Man has always been attracted by the image of the sea: the element prompted reflection, beckoned with its secrets, and called to adventure. It occupies a special place in the art of romanticism, when the rebel hero compares himself with a raging water element. One of the first Russian writers to draw a parallel between the sea and man, and even personify the elements, was V. A. Zhukovsky.

His famous elegy “The Sea” by V.A. Zhukovsky created it in 1822 - during the mature period of his work. By this time, the poet no longer turns to the motives of sentimentalism, but develops a romantic ideology. The poem “The Sea” occupies a central place in the author’s work; it becomes the standard of Russian romanticism.

The poem “Sea” is dedicated to Maria Protasova. Zhukovsky had tender feelings for this girl, but could not marry her. The fact is that Masha’s mother E. A. Protasova was the writer’s cousin; she considered the relationship between her daughter and her cousin to be too close to give permission for marriage. The pain from this disappointment was reflected in the entire work of the poet.

Genre and size

The work was written in a special style characteristic of that time. The genre of the poem “The Sea” by Zhukovsky is elegy. Poets of the Romantic era often turned to it. Literally, “elegy” is translated as “complaint.” Interestingly, this genre has retained its characteristics since antiquity. The elegy has a philosophical character; it expresses melancholy and lyrical reflection. All this is typical for the poem “Sea”.

In addition to content, this genre also implies technical features. Authors often choose the average volume of the work, which allows them to create a detailed statement, a three-syllable size that gives melodiousness. Zhukovsky's tools are interesting. He writes his elegy in blank verse, that is, while maintaining meter and rhythm, there is no rhyme. The size of the poem “The Sea” is amphibrach tetrameter. All these characteristic properties make the work sensual, deeply permeated with poetic sadness.

Direction

It is impossible to overestimate the role of elegy for romanticism. Like no other genre, in this genre a romantic poet could fully express his emotions, talk about his suffering, his mental pain. V.A., who developed the tendencies of romanticism in his work. Zhukovsky did not shy away from this genre. His first elegy, “The Rural Cemetery,” was written back in 1802; it is a translation of Gray’s poem. This arrangement allowed sentimentalists to consider Zhukovsky their successor, but already in it one can see the motives of appeal and resistance belonging to romanticism.

A completely different author appears to the reader in the elegy of 1822. Having created his own special interpretation of the image of the sea, Zhukovsky becomes the founder of a new tradition in Russian literature. Since then, poets have often turned to the motif of this element: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev. The very idea of ​​the closeness of man and nature is very close to the era of romanticism. It is known that A.S. Pushkin highly valued “The Sea,” and two years later he himself wrote a poem with the same title.

Composition

The elegy “The Sea” can be divided into three parts.

1. First, a dialogue takes place between the lyrical hero and the sea; the author contemplates the “silent” sea, is fascinated by it, but feels that this visible peace holds a certain secret.
2. The second part describes a storm, to which the lyrical hero gives a very interesting explanation. It is caused by the fact that “dark clouds” violate the idyll of sea and sky.
3. The final part - the author again returns to the description of the calm elements that loop the poem. However, now he already knows what secret is kept in the abyss of the waters.

It is interesting that the sea itself remains calm throughout the entire work; the storm is imagined by the author. But it is precisely this method of reasoning that allows the poet to make the composition three-part, which gives dynamism to the work and convincingness to the author’s conclusion.

Heroes and their characteristics

The main character of the elegy is the sea. Let's consider in what ways the poet draws the image of the sea. It is not enough to say that the element is personified, it is anthropomorphic. The sea is alive, it breathes, but most importantly, it has all the psychological qualities of a person. It is in love with the clear sky when it is reflected in its waters - the sea is happy and serene. But sometimes this idyll is disrupted by clouds that hide the sky from admiring the waters. The surface of the water reacts sharply to separation from the sky: it resists, tries to resist the “hostile darkness” in order to regain its happiness.

After imagining this picture, the lyrical hero of the poem guessed what secret the sea was hiding. Now he feels his kinship with him - he understood the sea, and the sea understood him. Perhaps he is experiencing the same tragedy, which is why he stands over the abyss... All this brings the characters together: both are inclined to contemplation, they feel the same pain for both.

