The waves are crashing. How good you are, O night sea. Analysis of Tyutchev's poem "How good you are, O night sea ..."

How good are you, O night sea, -
Here it is radiant, there it is gray-dark ...
In the moonlight, as if alive,
It walks and breathes and it shines...

In the endless, in the free space
Shine and movement, roar and thunder ...

How good, you are in the wilderness of the night!

You are a great swell, you are a sea swell,
Whose holiday are you celebrating like this?
Waves are rushing, thundering and sparkling,
Sensitive stars look from above.

In this excitement, in this radiance,
All, as in a dream, I'm lost standing -
Oh, how willingly in their charm
I would drown my whole soul ...

Analysis of Tyutchev's poem "How good you are, O night sea ..."

The first version of the poem appeared on the pages of the literary and political newspaper The Day in 1865. After the publication, Tyutchev expressed dissatisfaction. According to him, the editors printed the text of the work with a number of distortions. So there was a second version of the poem, which became the main one. Readers got acquainted with her in the same 1865 thanks to the magazine "Russian Messenger".

The work is dedicated to the memory of Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva, Tyutchev's beloved, who died in August 1864 from tuberculosis. The death of an adored woman, an affair with which lasted for fourteen years, the poet experienced extremely hard. According to contemporaries, he did not seek to hide from the people around him the strongest pain of loss. Moreover, Fedor Ivanovich was constantly looking for interlocutors with whom one could talk about Denisyeva. According to some literary critics, it is the dedication to Elena Alexandrovna that explains the appeal of the lyrical hero to the sea on “you” in the first quatrain. A well-known fact - the poet compared his beloved woman with a sea wave.

The poem is divided into two parts. First, Tyutchev draws a seascape. The sea in his image, like nature in general, appears animated, spiritualized. Personifications are used to describe the picture that opens before the lyrical hero: the sea walks and breathes, the waves rush, the stars look. The second part of the work is quite short. In the last quatrain, the poet tells about the feelings experienced by the lyrical hero. He dreams of merging with nature, completely immersing himself in it. This desire is largely due to Tyutchev's passion for the ideas of the German thinker Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). The philosopher claimed the animation of nature, believed that it has a "world soul".

The works of Fedor Ivanovich, dedicated to nature, in most cases represent a declaration of love for her. It seems to the poet an indescribable pleasure to be able to observe its various manifestations. Tyutchev equally likes to admire the June night, the May thunderstorm, the snow-covered forest, and so on. Often he expresses his attitude to nature with the help of exclamatory sentences expressing delight. This can also be seen in this poem:
The sea drenched in a dull radiance,
How good you are in the emptiness of the night!

The poem "How good you are, O night sea … ”was written by F.I. Tyutchev in 1865. There were several versions of the work. One of the last editions of the poem was handed over by the relatives of the poet I.S. Aksakov, who published them in the newspaper Den on January 22, 1865. However, the text of the work turned out to be distorted, which then caused Tyutchev's indignation. In February, the poet sent a new version of the poem to the Russky Vestnik magazine. This option is considered final.
We can attribute the poem to landscape-meditative lyrics, with elements of philosophical reflection. His style is romantic. The main theme is man and nature. Genre - lyrical fragment.
In the first stanza, the lyrical hero turns to the sea, admiring the play of its colors:

The pronoun "you" is present here. refers to the sea as a living being, like A.S. in his poem "To the Sea". However, then the hero seems to separate himself from the water element, conveying an impression from the outside. At the same time, he endows the sea with a “living soul”:

In the moonlight, as if alive,
It walks and breathes and it shines...

The play of colors, light and shadow is given here in motion, in dynamics, it merges with a sound symphony. As the researchers accurately note, in this poem Tyutchev does not have his usual opposition of sound and light, and the water element is presented not linearly, but as a surface (Gasparov M.).

In the endless, in the free space
Shine and movement, roar and thunder ...
The sea drenched in a dull radiance,
How good you are in the emptiness of the night!

