rein to the imagination and restores the picture of a historical event: “What is so tricky if once even the symbols of names accompanied by the music of poetry evoked in listeners a whole world of sensations and memories, where the cries of battle were mixed with the ringing of glory, and the shine of golden armor and purple sails with the sound of dark Aegean waves?
The word “brood,” which also has an additional meaning, is a type of re-etymologization. “Bring out/lead” means “grow up”, “nourish”, “educate”; another meaning of this word is “to lead”, “to lead” /67/
etc., so here, as far as I understand, there is a play on words. Then the whole line has a rhythm different from the first two. Iambic hexameter is used here, which is unusual for modern Russian poetry. Associated with Alexandrian verse and Russian hexameter, in this poem it is directly related to Homer and classical poetry. In the first two lines there is the usual male caesura (“Homer”, “ships”), In the third and fourth it changes to dactylic (“brood”, “Hellas”), In other words, as soon as the poet’s thought switches from insomnia to reflections on the “Iliad” “, the rhythm of the verse itself changes: not only the dactylic caesura, but also the repeated “this” (in unstressed positions), and the internal rhyme (“long” - “crane”) - all this gives the line special meaning and expressiveness.
Another description characterizing the list of ships is “this train is a crane.” Associations associated with swimming birds in the previous comparison develop further, and, as is typical for Mandelstam, poetic images “rise” from the earth to the sky: the ships are now compared to a crane wedge heading to Troy. The “crane” metaphor is, of course, popular and not new; as Victor Terras notes, it was used back in the Iliad3. An example of this can be found in Song Three: “Three sons rush, talking, shouting like birds: // The cry of cranes is heard under the high sky, // If, having avoided both winter storms and endless rains, // With the cry of the herds flying through the fast flow of the Ocean...” (translated by N. Gnedich). There are similar lines in the second Song, this time about the Achaeans: “Their tribes, like countless flocks of migratory birds, // In the lush Asian meadow, near the wide-flowing Caistra, // Hover back and forth and have fun with the splashing of their wings, // With shouts they sit down opposite those sitting and the meadow is announced, - // So the Argive tribes, from their ships and from their booths, // Noisily rushed to the Scamandrian meadow; (translated by N. Gnedich). These two comparisons focus on the calls of the cranes. Dante has something similar in “Hell”: “Like a crane’s wedge flies to the south // With a sad song in the heights above the mountains, // So before me, groaning, a circle // of shadows rushed…” (translated by M. Lozinsky). We find the same thing in Goethe4.
Mandelstam's comparison, however, is unusual in that no one, I am sure, has ever used it to apply it to ships.
Like the first description of the list of ships, the second - “This crane train” - surprises with the combination of words of different stylistic levels. The archaic appears again /68/
and the poetic “this”, followed by the word “train”, in addition to its usual meaning, also has the meaning of “procession” (Blok: “I’m looking at your royal train”) or successive means of transportation: usually these are carriages, sleighs etc. (“wedding train”). The use of this word with the definition “crane” is quite unusual; on the other hand, the word “train”, which evokes more solemn associations, goes better with the poetic “this”. Now it seems that the poet has discarded the ironic intonations present in the previous lines; a seriousness emerges that culminates in the next three questions. This impression arises due to the predominance of [a] in stressed and unstressed syllables.
In the next stanza we encounter another comparison relating to a string of ships. This time it is quite familiar: “crane wedge”. What is unusual here is not the comparison, but the orchestration of sounds. In the third line of the first stanza, we already noted the internal rhyme: “long - crane-like.” It repeats and develops further: “crane wedge”. This sound repetition is similar to the following: “foreign frontiers.” In addition, all stresses on [i], [y] are repeated three times in the same positions ([zhu], [chu], [ru]), and [zh] is repeated three times. This orchestration seems to imitate the cries of cranes and the noise of their wings and gives rhythm to the entire line, enhancing the feeling of flight. Emphasizing the cry of cranes, Mandelstam resorts to the old poetic tradition, but at the same time enriches it and makes his own changes.
In the second line a phrase appears that destroys the established idea of flight and returns us to the people on their way to Troy: “There is divine foam on the heads of the kings.” The kings are, no doubt, those who are on board the listed ships, but the meaning of the words "divine foam" is not so clear. It may simply mean foam - the ships sailed at such high speed that the sea foam flew on board, hitting people. Or, connecting this phrase with the previous comparison about the flight of cranes, should we understand that there were clouds on the heads of the kings?
The definition of “divine” is reminiscent of Mandelstam’s poem “Silentium,” which talks about the birth of the goddess Aphrodite. Since the goddess of love was born from sea foam, the foam can be called "divine." This means that it is connected with the secret of love, and this phrase precedes the statement that everything, including the sea, is moved by love. /69/
The following question relates to the ships and people sailing to Troy: “Where are you sailing?” The question seems inappropriate, since it is clear that the kings have a clear idea of where they are going. In fact, only the geographical goal is clear, behind which another, more abstract and more important, is visible. The next sentence (no verb) puts everything in its place. This is the main point in the poem. Now we begin to understand what the poet wanted to say.
Paradoxically, the answer to the question is contained in the question: “Whenever it was not for Helen, // What is Troy alone for you, Achaean men?” It was love that prompted the “Achaean men” to assemble a fleet and go to Troy. This idea is then repeated by the author in a generalized form in the first line of the third quatrain: “Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love.” As an answer to the second question from the previous quatrain, we get a short and simple conclusion: “everything moves by love.” But there are two more words here that are mysterious and thought-provoking: “sea” and “Homer.” What do they mean? Meanwhile, the words go well with each other. Not only semantically - in the two previous quatrains they were already used together - but also in sound. Both words contain similar sounds: "Homer" is almost a complete anagram of the word "sea".