Themes

• The main theme of the elegy “The Sea” is the impossibility of love. And this reveals the autobiographical nature inherent in most of the poet’s lyrics. He could not marry his beloved - M.A. Protasova. The young people did not dare to get married without their mother’s blessing and remained good friends. Thus, the allegory in the elegy is more optimistic than the fate of the writer himself, because the separating force only temporarily invades the union of heaven and the abyss of water, but he is not given the opportunity to enter into a marriage with his beloved. Perhaps the image of the sea turned out to be so psychological because the author transferred his own experiences to it.
• The motive of struggle follows from the above discussed topic. The confrontation between the sea and the clouds is the culmination of the poem. But even having won, it will never be calm: the sea is doomed to always be afraid that the darkness may at any moment again try to take away its happiness.
• In addition, the work contains the theme of loneliness. It’s not for nothing that the lyrical hero turns to the sea - he is lonely, he rejoices that the element is happy in admiring the sky, but at the same time he also feels the anxiety of the element. The watery abyss is worried about its light azure, afraid of losing it again and being left alone, perhaps forever.

Idea

Zhukovsky’s poem reflects the main idea of ​​romanticism - the kinship of man and nature. The poet calls on her to learn both contemplation and resistance, and the meaning of the poem “The Sea” is that you need to fight for your happiness. As an example, a person is given an element that triumphs over darkness. Unfortunately, the sea will never be serene as before, but it is together with the sky again! Perhaps the author of the poem himself would like to just as boldly and firmly overcome all the obstacles standing in the way of the desired marriage.

Artistic media

The paths of the poem “Sea” work to create unique author’s images. The elegy is rich in various artistic means.

The role of epithets in the work is significant. With the help of them, the author in the first part of Zhukovsky conveys the calmness of the elements: “silent”, “azure”. This is followed by personifications that endow the sea with a feeling soul: “you breathe,” “your tense chest breathes.” In the climactic and final parts, the state of the sea will be conveyed by verbs conveying movement or state of mind, which gives the image psychologism: “you are pouring,” “splashing,” “howling,” “beating,” “heaving,” “admiring, trembling.” This state is also characterized by the epithet “scared”, which refers to waves.

The opposing force has characteristic epithets: “dark” (clouds), “hostile” (haze).

The epithets also convey the joy of the meeting of sky and sea; it is no coincidence that the “brilliance of the returned heavens” is precisely “sweet.”

There are poems and figures of speech in the text. To begin with, I would like to note that the elegy contains speech patterns characteristic of romanticism: “tense chest”, “sweet life”.

There are no antitheses in the text: the opposing forces have corresponding epithets (clear skies - dark clouds).

In the first part, such a figure of speech as a rhetorical question is repeatedly encountered: “What moves your immense womb?”

The ellipsis at the end of the climactic part allows the author to break off the narrative on the most dramatic note and return to the dialogue with the mysteriously calm sea.

Interesting? Save it on your wall!

Comparative characteristics of the elegy by V. A. Zhukovsky “The Sea”, the poems by A. S. Pushkin “To the Sea” and F. I. Tyutchev “How good you are, O night sea...”

Collection of works: Comparative characteristics of V. A. Zhukovsky’s elegy “The Sea”, poems by A. S. Pushkin “To the Sea” and F. I. Tyutchev “How good you are, O night sea...”

The theme “Man and Nature” has always been deeply organic for Russian poetry. She invariably placed all the diversity of nature next to man and opened his eyes to the “thrill of life,” to wise expediency, grandeur and harmony, and the beauty of his native land. Nature has always remained a source of beauty and inspiration for the creator. Often the same natural phenomenon attracted different poets at different times.

The high sense of nature is subtly conveyed by Russian poetry. Moreover, the image of nature is never confined only to a landscape framework; it is always something more. M. Epstein wrote that “the analysis of landscape motifs helps to understand not only the national identity of Russian poetry, but also its historical movement, since these motifs stand outside of history. Changes become obvious against the backdrop of something unchanged.”1

Images of nature, which remains the same throughout the centuries, allow us to trace the movement of artistic imagery itself, without confusing it with the movement of the depicted reality. It is easier to feel the peculiarity of a particular vision of the world if the subject of this vision is something stable, the same for all poets. In our case, this is the sea, which was attractive not only to Russian poets.

The elegy of V. A. Zhukovsky “The Sea” is one of the best and famous elegies of the poet. It is written in amphibrach tetrameter and blank verse, which allowed Zhukovsky to imitate the silence of the sea, the movement of waves, and the swaying of the sea surface. The sea is a new image for the poet. Zhukovsky depicts him in a calm state, during a storm, and after it.

