Monographic analysis of the poem "Roadside Herbs" by Konstantin Balmont

At one time, Konstantin Balmont was as popular as Blok. Young people wrote down lines from his poems in diaries and quoted at poetry evenings. It was impossible not to love him. Neither himself nor his work. Surrendering to the end of his work, he could not imagine himself outside of love. The poet, absorbed in general attention, was the embodiment of posturing and childish immediacy, 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 Silver Age poetry. Biographers and writers tirelessly build theories about how the poet wrote, what techniques he used, with what symbols he denoted certain events. They want to know where all this sincere and ingenious came from. But theories are powerless before the aspiration of the human soul.

“A sudden line is born (...)

Where, how much, I don’t know myself

But I'm not meditating on a verse

And I never compose the right. ”

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 written. I want to live and live, to live forever. I wrote more than a hundred new poems, it was a real fabulous craziness. " He never planned his creative activity, but simply wrote, this gave rise to his desire to live and love for the world. Many of his works arose suddenly, even for himself. Balmont's “Roadside Herbs” is one such poem.

"Great poet

As contemporaries of Balmont say, he was a poseur. He liked to take a thoughtful look and build from himself a real writer, a genius of poetic thought and a connoisseur of literary prose. Here are just proudly thrown head and frowning eyebrows, even at Balmont himself caused provocative and good-natured children's laughter.

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

In the first quatrain of Roadside Herbs, Balmont is presented to the reader as a great poet, a wise philosopher, an all-seeing genius who is on a par with God. But it only seems so. Talking about the futility of being, where one cart wheel can mutilate the life of a beautiful, not yet blossoming flower, Balmont draws the reader's attention to himself as to a poet-philosopher.

Childishness

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

So, with a ban on freedom of thought and feeling, tragedy and conflict are born. As an avid symbolist, he shows that modern society is doing wrong, dictating conditions that infringe on the human essence. Echoes of mysticism are also traced in this stanza that they were not so alien to the symbolist poets of that time. Fatum. A deplorable combination of circumstances, which makes roadside herbs dry, and a person unhappy - an integral part of this world. This is what Balmont writes.

Towards the sun

Just as a child does not want to accept cruel reality, so the poet tries to direct the reader to the light. When analyzing Balmont’s poem “Roadside Herbs”, one can notice how in the third stanza the lyric hero tells the reader that it is time to make a choice: to stay lying in the dust and look at the sky without having time to bloom, or to meet the sun.

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

Balmont's poetry is often attributed to magical properties. Once they told a story 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, but there is no mysticism here, the poet simply knows how to touch the human soul, how to make it warm, shake up and set off on a long journey.