The idea that Homer is motivated by love can be understood in different ways. If we judge Homer as a poet, then all poetry is moved by love, and not just the love of an individual person, but also love in a more abstract sense. "Homer" may also be a metonymy for historical events described in the Odyssey and Iliad. The main driving force of the story is love, passion, human emotions. This is all pretty clear, but how can we say that the sea is moved by love? At first glance, it seems that the word “sea” is connected in meaning with the word “Homer” and with the associations evoked by this name. Playing an important role in the Iliad, the word “sea” is consonant with the name “Homer” and is a metonymy for it.
As the poem progresses, the complex task turns out to be simple. The "sea" apparently has its own eigenvalue. It assumes, for example, that everything in the Universe moves and is guided by love. This, by the way, is a common poetic place. Of course, there is no such thing in the Iliad, but, as Victor Terras notes5, this idea is clearly expressed in Hesiod’s Theogony: “First of all, Chaos arose in the universe, and then // Broad-breasted Gaia, the safe haven of all, // Gloomy Tartarus, in the depths of the earth /70/
deep, // And among all the eternal gods, the most beautiful is Eros. // Sweet-tongued - for all gods and earth-born people // He conquers the soul in the chest and deprives everyone of reasoning *"6.
We find the same idea in one of the “ancient poems” of Leconte de Lisle, a French Parnassian. His long poem "Helen" describes the events leading up to the abduction of Helen and the outbreak of the Trojan War. This poem also places great emphasis on the theme of love; As a general conclusion, a long monologue is given, proving the power of love, the power of Eros as the ruler of all humanity - thoughts that are also found in Hesiod:
Toi, par qui la terre féconde
Gémit sous un tourment cruel,
Eros, dominateur du ciel,
Eros, Eros, dompteur du monde.
The classical idea also developed in the principle of divine love, the moving universe, represented in Plato’s idea of perfection in love and Aristotle’s idea of the “immovable mover” (Mandelstam’s “moves” is clearly reflected in classical philosophy); in the form of a carefully developed hierarchy, this principle was also presented in the medieval religious idea: “The binding bond of the whole system is love, whether it is the lower kind of love that moves the stone to set it in its right place, or whether it is the naturally inspired love of God in the soul person"7. In the last three lines of Dante's Paradise, the poet reaches the highest circle, where he discovers the divine love that moves the universe and, from that moment on, guides his own thoughts and will:
Here the high spirit of soaring was exhausted; But passion and will were already striving for me, As if a wheel was given a smooth ride. Love that moves the sun and luminaries**.
Mandelstam’s “everything is moved by love” can be perceived as an aphorism that completes the story of Elena. But the poem does not end there, as it could. It's taking a new turn. A completely unexpected question follows: “Who should I listen to?” It is unexpected, since so far we have said that both “Homer” and the “sea” are moved by the same force. Is there a difference in who /71/
Which of them should the poet listen to? Obviously, there is a difference, and the poet tells us about his choice: he listens to the voice not of “Homer” and not of the “sea” from the poem, but the noise of the real roaring Black Sea.
Again, as with the flying cranes, the image of the sea is created by the orchestration of sounds in the percussive position. Again the male caesura changes to dactylic, [o] predominates in the lines, especially in the last ones, followed by a spectacular alternation [h] - [w] - [x]. All this gives special significance to the last lines.
What's the point here? If everything has been clear enough so far: the poet, suffering from insomnia, chooses Homer as his bedtime reading. The book evokes a number of associations and images centered on love. After some time, he puts the book aside and listens to the sound of the sea roaring around him. What does this sea mean? Is this a metaphor for the poet's sleep or dormancy?
The sea was the focus of attention in the previous stanzas as well. This was Homer's sea, and the first line in the third quatrain brings them together. Now in the last two lines the sea has a different meaning. This is no longer a sea with divine foam, but a gloomy Black Sea: “a black sea.” Terras says that this is a “typical Homeric” image and cites similar lines from the Iliad about the Achaeans: “... and the people rushed back to the meeting square, from their ships and from their tabernacles, // With a cry: like the waves of a silent sea , // Breaking into a huge bank, they thunder; and Pontus answers them.”***8.
But this image apparently has a broader meaning: both concrete and metaphorical. This “black sea” may in fact be the Black Sea and therefore it may contain memories of Voloshin’s Crimea and Koktebel. Marina Tsvetaeva, quoting this poem, even wrote: “The Black Sea”9. And Mandelstam’s poem “Not Believing the Sunday Miracle...”, which talks about Crimea and which was probably written partly there, depicts for us “those hills... // Where Russia breaks off // Above the black and deaf sea.”
The image of the sea can also represent the Neva River, which has played an important role in Mandelstam’s poems since 1916. It is mentioned not only in neutral expressions, such as “on the banks of the Neva” or “Neva wave,” but also with adjectives that convey the poet’s feelings: “heavy Neva” and even “above the black Neva.” Image of the sea, /72/
appearing in the room is also present in other poems with references to the Neva, namely in two poems called “Straw”. They also refer to “poems composed during insomnia”: “When, Straw, you don’t sleep in a huge bedroom...”. In the first poem there is a picture of a snowy December:
Solemn December flows its breath,
It's like there's a heavy Neva in the room.
In the second, in similar lines, “as if” turns into “materialized metaphor”:
In a huge room the Neva is heavy,
And blue blood flows from granite.
As in the poem “Insomnia...” the image of water is used to create an atmosphere of something cold and heavy. The first of the poems also contains slightly solemn intonations. This is “solemn December”, which is compared to the Neva; “solemn” looks like a parallel to the word “floriding” in our poem. In the second poem there is no longer such solemnity and heaviness is emphasized: the “breath” of December disappears, and instead of it the image of granite with the adjective “heavy” appears.