All three pictures are great. The calm surface of the sea reflects the clear azure of the sky, golden clouds, and the shine of the stars. In a storm, the sea beats, waves rise, the noise of which is wonderfully conveyed by Zhukovsky with the help of alliteration:

You fight, you howl, you raise waves,

You tear, you torment the hostile darkness...

A complete illusion of the hissing of boiling, bubbling waves is created. The three-syllable feet in the above lines are separated by pauses, conveying the measured beats of the waves.

But no matter how beautiful the sea is, it is not the only thing that occupies the poet’s thoughts. He represents the sea element as a living, feeling, thinking creature. This explains the abundance of metaphors, metaphorical comparisons, and personifications. The poet turns to the sea with questions, as if to a person: “What moves your vast bosom? What is your tense chest breathing?” The sea remains a mystery to him. His thoughts lead him to think about the similarities between earthly life and the life of the sea elements. The sea from “earthly bondage” reaches to the sky to find the desired freedom. Only there, in the heights, everything is beautiful and eternal. The state of two abysses - sea and heaven - worries the poet: “Zhukovsky’s sea turned out to be a picturesque symbol of human life. The traditional allegorical image of the sea of ​​life turned into a symbolic one in the poet’s romantic system. The secret of the sea is its constant attraction to the bright sky, its inner independence from it, its reflection, a fierce protest against the hostile darkness that hides the pure heavenly grace, constant trembling, as if fear of loss.”

Everything in this elegy was new: the artistic image, the philosophical sound, the by no means elegiac mood. Only the image of the sky, familiar to Zhukovsky, has been preserved, which always signified infinity in his works.

He peered intently into this infinity and noticed everything: the movement of light streams, the play of colors, the behavior of the sun and moon. In “Sea” two infinities appear – heavenly and sea. To define one of them, the poet uses a word that would later become Tyutchev’s favorite - “abyss.”

According to G.N. Pospelov, the life of the sea in Zhukovsky’s elegy “is comprehended in the light of the religious ideal, the desire for the otherworldly.” This desire is associated with the development of personal consciousness and general dissatisfaction with the world around us.

Two years later Pushkin’s “To the Sea” was written. The history of the creation of this poem is well known, but it is worth remembering it in class, since it is directly related to its problems. In his depiction of the sea, Pushkin follows the romantic tradition: for him the sea is a free, indomitable element. For the disgraced poet, it is a symbol of freedom, and this is once again confirmed by the mention of Byron and Napoleon, whose names were associated with freedom for the noble intelligentsia of that time.

In the poetic speech used to describe the sea, Pushkin and Zhukovsky have much in common: “and you shine with proud beauty” - “and you joyfully sparkle with its stars”; “you roll blue waves” - “azure sea”; “a voice from the depths” - “over your depths” and so on. Both poets were inspired by southern nature, were captivated by its beauty, and created similar artistic images. How are the poems different? They are different in their ideas and problems. “To the Sea” was written in the light of the ideal of civil liberty. For Pushkin, the sea is full of irresistible, indomitable force, and this is why it is dear to him. The romantic image of the sea element helped emphasize the freedom-loving mood of the poet and his determination. The landscape recedes into the background, in the foreground is the civil sound of the lyrical work.

The last in this series is F. I. Tyutchev’s poem “How good you are, O night sea...”, written in January 1865 in Nice, shortly after the death of E. A. Denisyeva. The poem, like other works of this period, reflects the poet's depressed mood.

Let us note something that, of course, has in common the three poets glorifying the sea element. For Tyutchev, the sea is like a living creature: “In the moonlight, as if alive, // It walks, and breathes, and it shines.” In his mind, the great swell of the sea is free and beautiful. As in Zhukovsky’s poem, in Tyutchev’s poems two infinities arise - heavenly and sea.

The space is open vertically, and two infinities are connected by the presence of a person:

In this excitement, in this radiance,

All as if in a dream, I stand lost...

We look at the sea through his eyes, he is between two abysses and does not just peer into a natural phenomenon, but with all his soul is imbued with the state of the elements, wants to merge with it. Night is a time often mentioned in Tyutchev’s poems about nature. At night, nature, more than ever, reveals its kinship with the abyss of chaos - the ancestral home of all things. The man stops, amazed by the majestic spectacle, shocked by the realization that it is so close to the state of his soul.

