English metaphysical poetry is born and formed as one of the variants of European baroque poetry. The term itself metaphysical poetry like many literary terms - the name is very conditional and is not directly related to philosophical meaning concepts metaphysics. It is believed that Donna was the first to use it in relation to poetry at the end of the 17th century. poet and critic John Dryden (1631-1700). To Dryden himself, who was influenced by classicism and gravitated towards a clear, open poetic style, Donne's poems seemed too intellectual and complex in meaning. It was these qualities that he designated with the word “metaphysics”: “He [Donn] imitates metaphysics not only in his satires, but also in love poems, where nature alone should rule; he strikes the minds of the fair sex with magnificent philosophical theories, instead of winning their hearts ... ". In the 18th century, the term was taken up by another famous critic, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who gave it an even broader meaning: he was talking about metaphysical poets, those. the whole poetic school of Donne's followers.
However, in the XVIII century. neither Donne's work nor the poetic works of his students were widely popular, and the situation did not change in the 19th century. Only at the beginning of the 20th century does metaphysical poetry return to readers. A prominent role in this process was played by Herbert Grierson, a Scottish professor who in 1912 published an academic edition with commentaries on the poetry of John Donne, and in 1921 a collection of metaphysical poetry. Contributed to the awakening of interest in this poetic school and articles about it by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), a famous poet and critic, Nobel Prize winner.
The baroque literature of English metaphysical poets is related by the desire to create in their works a paradoxical, dynamic, multidimensional picture of the world. The main tool for building this new universe is a special image, called concept(in English it corresponds to the term conceit). The basis of the concept is usually a metaphor or comparison, but if the traditional metaphor or comparison brings together objects or phenomena in which there is some kind of relationship or similarity, then the concept connects objects and phenomena, the dissimilarity of which is obvious and immediately attracts attention. To create such paradoxical combinations, the poet must have a baroque wit, i.e. a special type of poetic thinking that allows you to see the world in unexpected and original perspectives. This structure of the concept also determines its tendency to ambiguity. The absence of obvious similarity or closeness between the members that make up the concept provokes the reader's mind to look for possible connections between them, stimulates his associative thinking. This process gives rise to resistance to an unambiguous interpretation of the concept, which does not allow one to feel confident that the only and correct meaning of it has been found. Such qualities of the concept fully coincide with the general inclination of baroque art to overcome immobility, certainty, rigid fixedness.
John Donne(1572-1631) was born into the family of a wealthy merchant. Maternal grandfather was the popular playwright and composer John Heywood. The future poet was also related to the famous writer and statesman Thomas More. The family was Catholic in their faith, which in the time of Queen Elizabeth, who actively supported the Anglican Church, was fraught with considerable dangers. So, brother Donna was imprisoned, where he soon died, only because he sheltered a Catholic preacher in his apartment while studying at the university. The poet himself, because of his belonging to the Catholic Church, could not get a master's degree, although he studied, as many biographers believe, both at Oxford and Cambridge. In the end, he was forced to graduate from law school in London. In 1596 and 1957 participated in the military expedition of the English fleet to Cadiz and the Azores, which then belonged to Spain, the main enemy of Great Britain in Europe. The poet expressed his impressions of the sea voyage in two poetic messages: “Calm” and “Storm”.
On his return to England, Donne took a position as secretary to Thomas Egerton, who held the post of Lord Privy Seal. Obviously, at this time the poet also changed his religion - remaining a Catholic, he could not count on a successful career. However, Donn decided to take this step not only because of career considerations, he began to have doubts about Catholicism much earlier. A secret marriage with Anna More, Egerton's niece, which Donne entered into in December 1601, prevented successful promotion. The court, however, recognized the marriage as legal, and soon Donn was released. The father-in-law tried to resolve the situation with the greatest benefit for himself: he returned his daughter to his lawful spouse, but refused the dowry. In subsequent years, Donn, along with a rapidly growing family, had to live first with relatives and friends, and then at the expense of noble patrons. Sometimes the poet's dependence on the will of other people led to family conflicts. According to the first biographer of the poet, Walton, the reason for writing one of Donne's most famous poems, "A Farewell Forbidding Sorrow," was a quarrel with his wife. The reason for the quarrel was the need for the poet to travel around Europe with his patron Robert Drury, while Anna was expecting a baby soon. According to the legend that Walton cites in his book, on the very day when Donna's wife had a difficult birth, and she was on the verge of death, her ghost appeared to the poet, who was in Paris.