In other words, what is important here is that the “black sea” in the poem does not have any biographical overtones or connection with certain geographical names, be it the Black Sea or the Neva. But this hardly brings clarity to the understanding of the meaning of the poem. What is clear is that a metaphor is being used here. But what does it mean? “Homer” is something definite and understandable, we would like “sea” to also have a specific meaning. However, the point here is - a typical Mandelstam technique - that the poet compares a noun that has a specific meaning with a word that can be interpreted in different ways.
At first, the sea was associated with Homer, and this meant that they had something in common. Then the poet makes a choice between them, keeping in mind the existing difference. What kind of opposition do we face here? Homer describes historical events that happened a long time ago. Reading the Iliad, the poet is transported from the present (insomnia) to the past. When he puts the book aside (“and Homer is silent”), he returns to the present. The sea here is not only the sea of Homer, but the real sea, which is currently roaring around the poet. /73/
So we can understand the sea as a symbol of the present, embracing the poet’s life, his feelings. The poem is dated 1915. The passions and emotions of people act as the driving force of history, once again plunging humanity into a long, bloody war. Regimental lists of those sent to the battlefield or lists of dead soldiers and officers are common things for that time: perhaps the poet associates them with the list of ships of Hellas. The image of the sea in the room takes on a connotation of danger, forcing us to recall Annensky’s poem “The Black Sea,” in which (in contrast to Pushkin’s famous poem “To the Sea”) it symbolizes not revolution, but death (“No! You are not a symbol of rebellion, // You - death's feasting cup")10. The verb “to ornate,” characteristic of 18th-century rhetoric, also creates the impression of a classical tragedy.
This is one way to interpret the last lines. But there are others. The sea, like Homer, as already noted, “is moved by love,” and the poem is undoubtedly about love. But Mandelstam's love lyrics are much different from similar poems by other poets. The poet's personal feelings rarely lie on the surface; they are combined and intertwined with other topics, such as poetry and history, as in our case. The "something" approaching the head of someone's bed may be an image suggesting love: for example, a lover approaching his beloved's bed. Homer's Iliad told the poet about love, and when he puts the book down, the sea waves whisper to him about the same thing. As we see, this topic interests the poet; he cannot drown out the threatening and at the same time eloquent voice of the sea filling the room; the sea, which comes so close to the poet’s head that it threatens to swallow him.
Another interpretation of these lines is possible. In many poems, Mandelstam compares nature with poetry, art and culture, likes to contrast them or bring them together. “Nature is the same Rome and is reflected in it,” says one poem, and in another, “There are orioles in the forests...” - nature is compared with the poetics of Homer. The poem “Insomnia...” also refers to such poems, although here we are not dealing with all of nature, but with part of it. The meaning is the following: should the author listen to the voice of poetry, speaking about love, war, death, or the voice of Nature, the voice of Life itself, speaking about the same thing?
I present different readings to show that the question of understanding these images remains open. This "openness of theme" is part of the ambiguity of the entire poem that makes the reader think. It starts from the very first line; when the meaning of this line becomes clear, the plot and idea of the poem become more or less clear. But the final lines introduce a new twist, which was actually necessary after the conclusion: “Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love.” Despite the fact that the poem could end with these words, a kind of aphoristic conclusion (by the way, not particularly original), its last lines are such that they again make the meaning vague, and we are given the right to reflect on what the author meant. However, there is no need to choose just one of the given interpretations. I think they are all present here.
O. Mandelstam - Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships halfway through:
This long brood, this crane train,
That once rose above Hellas.
Like a crane's wedge into foreign borders, -
On the heads of the kings there is divine foam, -
Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena
What is Troy alone for you, Achaean men?
Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love.
Who should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,
And the black sea, swirling, makes noise
And with a heavy roar he approaches the headboard.
Song translation
There is no translation. You can You can add it!
If you find an error in the name
Read by Sergei Yursky
YURSKY, SERGEY YURIEVICH, (b. 1935), actor, director, writer, poet, screenwriter. People's Artist Russian Federation.
Mandelstam Osip Emilievich - poet, prose writer, essayist.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891, Warsaw - 1938, Vladivostok, transit camp), Russian poet, prose writer. Relations with his parents were very alienated, loneliness, “homelessness” - this is how Mandelstam presented his childhood in his autobiographical prose “The Noise of Time” (1925). For Mandelstam’s social self-awareness, it was important to classify himself as a commoner, a keen sense of injustice existing in society.
Mandelstam's attitude towards Soviet power since the late 1920s. ranges from sharp rejection and denunciation to repentance before the new reality and glorification of I.V. Stalin. The most famous example of denunciation is the anti-Stalin poem “We live without feeling the country beneath us...” (1933) and the autobiographical “Fourth Prose.” The most famous attempt to take power is the poem “If only I would take coal for the highest praise...”, to which the name “” was assigned. In mid-May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and exiled to the city of Cherdyn in the Northern Urals. He was accused of writing and reading anti-Soviet poems. From July 1934 to May 1937 he lived in Voronezh, where he created a cycle of poems, “Voronezh Notebooks,” in which an emphasis on lexical vernacular and conversational intonations is combined with complex metaphors and sound play. The main theme is history and the place of man in it (“Poems about the Unknown Soldier”). In mid-May 1937 he returned to Moscow, but he was forbidden to live in the capital. He lived near Moscow, in Savelovo, where he wrote his last poems, then in Kalinin (now Tver). At the beginning of March 1938, Mandelstam was arrested in the Samatikha sanatorium near Moscow. A month later, he was sentenced to 5 years in the camps for counter-revolutionary activities. He died of exhaustion in a transit camp in Vladivostok.