Here we can also recall the poem by V.A. Zhukovsky "Sea". However, we immediately note the difference in the attitude of the lyrical hero. As the researchers note, “the lyrical “I” in Zhukovsky acts as an interpreter of the meanings of nature; this interpretation turns out to be an extrapolation of the hero's self-perception - the sea turns into his double. In Tyutchev, the sea and the lyrical hero are not identical to each other. These are two different units of the lyrical plot. We also note that in Tyutchev's work there is no opposition between the sea and the sky, but rather the poet asserts their natural unity, harmonious coexistence:

You are a great swell, you are a sea swell,
Whose holiday are you celebrating like this?
Waves are rushing, thundering and sparkling,
Sensitive stars look from above

At the same time, the lyrical hero of Tyutchev is here part of the natural world. The sea enchants and hypnotizes him, plunges his soul into some kind of mysterious dream. As if plunging into the sea of ​​his feelings, he longs for complete merging with the great element:

In this excitement, in this radiance,
All, as in a dream, I'm lost standing -
Oh, how willingly in their charm
I would drown my whole soul ...

The same motif of the soul merged with the sea appears in the poem “You, my sea wave”:

Soul, soul I live
Buried at your bottom.

The researchers noted the metaphorical meaning of the poem, hinting at the poet's appeal to his beloved woman, E. Denisyeva, in the first stanza ("How good you are ..."). It is known that the poet compared his beloved with a sea wave (B.M. Kozyrev). With this interpretation of the poem, its ending sounds like the desire of the lyrical hero to completely dissolve in another being, to merge inextricably with him.
Compositionally, we can distinguish two parts in the work. In the first part, the poet creates an image of the sea element (1-3 stanzas), the second part is a description of the feelings of the lyrical hero (4th stanza). We also note the parallelism of the motives of the beginning and ending of the poem. In the first stanza, the lyrical hero speaks of his feelings (for the sea or a beloved creature): “How good you are, O night sea ...”). In the finale, we also have a lyrical confession: “Oh, how willingly in their charm I would drown my whole soul ...”. Landscape has similar features. In the first and fourth stanzas, the sea is depicted in "moonlight". In this regard, we can talk about the ring composition.
The poem is written in four-foot dactyl, quatrains, rhyming - cross. The poet uses various means of artistic expression: epithets (“dim radiance”, “in the free space”, “sensitive stars”), metaphor and inversion (“Oh, how willingly in their charm I would drown my whole soul ...”), personification (“Walks, and breathes, and it shines ...”, “Sensitive stars look from above”), comparison (“as if alive”), rhetorical appeal and a rhetorical question in which the poet deliberately resorts to tautology (“You are a great swell, swell you are a marine, Whose holiday are you celebrating like this?”), polyunion (“Walks, and breathes, and it shines ...”). Color epithets (“radiant”, gray-dark”) create a picturesque picture of the night sea, shimmering in the glow of the moon and stars. "High vocabulary" ("shines", "radiant") gives the speech solemn intonations. Analyzing the phonetic structure of the work, we note the assonance (“How good you are, O night sea ...”) and alliteration (“It is radiant here, it is gray-dark there ...”).
Thus, the lyrical fragment “How good you are, O night sea ...” conveys the relationship between man and nature. As the critic notes, “to be so imbued with physical self-awareness in order to feel oneself an inseparable part of nature - this is what Tyutchev succeeded more than anyone else. This feeling feeds on his wonderful “descriptions” of nature, or rather, its reflections in the soul of the poet.

This work was written in 1865, when the poet's spiritual wound from the loss of his beloved woman was still too fresh. We are talking about Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva, Tyutchev's romance with which lasted 14 years. Tyutchev was very upset by the death of his beloved. It is a known fact that during his lifetime he compared Elena with a sea wave. It is the appeal to the sea on “you” that gives reason to assume that the text of Tyutchev’s poem “How good you are, about the night sea ..” are words dedicated to the beloved woman. The sea is presented by the poet as a living being, it breathes and walks. The word "swell", which the author calls the depths of the sea, gives the poem a note of hopelessness. He passionately desires to dissolve in this stormy element and drown his soul here. The poet contemplates the mysterious surface of the night sea and feels lost in this world.

This beautiful piece of Russian literature can be taught in the classroom, or left for independent study by students as homework. You can download it in full, and if necessary, read it in full online, on our website.

How good are you, O night sea, -
Here it is radiant, there it is gray-dark ...
In the moonlight, as if alive,
It walks and breathes and it shines...

In the endless, in the free space
Shine and movement, roar and thunder ...
The sea drenched in a dull radiance,
How good, you are in the wilderness of the night!

You are a great swell, you are a sea swell,
Whose holiday are you celebrating like this?
Waves are rushing, thundering and sparkling,
Sensitive stars look from above.

In this excitement, in this radiance,
All, as in a dream, I'm lost standing -
Oh, how willingly in their charm
I would drown my whole soul ...