This conscious aesthetic sense of nature belongs to a rather late time: “To find it, a person must at least partially free himself from natural dependence, go far enough along the path of culture and, only looking back, from its height, consider what he always knew and at the same time I didn’t seem to notice the time.”

All life on earth, according to Tyutchev, exists in the struggle of passions. Man is a participant in these clashes, this struggle. But if there is harmony in nature, then it is not in the human soul. The poet was looking for ways of reconciliation between man and nature. He saw this path in the merging of the human soul with the soul of nature, with a single world soul (in the spirit of Schelling’s idealistic philosophy and his natural philosophical ideas).

To summarize, we are talking about what new, in accordance with their era, each of the poets contributed to the development of the traditional theme “Man and Nature”. Having observed its development, we can draw a conclusion about the traditional and innovative in landscape lyrics, about how gradually the description of nature in Russian poetry received ever deeper content and philosophical understanding. Changes in the system of poetic thinking are always closely connected with the time in which he lived and created words, with philosophy and history, the evolution of literary genres and movements. That is why it is interesting to analyze three poems on the same topic by different poets.

You have read the finished development: Comparative characteristics of the elegy by V. A. Zhukovsky “The Sea”, the poems by A. S. Pushkin “To the Sea” and F. I. Tyutchev “How good you are, O night sea...”

Textbooks and thematic links for schoolchildren, students and anyone involved in self-education

The site is addressed to students, teachers, applicants, and students of pedagogical universities. The student's handbook covers all aspects of the school curriculum.