Below there are no indications of overlaps with other works of Mandelstam: such information is useful if it can clarify the content of the commented text, and redundant if there is no darkness in it. The commentator did not look for answers to the questions “could the author have read this” and “did the author realize...”, believing that the commentary is evidence not about the author, but about the language. The following indications of the overlap between Mandelstam's text and the works of other authors are intended to help readers evaluate the resources of poetic language and its ability for self-reflection.
Commented text:
Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships halfway through:
This long brood, this crane train,
That once rose above Hellas.
Like a crane's wedge into foreign borders -
On the heads of kings there is divine foam -
Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena
What is Troy alone for you, Achaean men?
Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.
Who should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,
And the black sea, swirling, makes noise
And with a heavy roar he approaches the headboard.
The commentator considers it his pleasant duty to express gratitude to M. Bobrik, V. Brainin-Passek, A. Zholkovsky, O. Lekmanov, N. Mazur, N. Okhotin, O. Proskurin, E. Soshkin and M. Fedorova for their assistance in the work.
Materials for comment:
Insomnia – Along with the works of such authors as Sappho and Du Fu, Petrarch and Shakespeare, Heine and Mallarmé, the commented text is included in anthologies of literature about insomnia (see: Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems. N.Y., 1999; Schlaflos: Das Buch der hellen Naechte. Lengwil, 2002), however, it is difficult to form an idea of the Russian tradition in the development of this topic. It lacks, for example, the motifs of anxiety that are obligatory for most Russian “poems composed during insomnia”: “Why are you disturbing me?” (Pushkin), “I am worried mercilessly” (Yazykov), “I only close my lids - and my heart is alarmed” (Benediktov), “And I could not close / Anxious eyes at all” (Ogarev), “Again in my soul there are worries and dreams” (Apukhtin), “Before them, the heart is again in anxiety and on fire” (Fet), “And anxious insomnia / Can’t be driven away into a transparent night” (Blok) and/or languor: “Hours of languid vigil” (Pushkin), “Anxious night story! (Tyutchev), “How tiresome and sleepy / My insomniac hours!” (Yazykov), “In the hour of languid vigil” and “Why in the hours of languor” (Ap. Grigoriev), “And only you languish alone in silence” and “The mystery, the eternal, formidable mystery torments / The mind tired of work” (Nadson), “And my sinful heart torments me with its / Unbearable injustice” (Fet), “Tomy and tender waiting” (Annensky). Mandelstam's text is closer to works that describe falling into sleep - under the influence of sea motion, the sound of the surf, fatigue from reading or counting imaginary identical objects; only Mandelstam uses not one, but all of the named sleeping pills.
Insomnia. Homer – Freedom from external vision, gained through sleep or blindness, is a condition for supervision: “I am sweetly lulled to sleep by my imagination, / And poetry awakens in me” (Pushkin), “O, surround yourself in darkness, poet, surround yourself in silence, / Be alone and blind like Homer and deaf like Beethoven, / Strain your spiritual hearing and spiritual vision more strongly” (A.K. Tolstoy).
Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails – Nominative structure of the beginning (cf. in other nocturnes: “Whisper, timid breathing...”, “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy...”; see: Nilsson N. A. Osip Mandel'štam. Stockholm, 1974. P. 36) gives it the appearance of a completed construction, which increases its suitability as material for quotation - reverent: “And there are no other signs granted from time to time, / it’s only worth repeating, remembering the voices: / Night, street, lantern, pharmacy... / Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails" (Kovalev) or travesty: "Insomnia. Harem. Tight bodies" (Gandelsman).
Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails... list of ships – Homer serves not only as an example of grace-filled freedom from external sight, but also as a means of immersion in a trance: occupying about a third of the volume of the 2nd song of the Iliad, the story about the Achaean commanders who brought their ships to Troy has a reputation as a tedious lecture: “This collection of legends about Agamemnon’s warriors, sometimes just a list of them, now seems quite boring to us” (Annensky, “What is poetry?”; see: Nilsson. Op. cit., 37–38). In Gnedich’s translation, the 2nd canto of the Iliad is entitled “Dream. Boeotia, or List of Ships” - in it Zeus tells the god of sleep: “Rush, deceptive Dream, to the fast-flying ships of the Achaeans.”
read to the middle - Subsequently, Dante’s voice will be heard here: “Insomnia, Homer, tight sails...“ / He lived through the list of ships until the middle” (Strochkov) and “Earthly life, like a list of ships, / I read barely until the middle” (Kudinov).
Insomnia... crane-like – Wed. subsequently: “When there is insomnia, birds are a tried and tested company,” “there were birds until I lost count” (Soshkin).