In 1615 Donne took the priesthood. He received offers to become a minister of the church before. In 1607 such an offer was made to him by Thomas Morton, rector of the cathedral in Gloucester, in gratitude for his help in working on a theological treatise. Donne refused, obviously mindful of his early poetry, many of which were very frivolous. But in 1615 he decided to take this step under pressure from King James I, who was greatly impressed by Donne's pamphlet directed against the Catholic Church.
In 1621, the poet became rector of St. Paul's Cathedral and held this post until the end of his life. During this period he became famous as a brilliant preacher. Donn carefully edited and prepared his sermons for publication, since it was with sermons that he pinned his hopes for posthumous literary fame. Donne delivered his last sermon a few weeks before his death and dedicated it to the theme of death, later called "Duel with Death". The poet died on March 31, 1631 and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
During Donne's lifetime, only a few poems were published, the rest were known to readers in lists. For the first time, a collection of Donne's poems was published after his death in 1633. The exact dating of the creation of many poems of the early period of creativity is unknown. Donne's poetic heritage contains many examples of popular genres of the Elizabethan era: satires, sonnets, elegies, songs, epistles, etc. However, under his pen, traditional genres are undergoing significant changes. As one of the most characteristic trends in his work, one can note the rejection of the musicality of Elizabethan lyrics and an orientation towards colloquial speech. And although Donn is able to compose very melodic poems, especially in the song genre, his poetry is still dominated by colloquial intonations. He saturates his poetic works with appeals, exclamations, questions, they often have a complex rhythmic pattern and resemble dramatic monologues.
The proximity to dramatic monologues is also determined by the originality of Don's satires. The monologue is conducted in them on behalf of an ironic and witty narrator, who is able to sketch pictures from the life of London, portraits of his contemporaries with a few strokes and expose their vices in a comical or grotesque form - depending on the situation.
Differently than that of his predecessors, the love theme is also presented in Donna's work. His early lyrics often clashed with the value system that underpinned Elizabethan love poetry. Due to frequent repetition, many ideas and concepts from this area have turned into clichés and have lost the ability to evoke an emotional response from the reader. Baroque art has always been suspicious of clichés and commonplaces, since for the Baroque consciousness they were something frozen, static, and therefore devoid of vitality. Metaphysical poetry was close to a similar position. Donne, challenging Petrarchist poetry, opposes its Platonism and excessive idealization of love relationships with the deliberate eroticism of his poems. The poems “Undressing the Beloved”, “Love War” and many others are imbued with a similar challenge.
It is noteworthy that, being a lawyer but an education, the poet does not forget about the knowledge gained in his work. Some of his heroes have a great command of the laws of logic and rhetoric, although they often use them in a very peculiar way. So, the hero of the poem "To undress the beloved"actively refers to the arsenal of scholastic logic: persuading a lady to get rid of one or another part of her toilet, he uses a new method of persuasion each time. The combination of scholastic science with love eroticism is a bold, even daring, paradoxical step, but completely consistent with the principles of the new aesthetics.
Close in spirit to this poem is an elegy "Turn". Defining the genre of his poetic work as an elegy, Donn focuses on the genre tradition laid down in the work of Catullus and other ancient Roman authors, for whom the elegy was primarily a model of love lyrics, which did not imply the obligatory presence of a sad tonality. In "Change", the lyrical hero advocates a freer relationship between a man and a woman. He confirms the legitimacy of such a position with examples from the life of nature:
The nature of constancy does not observe everything: the beast of the forest and cattle.
So for what unknown reason should a woman be faithful to a man?
(Translated by G. M. Kruzhkov)
Sometimes the hero of the elegy, in contrast to the pompous style of Petrarchist poetry, is exaggeratedly rude in dealing with his beloved:
Fool! How many labors have I killed,
Until I finally learned
You - the wisdom of love.
(Translated by G. M. Kruzhkov)
Sometimes Donn also uses more sophisticated forms of polemic with tradition. In the poem " Anagram"his hero ridicules poetic clichés, with the help of which female beauty was usually described in love lyrics. Based on a mathematical law that states that the sum does not change from a change in the places of the terms, he proves that the ugly Flavia is beautiful. It's just that she has small eyes, not a mouth; the blackness of the eyebrows turned out to be on the teeth, the gold (yellow color) of the hair on the cheeks, and the blush from the cheeks moved to the hair, and now they are red. However, Flavia has all the necessary elements of beauty, albeit in a different order, which means that “in sum” she is beautiful.