In the genre of elegy there is a special system of values. The eternity of limitless existence presupposes a pantheistic mystery, against the background of which life acquires personal integrity due to its extreme concentration in time and space. Elegiac beauty is the “farewell beauty” of an irrevocable moment, and elegiac experience is a feeling of living sadness about what has disappeared.
The elegy “The Sea” was written by V. A. Zhukovsky in 1822. This poem expresses the sad reflections of the lyrical hero over the mysterious and amazingly picturesque element of water. The “deep secret” is kept in the abyss of the azure sea. It is she who attracts the lyrical hero with both its dramatic tension and its serenity and immobility. The poet is concerned about the relationship between two abysses - sea and heaven. Zhukovsky’s sea is not free, unlike the absolutely free sky. The sea languishes in “earthly captivity”; it can only enjoy the view of the “distant”, “bright” sky. It seems as if two beings, feeling their kinship, spiritually gravitate towards each other. Love for the sky is a high ideal that fills the life of the sea with deep meaning. At the same time, the sea, sky and storm are symbolic images. For Zhukovsky, the sky is a symbol of serenity, peace, and beauty. When the sea defeats hostile clouds, the “sweet shine of the returned heavens,” silence, stillness, triumphs. But the sky also symbolizes the soul flying upward - the desire for unearthly perfection. In turn, the sea is also a symbol of the fickle human soul.
In the poem, only the image of the sea changes and develops. Through the eyes of the lyrical hero, we observe his movement from above. Zhukovsky surprisingly accurately chose the style of the poem: the elegy is a poetic appeal of the lyrical hero to the sea element. Perhaps she reminds him of his own state of mind:
I stand enchanted over your abyss.
You are alive; you breathe; confused love,
You are filled with anxious thoughts...
The movement of the sea is similar to the irreversibility of human life. Therefore, through the prism of the central image of the elegy, the lyrical hero speaks about his own experiences and feelings.
An important feature of the poem is the combination of statics and dynamics. The colorful descriptions that Zhukovsky draws are combined in an elegy with narrative elements: the lyrical subject talks about the sea as a living creature that loves, thinks, fights with dark clouds for the sky:
When the dark clouds gather,
To take away the clear sky from you -
You fight, you howl, you raise waves,
You tear and torment the hostile darkness...
It is important to note that the conflict between the sea and the forces opposing it is resolved by the end of the poem. However, the image of the sea does not achieve complete internal harmony and external serenity:
And the darkness disappears, and the clouds go away;
But, full of his past anxiety,
You raise frightened waves for a long time,
And the sweet shine of the returned skies
It doesn’t bring back silence at all...
The lyrical hero feels the deceptiveness of the motionless sea. It is no coincidence that the last lines of the poem reveal the main idea of ​​the elegy:
You hide confusion in the dead abyss,
You, admiring the sky, tremble for it.
True life consists of eternal movement, eternal struggle. It seems that the lyrical hero sees happiness and joy in the battle for love. You can't calm down, you can't resign yourself. Victory over the “dark clouds” of life can only be achieved through intense struggle. The visible silence and inner drama of the sea reflect the mental state of the lyrical hero.
This poem reveals the romantic theme of the eternal longing for an ideal, the restless desire for a distant dream:
Silent sea, azure sea,
Reveal to me your deep secret:
What moves your vast bosom?
What is your tense chest breathing?
Or pulls you from earthly bondage
Distant, bright sky to yourself?..
In order to show the constant movement of the sea as clearly as possible, Zhukovsky uses many verbs. In almost every line of the poem, the lyrical hero describes the changes in the sea: the sea breathes, filled with “swept away love” and “anxious thoughts.” From the very beginning of the elegy, Zhukovsky makes us understand that the sea has a soul. Spirit, according to Zhukovsky, is the basis of life. The dynamics of the development of the image of the sea occurs in contrast to the static sky. The lyrical hero describes the sparkle of heaven in warm and light colors. The abundance of epithets helps the poet enhance the contrast of light and darkness. In revealing the relationship between the two elements, antithesis is used. The nouns “love”, “life”, “light”, “silence” are contrasted with others: “secret”, “captivity”, “clouds”, “anxiety”, “confusion”.
Slavicisms and archaisms sound special in a romantic context, giving the elegy the color of a high poetic style. Repetitions enhance the melody and musicality of the piece.
The elegy “The Sea” can be divided into two semantic parts. The first part (the beginning of the elegy) is a lyrical appeal to the sea element. We learn that the “silent sea” is filled with anxious thoughts. In the second part, the poet reveals to the reader a “deep secret.” It is important to note that, despite the large volume, the poem is harmonious and proportionate. Rhyme and rhythm give these qualities to a poem. The elegy is written in amphibrach tetrameter. The neutrality of this meter is combined with an undeniable melodiousness, so the lack of rhyme is not noticed. The sound of the elegy resembles the movement and sound of a wave; one can feel the ebb and flow of the sea. If at the beginning it is silent and calm, then the “free element” becomes more and more agitated. When the sky is covered with clouds, the sea, fearing separation from it, “is tormented by a hostile darkness.” The poet uses a syntactic device such as gradation: “You fight, you howl, you raise waves, // You tear and torment the hostile darkness...” This is the culmination of the elegy. Then the sea calms down, but the lyrical hero says that this serenity is deceptive.
The elegy “The Sea” is rightfully considered the manifesto of Zhukovsky the romantic. The main thing in it is the depiction of a person’s feelings, his emotions and experiences. The poet needs to turn to landscape lyricism, or more precisely to the sea element, in order to understand more deeply and clearly the changes in the human soul. The sea is personified in the poem. At the same time, it is a symbol of melancholy and lack of freedom. The sea element is associated with the abyss of the human “I”.

History of creation. The poem was written in 1822 during the period of Zhukovsky’s creative maturity. It belongs to the program works and is one of the poet’s poetic manifestos. It is known that this poem by Zhukovsky was especially highlighted by Pushkin, who wrote his elegy with the same name two years later.

Genre. In the subtitle of the poem, the author designated its genre - elegy. This is the poet's favorite genre. Turning to the genre of elegy marked Zhukovsky's transition to romanticism. Elegy is a genre of lyric poetry that conveys the mood of sadness, grief, disappointment and sadness. Romantics preferred this genre because it makes it possible to express deeply personal, intimate experiences of a person, his philosophical thoughts about life, love, and feelings associated with the contemplation of nature. The elegy “The Sea” is exactly such a poem.

Topics and problems. Zhukovsky’s poem is not just a poetic picture of the sea element, but a “landscape of the soul,” as the famous philologist A.N. Veselovsky accurately defined such poems in romanticism. Indeed, this is not only a seascape, although, reading the poem, you vividly imagine the sea: it is either quiet, calm, an “azure sea”, or a terrible raging element that is immersed in darkness. But the romantic world of nature is also a mystery that he is trying to unravel. That is why it is so important that in the poem there is a constant roll call between the natural and human worlds - the state of the lyrical hero. But it is important not only that Zhukovsky creates a psychological landscape, that is, he expresses the feelings and thoughts of a person through a description of nature. The peculiarity of this poem is that it is not individual parts of the landscape that are animated, but the sea itself becomes a living being. It seems that the lyrical hero is talking to a thinking and feeling interlocutor, maybe with a friend, or maybe with some mysterious stranger. The romantic pose has no doubt that the sea can be endowed with a soul, just like a person. Indeed, in accordance with romantic ideas, it is in nature that the Divine dissolves; through communication with nature one can speak with God, penetrate into the mystery of being, and come into contact with the World Soul.