ships... like a crane – In the Iliad, warriors are likened to birds, including flying cranes (see: Terras V. Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandel’štam // Slavic and East European Journal. 1965. Vol. 10, no. 3. P. 258). The parallelism of ships and birds, absent in expanded form in the Iliad, is not uncommon in Russian poetry: “But in the fog there, like a flock of swans, / The ships carried by the waves turn white” (Batyushkov), “There are the ships of the brave Achaeans, / Like formations of cheerful swans, / They fly to their destruction, as if to a feast” (Glinka), “A herd of winged ships” (Shevyrev), “Choo, the guns burst out! winged ships / The battle village was covered with a cloud, / The ship ran into the Neva - and now, among the swells, / Swinging, it floats like a young swan” and “The ship floats like a thunder swan...” (Pushkin), “Ship<…>will spread out a winged course" (Kuchelbecker), "When a village of ships, / Noisy with its vast wings, / The rows of raging waves / With its high chest pushes apart / And flies to its native land" (Yazykov), "Fly, my winged ship" (A.K. Tolstoy), “As on outstretched wings, / A ship flew” (A. Maikov), “Winged ships turn white” (Merezhkovsky), “A ship flashed by, sailing away at dawn<…>like a white swan, spreading its wings” (Bely), “About the pier / of winged ships” (Voloshin). And vice versa, flight can appear as swimming: “The cheerful lark curls / And drowns in the blue swells, / Scattering songs in the wind! / When an eagle soars above the heights of steep rocks, / Spreading wide sails, / And across the steppe, through the abyss of water, / A village of cranes sails to their homeland” (Venevitinov; in the original, in Goethe, there is no motive for swimming). If an army is like birds, then the opposite is also true: “And above - in formation / Or in a sharp wedge, / Like an army, / A regiment of cranes / flies across the whole sky” (A. Maikov). The militarization of the air will increase the demand for this metaphor: “Above them, in the clouds, look, close, in the distance, / Steel cranes are flying - / Those are our miracle planes!” (Poor), “And, lined up for battle, / Cranes fly over you / In the blue sky. / You commanded: - Fly! – / And they are already far away” (Barto), “Who will fly up and shoot down / This black plane?<…>And they took off over the fields / Cranes after cranes, / And rushed to attack: / “Well, damned one, beware!” (Chukovsky). In a song from the 1970s, fallen warriors are reincarnated as flying cranes, and “there is a small gap in that formation - / Perhaps this is the place for me!” (Gamzatov, trans. Grebnev) - a motif that in the centon era will be combined with Mandelstam’s ships: “in the list of ships / there is a place for me” (Starikovsky).
Insomnia... ships... like a crane – The similarity in the pattern of movement and the shape of the hull, as well as the similarity (phonetic and morphological) of the words “ships” and “cranes” themselves made them members of a quasi-folklore parallelism - from “She has ships at sea, he has cranes in the sky” (Bestuzhev- Marlinsky, “Roman and Olga”) to “A crane flies in the sky, a ship sails on the sea” (Kim), as well as a rhyming pair, starting at the latest with Blok: “And on the blizzard sea / Ships are sinking. / And over the southern sea the cranes moan.” In Mandelstam, this parallelism, reinforced by the figure of comparison, motivates the mixture of two soporific practices - reading a boring text and counting animals of the same species. Wed. subsequently: “Ship, crane, dream” (Lvovsky).
crane train – Possibly a translation of the expression “Kranichzug” (“Zug der Kraniche”), found, for example, in Schiller (“Was ist’s mit diesem Kranichzug?”) and in the scene with Helen the Beautiful in “Faust” (“...gleich der Kraniche / Laut-heiser klingendem Zug"; compare: Nilsson. Op. cit., 39).
crane... into foreign borders – Wed: “In the steppe the cranes screamed, / And the power of thought carried them / Beyond the borders of their native land” (Fet). In Russian and Soviet authors, the image of flying cranes often accompanies reflections on the homeland and foreign lands: “The Crane, the nomadic hermit, will visit them as a guest for a moment. / Oh, where then, orphaned one, / Where will I be! To what countries, / To what alien borders / Will my bold sail proudly rush / My canoe along the galloping waves! (Davydov), “I shout to the ships, / I shout to the cranes. / – No, thank you! – I scream loudly. – / You swim for yourself! / And fly for yourself! / But I don’t want to go anywhere<…>I’m from here / At all / Nowhere / I don’t want to go! / I will stay in the Soviet Country! (Kharms), “They are flying migratory birds/ In the autumn distance there is a blue sky, / They fly to hot countries, / And I stay with you. / And I remain with you, / My native country forever! / I don’t need the Turkish coast, / And I don’t need Africa” (Isakovsky). The cry of cranes is an attribute of Russia: “Choo! the cranes are pulling in the sky, / And their cry is like a roll call / Keeping the sleep of the native land / The Lord's sentinels” (Nekrasov), “About the homeland - the cry of the cranes” (T. Beck); Having heard it in a foreign land, they remember their homeland: “Now they are flying close and sobbing louder and louder, / As if they brought sad news to me... / From what inhospitable land did you / Fly here for the night, cranes?.. / I know that a country where the sun is already without strength, / Where the shroud is already waiting, the cold earth / And where the sad wind howls in the bare forests - / Either my native land, then my fatherland” (A. Zhemchuzhnikov). Since the movement of the cranes “to foreign borders” is a movement to the south, and the Achaean ships are heading in the other direction and are still likened to cranes, the commented text takes on similarities with the enactment of an ancient plot in Central Russian scenery, popular in the modern era.
On the heads of kings there is divine foam – “Phrase<...>evokes productive ancient associations - the kings of the tribal society, their arrogance, strife, the birth of Aphrodite from the foam, pagan polytheism, the closeness of the gods to people" ( Polyakova S. Osip Mandelstam. Ann Arbor, 1992. P. 28). Wed. also: “We are splashes of red foam / Above the pallor of the seas. / Leave earthly captivity, / Sit among kings!” (Vyach. Ivanov; see: Lekmanov O. Notes on the topic “Mandelshtam and Vyacheslav Ivanov” // “Own” and “alien” words in a literary text. Tver, 1999. P. 199).
Where are you sailing? – Wed: “The community has moved and is cutting through the waves. / Floats. Where should we sail?”, here the fleet is likened to birds: “And the flock of ships are sinking,” and creative state– sleep (Pushkin); “Everything swells like the sea. I’m definitely in reality / I’m sailing somewhere into the distance on a ship<…>Where am I going?" (Ogarev).
crane wedge... Where are you sailing? - Wed: “Where are you rushing, winged villages?” (A. Odoevsky).
Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena – The similarity with Lermontov’s “In dust and blood his knees glide” (cf. the roll call of the endings of verses and hemistiches: “... you are Elena” / “... blood - knees”) appears in the centone: “Where are you sailing when wouldn't it be Elena? / Wherever you look, her hem is everywhere, / Her knees slide in dust and blood” (Eremenko).
long... Like a crane's wedge... Elena – In Dante, the shadows of those convicted of debauchery, including Helen, Achilles and Paris, move “like cranes”<…>in a long line" (“come i gru<…>lunga riga"; compare: Nilsson. Op. cit., 39). Lozinsky, translating this passage, will remember Mandelstam: “Like a crane’s wedge flies to the south.”
If not for Helen, What is Troy alone for you, Achaean men? - Wed: “No, it is impossible to condemn that the sons of Troy and the Achaeans / For such a wife they endure battles and troubles for so long” (“Iliad”, trans. Gnedich; see: Terras. Op. cit., 258).
Homer... crane... sea – Wed: “The swells of the iambic seas are sad, / And the wandering flocks of cranes, / And the palm tree about which Odysseus / Told the embarrassed Nausicaa” (Gumilyov).
foam... Elena... sea – Wed: “And then Elena is born<…>Whiter than sea foam" (Merezhkovsky).
ships... foam... Elena... sea – Wed: “You are pale and beautiful, like foam<…>You and death, you and the life of ships. / O Elena, Elena, Elena, / You are the beautiful foam of the seas” (Balmont; see: Markov V. Kommentar zu den Dichtungen von K. D. Bal’mont. Koeln, 1988. S. 195).
Both the sea and Homer – Russian authors, following Byron (“By the deep sea, and music in its roar”; trans. Batyushkova: “And there is harmony in this talk of the waves”), declare art to be congenial to the sea element: “For me, the overflows of wonderful harmonies / The roar of the rolling swells formed "(A. Maikov), "There is melodiousness in the sea waves, / Harmony in spontaneous disputes" (Tyutchev); hence the likening of poems to waves with an imitation of the rhythm of the surf - from “What to swim in the sea, then read Dante: / His poems are solid and full, / Like elastic waves of the sea!” (Shevyrev) to “I was born and raised in the Baltic swamps, next to / gray zinc waves that always came in twos, / and from here all the rhymes” (Brodsky). In Mandelstam, this declaration is reduced to an equation, the evidential power of which is ensured by the sound similarity of its members: “sea” and “Homer”. This "almost an anagram" ( Nilsson. Op. cit., 41), perhaps inspired by Pushkin’s phrase “What is Zhukovsky’s sea - and what is his Homer” (see: Ronen O. Poetics of Osip Mandelstam. St. Petersburg., 2002. P. 25), will be expanded into a hexametric palindrome “The sea is mighty - I will answer Homer in its noisy tone” (Avaliani). Pasternak will use a punning way of proving the thesis about the naturalness of poetry to the sea, also on Pushkin’s material: ““To the sea” was: the sea + Pushkin’s love for it<…>poet + sea, two elements that are so unforgettable - Boris Pasternak: “The element of free element / With the free element of verse” ...” (Tsvetaeva, “My Pushkin”; cf.: “Farewell, free element!” and “... poems will flow freely"). The association “Pushkin - sea - poetry” (reflected in the call to “throw” him “from the Steamboat of modernity”) dates back at the latest to Merezhkovsky, who argued that the poet and the hero “are born from the same element. The symbol of this element in nature for Pushkin is the sea. The sea is like the soul of a poet and hero” (“Pushkin”); here and soon in Rozanov (“About Pushkin Academy”) Pushkin is close to Homer.
Like a crane's wedge... everything moves – Wed. subsequently: “like a crane’s wedge when it takes / a course to the south. Like everything moving forward” (Brodsky).
everything moves with love – An idea that goes back, in particular, to Dante (see: Nilsson. Op. cit., 42); in a similar verbal design cf.: “Only love holds and moves life” (Turgenev, “Sparrow”).
And the sea... with love – Hidden roll call “and the sea - amore” (cf.: Lachmann R. Gedaechtnis und Literatur. Frankfurt am Main, 1990. S. 400)?
divine foam... And the sea, and Homer... with love... listen – Wed: “What a charm<…>in this eavesdropping on Anadyomena emerging from the foam of the sea, for she is a symbol of Homer’s poetry” (Zhukovsky about his work on the translation of “The Odyssey”). Wed. also “The Sea” by Vyazemsky, where the sea element appears as the cradle of the “enchantress of the world” and the eternal source of poetry.
Homer is silent- So counselor Virgil leaves Dante.
read to the middle... Homer is silent – Wed: “Over the Bible, yawning, I sleep” (Derzhavin), “And I yawned over Virgil” (Pushkin), “They beat Zorya... from my hands / The old Dante falls out, / On my lips the verse I started / Has died away half-read” ( Pushkin).
I read the list of ships halfway through... the black sea – “Black Pont” is mentioned in “The Iliad” (translated by Gnedich; see: Taranovsky K. Essays on Mandel’štam. Cambridge MA; London, 1976. P. 147) approximately in the middle of the “list of ships” (see: Lifshits G. Polysemantic word in poetic speech. M., 2002. P. 169).
is silent, And the black sea... is noisy – Wed: “Everything is silent / Only the Black Sea is noisy” (Pushkin; see: Taranovsky. Op. cit., 147; cf.: Lachmann. Op. cit., 401) and “And the Black Sea makes noise without stopping” (Lermontov; see: Taranovsky. Op. cit., 147).
sea... ornate – The idea of the “speak of the sea” as a hymn to the creator of the universe (murmur maris, a frequent phrase in Latin poetry; proposed by Cicero as an example) was adopted by new European literature: Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Byron, Hugo, Batyushkov, Vyazemsky, Baratynsky, Pushkin, etc. . (see: // New Literary Review. 2004. No. 66. P. 128–129).
florid, makes noise - Wed: “What are you making a fuss about, people’s leaders?” (Pushkin).