At the same time, Donn was never just a singer of sensual pleasures, a creator of frank erotic poetry and a destroyer of traditions, for whom nothing is sacred. All these are rather masks that the singer tries on himself. A masquerade is one of the favorite themes of baroque art. Donn also has very sublime love poems. Among these can be attributed one of the most famous poetic works of the poet - " Parting, forbidding sadness." It was included in a group of poems that were labeled "Songs and Sonnets" in the second edition of Donne's poetry collection. Sonnets in that era were often called poems of various genres dedicated to love. Donne's sonnets also do not have the formal features of a traditional sonnet, so A. N. Gorbunov recommends calling them "poems about love".
In "A Farewell Forbidding Sorrow", the hero tells his beloved about the indissoluble unity of their union and compares it with the unity of the legs of a compass:
Like the legs of a compass, we are doubly inseparable and united:
Wherever I wander, "You reach out to me from the middle. Spinning with my whirling in tune, Bowing, as if listening, Until my curve turns back To your straight line.
Where the path does not turn
Only you are a reliable support for the One who, closing the path,
Will return to the source soon.
(Translated by G. M. Kruzhkov)
The comparison of lovers with compass legs is one of the most popular concepts in Donn's poetry and, like many metaphysical concepts, tends to be ambiguous. Donne borrowed the image of the compass from the Book of Emblems. Such publications were very popular in Europe. In them, abstract ideas were expressed with the help of graphic images, and often such drawings were accompanied by poetic or prose explanations. In the Book of Emblems, the compass symbolized the dependence of the human soul on God. The poet rethought this image, filled it with new content, but for the reader familiar with this work, the former meaning of this emblem gave a religious sublimity to Donn's concept.
In addition, the circle that the compass draws could symbolize the perfection, harmony and infinity of the new universe that appeared after the meeting of lovers. A circle with a dot in the middle - namely, such a figure should have appeared after the compass returned to "its source" - was associated with the astrological sign of the Sun and the alchemical sign of gold. And each of these images has a place in the figurative system of the poetic text. Other semantic associations are also possible, as already mentioned, such is the nature of the concept - to provoke the reader to search for different meanings.
In the creative heritage of Donn there are also poems in which he sings of platonic love. However, Donne's Platonism differs markedly from the Platonism of the Petrarchists, in whom it basically boiled down to the gentleman's refined longing for a disembodied lady. Donn's Platonism is more closely connected with the teachings of the ancient Greek thinker, whose ideas formed the basis of the mentioned type of love. Among the "Platonic" of the English poet are the poems "Good morning", "Canonization", "Infinity of love", "Ecstasy", etc.
In a poem "Good morning" one can see an appeal to the traditions of the Alba genre, which originated in medieval courtly poetry. Usually Alba told about the parting of a knight with his beloved at dawn. Donne's time also saw a variant of the genre in which young lovers, after waking up, shared their impressions of their night. The poet at first supports the reader with the illusion that he is dealing with just such a variant of the alba:
Where were we before?
Breast sucking? Rocked in a cradle?
Or fed meadow porridge?
(Translated by G. M. Kruzhkov)
However, by the end of the first stanza, it turns out that the physical side of love is already well known to them, and the novelty of their relationship is due to the fact that their souls have awakened to love:
Our souls have awakened only now,
Woke up - and froze in anticipation;
Love has locked our door
Turning the closet into the universe.
(Translated by G. M. Kruzhkov)
Love develops here according to the formula proposed by Plato in the dialogue "Feast": from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies and then from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls. The ultimate goal of this ascent is the "open sea of beauty".
In the image of the cave (“Or, like seven sleepy people, they snored / All the years”), where seven Ephesian youths slept safely for 187 years, walled up by the persecutors of early Christians, one can see a hint of the “Platonic cave”. With the help of an allegorical picture of a cave and chained prisoners sitting in it, Plato illustrated the relationship between the world of ideas and the sensual world in which people live. It is just as difficult for a person observing the earthly world to imagine the world of ideas as it is for prisoners to guess from the shadows on the wall what is happening outside the cave. In this philosophical perspective, all the previous beauties of the lyrical hero were only vague shadows of his current lover. ("all pleasures fancies be.., "twas but a dream of thee"), which embodies the true idea of love.