Zhukovsky is sure that the soul of the sea is similar to the human soul, where darkness and light, good and evil, joy and sorrow are united. It also reaches out to everything bright - to the sky, to God. But unlike many other romantics who paint this “free element,” Zhukovsky also sees that the sea is languishing, that something is weighing it down, it is rebelling against it. Like a person, the sea cannot feel absolute peace and harmony; its freedom is also relative. That is why the traditional romantic problems of freedom and bondage, storm and peace in Zhukovsky receive a very unusual interpretation.

Idea and composition. The poem “The Sea” is constructed in accordance with the idea contained in it. This is not so much a description of natural phenomena as a special lyrical plot. It shows movement, the development of the state of the lyrical hero, who follows the changes that occur with the sea. But even more important is this. that behind this lies the dynamics of the internal state of the sea itself, its soul. This internal plot can be divided into three parts; "Silent Sea" -

1st part; “Storm” - 2nd part; “Deceptive peace” - part 3. In accordance with them, we will follow the development of the artistic thought of the poem.

Part 1 paints a beautiful picture of the “azure sea,” calm and silent. But “purity” and clarity are inherent in the sea soul “in the pure presence” of the “distant bright sky”:

You are pure in his pure presence:
You flow with its luminous azure,
You burn with evening and morning light.
You caress his golden clouds"
And you joyfully sparkle with its stars.

It is the “luminous azure” of the sky that gives the sea its amazing colors. The sky here is not just an element of air stretching over the abyss of the sea. This symbol is an expression of another world, divine, pure and beautiful. Endowed with the ability to capture even the most imperceptible shades, the lyrical hero of the poem, reflecting on the sea, realizes that some secret is hidden in it, which he is trying to comprehend:

Silent sea, azure sea,
Reveal to me your deep secret:
What moves your vast bosom?
What is your tense chest breathing?
Or pulls you from earthly bondage
Distant, bright sky to yourself?..

The 2nd part of the poem lifts the veil over this secret. We see the soul of the sea revealed during a storm. It turns out that when the light of the sky disappears and the darkness thickens, the sea, immersed in darkness, begins to tear, beat, the eye is filled with anxiety and fear:

When the dark clouds gather,
To take away the clear sky from you -
You fight, you howl, you raise waves,
You tear and torment the hostile darkness...

Zhukovsky paints a picture of a storm with amazing skill. It seems that you can hear the roar of the oncoming waves. And yet this is not just a picture of a raging disaster. The deeply hidden secret of the soul of the sea is revealed to us. It turns out, like everything on earth, the sea is in captivity, which it is not able to overcome: “or it pulls you out of earthly captivity.” This is a very important idea for Zhukovsky.

For the romantic poet, who believed in the “enchanted There,” that is, another world in which everything is beautiful, perfect and harmonious, the earth has always seemed like a world of suffering, sorrow and sadness, where there is no place for perfection. "Oh! The Genius of pure beauty does not live with us,” he wrote in one of his poems, depicting a Genius who visited the earth only for a moment and again rushed off into his beautiful, but inaccessible to earthly man, world.

It turns out that the sea, like man, suffers on earth, where everything is changeable and impermanent, full of losses and disappointments. Only there - in the sky - everything is eternal and beautiful. That is why the sea reaches there, as does the soul of the poet, striving to break earthly ties. The sea admires this distant, luminous sky, “trembles” for it, that is, it is afraid of losing it forever. But the sea is not allowed to connect with it.

This idea becomes clear only in the 3rd part of the poem, where the “returned heavens” can no longer completely restore the picture of peace and serenity:

And the sweet shine of the returned skies
It doesn’t give you back silence at all;
Deceiving your immobility appearance:
You hide confusion in the dead abyss.
You, admiring the sky, tremble for it.

This is how the secret of the sea is revealed to the lyrical hero. Now it’s clear why confusion is hidden in his “dead abyss.” But the poet’s confusion remains, facing the insoluble riddle of existence, the mystery of the universe.