And with a heavy roar – Wed: “And fell with a heavy roar” (Pushkin).
Insomnia... foam... sea... noisy... roaring – Wed: “I heard the roar of the depths of the sea, / And the foam of roaring waves burst into the quiet region of visions and dreams” (Tyutchev).
sea... love... headboard – Wed. later: “And he will follow my shadow - how? with love? / No! it will most likely be caused by the tendency of water to move. / But it will return to you, like a great surf to your head, / like Dante’s counselor, yielding to destruction” (Brodsky).
Insomnia... love... headboard – Wed: “The holy joys flew away as friends - / Their swarm played around you in the morning sleep; / And the angel of beauty, your relatives, with love / Invisibly clung to your head” (Zhukovsky), “My Guardian Genius - with love / He was given the joy of separation: / Will I fall asleep? will cling to the headboard / And will sweeten the sad dream” (Batyushkov), “They will fall asleep - with prayer, with love / My ghost in their happy dream / will fly to his native headboard” (Kuchelbecker), “I cry like a child, clinging to the headboard, / I rush around the bed of sleep, tormented by love” (Davydov), “And before the morning the desired sleep / I closed my tired eyes<…>He leaned towards her head; / And his gaze with such love, / Looked at her so sadly” (Lermontov), “Then these sounds, with compassion, with love, / The beauty whispers, bending towards the head of the head... / She fell asleep...” (Benediktov), “I’m waiting for the hour of the night to come soon. / Did he break through? Clinging to the headboard / Exhausted, with a sore head, / I dream of the past with delight and love” (Rostopchina), “Some sounds rush around / And cling to my headboard. / They are full of languid separation, / They tremble with unprecedented love” (Fet), “In bed I cried, leaning against the headboard; / And my heart was full of forgiveness, / But still not people, - with endless love / I loved God and myself as one” (Merezhkovsky).
Insomnia... sea... love... headboard – Wed: “Here the prince falls asleep in anxiety and grief, / His sleep is sweetly lulled by the dark sea... / The prince dreams: quietly at his head / An angel bends over and whispers with love” (Apukhtin).
1915 – Parallelism between the Trojan War and the First World War (see: Dutli R. Meine Zeit, mein Tier: Osip Mandelstam. Zuerich, 2003. S. 128) clarifies the understanding of love as the source of universal movement: this source is eternal.
The creative process of the poet Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is extremely ambiguous. It is divided into several stages, according to structure and mood, which are radically different from each other. Poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails" was written in early years his activities and is imbued with a certain romanticism.
“Insomnia...” was written at the end of the summer of 1915. And it was published for the first time in the next publication of Mandelstam’s collection “Stone”. There are two versions of how this poem was created. The first and not very popular one tells that Osip Emilievich in those years was interested in ancient literature and was an ardent admirer of ancient Greek authors.
The other, more popular one, conveys the opinion of his close friends. They believed that the lyrics were inspired by Mandelstam’s trip to Koktebel, to the house of his old friend, Maximilian Voloshin (the Tsvetaeva sisters and Alexei Tolstoy also vacationed there). There Osip was shown part of an old ship that could have been built back in medieval times.
Genre, direction, size
The poem was written in iambic hexameter with the addition of pyrrhic. The rhyme is circular, where the feminine alternates with the masculine.
The direction within which Mandelstam’s creative genius developed is called “Acmeism.” From the point of view of literary theory, it is correct to call this phenomenon a movement, since it is not as large and large-scale as, for example, realism or classicism. The Acmeist poet prefers not abstract symbolic images, but rather concrete and understandable artistic images, metaphors and allegories. He writes down to earth, without using abstruse and complex philosophical concepts.
Genre: lyric poem.
Composition
The novelty of the poem is determined by its construction. The three-stage composition reflects the path overcome by the lyrical hero in his reflections.
- The first quatrain is the beginning of the plot. The hero is trying to sleep, and behold, a long list of Achaean ships in the hero’s imagination turns into a “crane train” rushing into the distance.
- The author asks the question: where and why are they sailing? Trying to answer this question in the second quatrain, Mandelstam asks even more serious questions, recalling the plot of an ancient poem, where a bloody war broke out because of love, claiming the lives of hundreds of heroes.
- The poem ends with a line that conveys the state of mind of the lyrical hero. The sea is noisy and thundering. But, it is worth assuming (considering that the work was written in Koktebel) that he finally falls asleep to these sounds of the night, dark sea.
Images and symbols
All images and symbols are taken by the author from Homer’s ancient poem “The Iliad”. In it we're talking about about the dispute between the Olympian goddesses who did not invite the goddess of discord to the feast. In a fit of revenge, she quarreled three women from the divine pantheon (Hera, Aphrodite and Athena), throwing one golden apple on the table, intended for the most beautiful of them. The ladies went to Paris (the Trojan prince), the most beautiful young man on earth, so that he would judge them. Each offered her gift as a bribe, but Paris chose Aphrodite's offer - love herself. beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of the Achaean king. The man kidnapped his chosen one, and then her husband, along with the troops of other rulers, went in search. The Achaeans could not stand the shame and declared war on Troy, which fell in the struggle, but resisted very courageously.
- List of ships- a long and monotonous list that the ancient Greek poet Homer added to his poem “The Iliad”. This is exactly how many ships went to conquer Troy. The author counted them in order to fall asleep, because his heart is also bewitched by love, he cannot find peace.
- Divine foam- This is a reference to the appearance of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She came ashore from the sea foam, which in this case is a symbol of love.
- Helen of Troy- a woman for whose love troops of both sides were killed. The Achaeans did not need land and power; they came at the call of their hearts.