In the later period of his work, Donn turns to religious themes. Around 1610, he created a cycle of poems called "Sacred Sonnets". These works are distinguished by the same passion and intensity of feeling that was characteristic of Donn's early love lyrics, only now his love is turned not to a woman, but to God. In the Sacred Sonnets, the poet also used the technique of religious meditation, which was developed and introduced into the religious practice of the Christian church by the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola (1491 - 1556). For the practitioner of this form of meditation, it was necessary to recreate in his imagination in detail some scene from the New Testament, place himself among the characters, and then analyze his experiences and draw a moral lesson from all this, which will contribute to the spiritual improvement of the individual. Often the composition of the sonnets from the mentioned cycle is close to this scheme.
During the same period, Donn creates a large number of sermons. The poetic talent of the author is felt in them: he likes to use bright, paradoxical images that should appeal not only to the mind, but also to the feelings of the listener. Donn especially willingly addresses the topic of death in his sermons. He portrays her in the most frightening aspects, he associates death with decaying flesh, grave worms, with gaping eye sockets of skulls, etc. These pictures were supposed to shock the listener. According to Donn, religious truths penetrate deeper into the soul of a person if this process is accompanied by a strong emotional response. The most famous were the lines from Donne's sermon, which later the American writer Ernest Hemingway used as an epigraph to his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls: “There is no person who would be like an Island, in itself, each person is part of the Mainland, part of the Land ; and if the Wave blows the coastal cliff into the sea, Europe will become smaller, and also if the edge is washed away
Cape or destroy your Castle or your Friend; the death of each Man diminishes me too, for I am one with all Mankind, and therefore never ask for whom the Bell tolls: it tolls for You.
In addition to sermons, Donne's prose religious writings also include the pamphlets The Pseudo-Martyr (1610), Ignatius and His Conclave (1611) and the treatise Biathanatos (c. 1611).
Donne was later recognized as the founder and head of the English school of metaphysical poetry. Currently, a large circle of poets of that era is included in it. Most often, among the representatives of this school, the names of George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan and Richard Crasho are mentioned.
George Herbert(1593-1633) represents a religious trend within the school of metaphysical poetry. Like Donn, he became a priest at an advanced age. George Herbert's mother, Magdalena Herbert, was Donne's patroness, and the poet was considered a family friend.
Peru George Herbert owns only one collection of poetry "Temple", which was published after the death of the author in 1633. The book consists mainly of short religious poems of various forms and themes, there are also figured poems, i.e. shaped in various shapes. The general tonality of the collection is distinguished by artlessness and the absence of any pretentiousness. The author of The Temple, like all metaphysical poets, likes to use paradoxical images in his works, but he borrows material for them from Holy Scripture. Following Donne, Herbert often turns to logic and rhetoric, but unlike Donne, they do not become an element of the game with the reader.
Like other representatives of the Donnovo school in the 11th century. George Herbert falls out of active literary circulation. It begins to be printed again in the 19th century, but it gains real popularity in the 20th century. after the poetry of John Donne was brought back to life.
Andrew Marvell(1621 - 1678) was born in the family of a priest. He studied at the University of Cambridge, where John Milton was among his friends. During the civil war, he did not join any of the conflicting parties. However, at the beginning of the war, he was more sympathetic to the royalists, but later wrote an ode glorifying Cromwell, and in his political views he was more guided by Parliament. During the Restoration, he quickly came to terms with the new government and was appointed secretary of the embassy mission, in which he visited several countries, including Russia.
As a poet, he considered himself a student of Donne and, like him, demonstrated considerable skill in the genre of satire. He became famous for his poetic satire "Last Instructions for an Artist"(1667), in which he sharply criticizes the royal court. The poet gives advice to the artist on how the modern state should look in his picture: deprived of protection, since he no longer has a fleet; ruled by drunkards and lechers who do not have any talents and virtues. The courage of the author in denouncing vices did not allow the satire to be printed during his lifetime, she went from hand to hand in handwritten form.