Artistic originality. The poem is full of means of poetic expressiveness that help make the picture of the sea elements not only visible, but also audible, tangible, and thereby make it easier for the reader to comprehend the author’s thought. Epithets play a special role in this. If in the 1st part they are intended to emphasize the purity of the sea and the light that permeates the entire picture (“bright sky”, “you are pure in the presence of its pure”, “golden clouds”), then in the 2nd part they create a menacing, alarming tone ( “hostile haze”, “dark clouds”). Epithets saturated with Christian symbolism of the divine are very important for expressing the artistic idea of ​​the poem: “azure”, “light”, “radiant”. Create a special rhythm anaphora to “you” (“you fight, you howl, you raise waves...”), syntactic parallelism, and a number of interrogative sentences convey the intense emotional structure of the poem. It should also be noted the important role of the refrain: “silent sea, azure sea,” which not only sets the rhythm of the poem, but also asserts an important poetic idea. And, as elsewhere, Zhukovsky masterfully uses the melodic capabilities of speech, “The Sea” is written tetrameter amphibrachium, blank verse, which helps convey the rhythm of the rolling waves. Particularly impressive is the picture of a storm, to recreate which the poet uses the technique of alliteration, that is, repetition of the same consonant sounds in several words. Here it is an alliteration of hissing, moreover, supported by the rhythm of the line, imitating the movement of waves: “You fight, you howl, you raise waves, / You tear and torment the hostile darkness.” In general, we can say that Zhukovsky’s poetic mastery in this poem reaches unprecedented heights, which Pushkin surprisingly accurately said: “... his poems have a captivating sweetness.”

The meaning of the work. Zhukovsky’s artistic innovation in the poem “The Sea” did not go unnoticed in Russian poetry. Following him, many great Russian poets painted a romantic picture of the sea elements, for example Pushkin in his 1824 poem “The Sea.” Lermontov in his famous “Sail”, Tyutchev in the poem “How good you are, O night sea...”. But in each of them, the image of the sea is not only a romantic symbol, but also something that helps the author express his thoughts, feelings and moods.

Elegy by V. Zhukovsky “The Sea”. Analysis.
“The Sea” is one of the beautiful elegies written by Zhukovsky in moments of reflection. The poet paints the sea in a calm state, during a storm and after it.

In addressing the sea at the beginning of the poem, the poet uses many bright epithets, but only one of them characterizes the sea as a beautiful natural phenomenon - “azure”. This is an outdated and lofty word for the color light blue. All other visual means give the sea a resemblance to a living, thinking, feeling creature: “silent” (“you are alive,” (“you are breathing,” “you are filled with confused love, anxious thoughts.” No matter how beautiful the sea is in itself, not only the poet's imagination is occupied with it.The sea seems to him to be a living, thinking creature, because something in his own soul excites and worries him.

“I stand enchanted over your abyss” - the lyrical hero seems to be looking at the sea from above, from some high cliff. The sea is vast and bottomless, it beckons, attracts with its “deep mystery.” The movement of the sea and its various states are conveyed by numerous verbs - metaphors and personifications: “you breathe”, “moves”; “caresses”, “burning”, “glittering”, “fighting”, “whining”, “lifting”, “tearing”, “tormenting”, “heaving”, “hiding”, “trembling”. Zhukovsky endows the sea with enormous strength, the ability to fight and tenderness, the ability to love.

As the mystery of the sea is unraveled, the views of the romantic poet are revealed: the sea is in earthly captivity, like all living things. Earthly life is full of struggle, loss, disappointment. Only there, in heaven, is everything beautiful and unchanged. Even clouds, seemingly belonging to the sky, exist on their own in Zhukovsky. They are only gathering to “take away” the sky, and it itself is “distant”, “light”, “clear”, “pure”. It is beautiful and defenseless. The contrast of “dark clouds” and “clear” skies emphasizes this. The struggle of the sea with dark, hostile forces symbolizes man's struggle with evil. The last picture - the sea after a storm - shows the psychological mastery of Zhukovsky the romantic. The calm that comes is only apparent, external:

Deceiving your immobility appearance:
You hide confusion in the calm abyss.
You, admiring the sky, tremble for it.
I can’t help but remember Lermontov’s Sail:
And he, the rebellious one, asks for a storm,
As if there is peace in the storms!