- Contrast between Homer's poetic voice and the sea necessary in order to show the futility of the efforts of the lyrical hero. Whatever he does, he cannot forget his own yearning of heart, because everything moves by love. The sea in this case is a free element, returning the author to the present time, to reality, where he is also tormented by feeling.
- Antique motifs. The poem begins with the thoughts of the lyrical hero while listing the names of ancient Greek ships. This is the "Catalog" mentioned in Homer's Iliad. The ancient work contains a detailed listing of each of the detachments of soldiers heading to the Trojan War. At the time of writing the poem, twenty-four-year-old Mandelstam was studying at the Faculty of History and Philology of the Faculty of Philology at St. Petersburg University. Reading a list of ships from Homer's poem was considered an excellent remedy for insomnia. It is with this word that the poet begins his work.
- Theme of love. The hero suffers from the fact that he cannot sleep and begins to list the names. However, this does not help and, having read the list to the middle, he begins to think. The main problem of the hero is as old as the world - love. The disturbances of the sea are like disturbances in his heart. He doesn’t know what to do, how to fall asleep and “who to listen to.”
- The problem of sacrifice of love. Mandelstam perceives feeling as a cult - it needs to make sacrifices, it is bloodthirsty in its fury. For his sake, the elements worry and destroy ships, for his sake wars are fought, where the best of the best perish. Not everyone is ready to devote themselves to love, putting all that is most precious on its altar.
Topics and issues
Meaning
The author recalls the Iliad, how the Kings, who were crowned with “divine foam,” sailed to Troy in the hope of returning the beautiful Helen, who was kidnapped by Paris. Because of her, the Trojan War broke out. It turns out that the most important reason for bloodshed is not the conquest of lands, but love. So the lyrical hero is surprised how this force sweeps away everything in its path, how people have been giving their lives for it for thousands of years.
In the third quatrain, he tries to understand this incomprehensible force, which turns out to be more powerful than both Homer and the sea. The author no longer understands what to listen to and who to believe if everything falls before the powerful force of attraction of souls. He asks Homer, but he is silent, because everything was said a long time ago, BC. Only the sea roars as furiously and stubbornly as the heart of a man in love beats.
Means of artistic expression
There are a lot of tropes in the poem on which the lyrical narrative is built. This is very characteristic of Acmeism, the movement to which Mandelstam belonged.
Metaphorical expressions and epithets, such as “long brood”, “crane train” immediately take the reader to the thoughts of the hero, allowing a deeper sense of the ancient Greek era that the author is thinking about. The ships seem to be compared to a flock of cranes rushing somewhere into the distance, where they literally sit “like a wedge” in foreign lands.
Rhetorical questions convey the hero’s thoughtfulness, his doubts, and anxiety. At the same moment, the element of the sea is very clearly manifested. For the author, she seems to be alive.
The adjective “black” simultaneously reminds us that the author was resting at that moment on the Crimean coast, and at the same time refers to eternity, bottomlessness sea waters. And they, like an endless stream of thoughts, rumble somewhere in the author’s head.
Interesting? Save it on your wall!"Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails" is an example of using ancient culture to reflect on the eternal moral and philosophical category of love. The poem is studied in 11th grade. We invite you to familiarize yourself with a brief analysis of “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails" according to plan.
Brief Analysis
History of creation– the work was created in 1915, when the poet was in Koktebel. It was first published in the second edition of the debut collection “Stone” (1916).
Theme of the poem– Trojan War; the power of love.
Composition– The poem is a monologue-reflection on the stated topics. In terms of meaning, it is divided into three parts: a story about insomnia, which forced him to turn to Homer, an appeal to "Achaean men", thoughts about love.
Genre- elegy.
Poetic size– written in iambic hexameter, ring rhyme ABBA.
Metaphors – “this long brood, this crane train”, “everything moves with love”, “the sea... approaches the head with a heavy roar”.
Epithets – “tight sails”, “divine foam”, “black sea”,
Comparison – “like a crane’s wedge... where are you swimming.”
History of creation
It is known that Osip Mandelstam was a student of the Faculty of History and Philology of the Romance-Germanic Department. He never graduated from the university, did not receive a diploma, but this period of his life left an imprint on the poet’s work. Philology students studied the Iliad in full. They considered reading a list of ships a proven cure for insomnia. This fact also found a place in the analyzed poem.
As a student, Mandelstam devoted himself to poetry. His creations were noticed by his older brothers-in-arms. In 1915, the young poet stayed in Koktebel in the house of Maximilian Voloshin. This is where the work “Insomnia” was created. Homer. Tight sails." Close friends of the poet claimed that he was inspired to write poetry by the wreck of an ancient ship he saw in Koktebel.
Subject
Ancient literature influenced the work of poets of different eras. O. Mandelstam, with the help of it, tries to reveal the eternal philosophical theme of love. The author's focus is on the Trojan War.
The lines of the poem are written in the first person. Thus, the reader can follow the lyrical hero’s train of thought directly. In the first stanza, the hero admits that he could not sleep, so he began to read the list of ships. He reached the middle, and then this process was interrupted by thoughts about the causes of the war. The lyrical hero believes that the “Achaean men” fought not for Troy, but for Helen.
Composition
The poem is a monologue-meditation of the lyrical hero. In terms of meaning, it is divided into three parts: a story about insomnia, which forced him to turn to Homer, an appeal to the “Achaean men,” and reflections on love. The work consists of three quatrains, which corresponds to the semantic organization of the text.
Genre
Means of expression
In order to reveal the topic and show his attitude to the problem posed, O. Mandelstam uses means of expressiveness. The text contains metaphors- “this long brood, this crane train”, “everything moves with love”, “the sea... approaches the head with a heavy roar”; epithets- “tight sails”, “divine foam”, “black sea”; comparison- “like a crane’s wedge... where are you swimming.”
Poem test
Rating analysis
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