In addition to the Donne tradition, satire is also influenced by Ben Jonson, on whose translations of the Horatian satires Marvel undoubtedly relied when developing this genre. The mixed influence of Donne and Johnson also makes itself felt in Marvell's lyrical poetry. With Johnson, who was guided by the norms of classic poetics, he is related by the logic in the disclosure of the theme, the orderliness of the poetic rhythm. Like Johnson, he willingly turns to genres from the ancient heritage. For example, pastoral is often found in Marvell's work. This genre includes poems "Amet and Festil", "Daphnis and Chloe" and others. They are based on a dialogue of heroes, or rather a debate about love, with the help of which the gentleman tries to convince his girlfriend to respond to his love proposal. In the content of the traditional pastoral, the amorous shepherd's prayers for favor alternated with the answers of his beloved, explaining the reasons for her coldness. Marvell's poems of this genre are much more erotic and playful. Festil argues with Amet rather for the sake of appearances and does not resist persuasion for very long.
The heroes of Marvell are not a shepherd and a shepherdess, but villagers working on hay harvesting and twisting dry grass into bundles. It is from this process that they borrow examples to illustrate their own views on love. If for Marvell's contemporaries such a technique - borrowing arguments from the sphere of everyday life of heroes - was a completely natural attribute of the pastoral genre, then he himself consciously emphasizes its conventionality. Creating an ironic distance between himself and the characters of the poem, he invites the reader to smile at the naive love etiquette of rural ladies and gentlemen.
However, it should be noted that the simplicity of images is combined in this text with their rather complex organization. The very expansion of the comparison of love with hay harvesting already brings Amet and Festila closer to Donne's poetic works, many of which are also based on one cross-cutting metaphor or comparison.
Marvell is related to metaphysicians and willingness to experiment with traditional poetic forms. In poems "Damon mower», "Mower - to the fireflies», "Mower against gardens", "Song of the Mower»
the usual pastoral hero - the shepherd is replaced by the mower. And the originality of these works is due not only to a new type of hero, but also to the fact that he is already connected with the natural world in other ways than in the traditional pastoral. Although the ultimate goal of his activity, like that of the shepherd, is to feed domestic animals, in Marvell's poems it is associated with death and destruction. Already the figure with the scythe itself evokes associations with the allegory of death.
Even further away from the pastoral, although genetically related to it, Marvell's largest (776 lines) poetic work is "Appleton House". This work belongs to the genre of "poem of a rural estate", the ancestor of which is Ben Jonson. The poem was written during Marvell's residence on the estate of Lord Fairfax, where he acted as a house tutor to the Lord's daughter. The poet depicts a rural estate as a part of space isolated from the rest of the world, where there are other, more harmonious relations between man and space, man and nature.
In the work of Marvell, there are also magnificent examples of love lyrics. One of the best poems "To the bashful lover." It can be attributed to that group of poetic works, the theme of which is often determined by a quote from Horace's ode - sagre diem ("seize the day"). The lyrical hero of such poems usually calls on his beloved to take advantage of her beauty and youth and not to put off enjoying the joys of life for later, since time is fleeting, and very soon she will lose both beauty and youth:
Madam, may our lives be eternal,
Who would betray modesty to reproach?
Slowly, ahead for many years We would think over the plot of love.
You would live somewhere in the valley of the Ganges With a retinue of a proper rank,
And I would dream of you in the endless distance on the Humber sand,
Starting long before the Flood sighs.
And you could for ages To encourage, then reject me ...
But behind me, I hear the winged chariot of moments;
And before us - the darkness of non-existence,
Deserted, sad places.
Believe me, beauty will not be reborn,
And my verse will subside in a stone tomb...
(Translated by G. M. Kruzhkov)
The new discovery of Marvell's poetry, like Donne, took place at the beginning of the 20th century, and T. S. Eliot, who repeatedly referred to the work of this poet in his articles, deserved a great deal of credit for this. Eliot considered the poem "To the Shameful Beloved" to be one of the greatest works of English poetry.
Henry Vaughan(1621 - 1695) was born in Wales, graduated from Oxford University. Early poetry that compiled the first collection "Askan Swan"(publ. 1651), is distinguished by pretentious imagery and obscure meaning. At the end of the 40s. In the 17th century, having survived a serious illness, he turned to religious poetry under the influence of George Herbert. During this period of creativity, Herbert's poems very often serve as a model for his own writings. Thus, the collection "Fire Flint" (1650, second edition 1655) by Vaughan was created with an orientation towards Herbert's "Temple". Many of the poems in this collection are imbued with religious mysticism. The author believes in the inseparable connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, in nature he seeks to see traces of eternity, a manifestation of the divine.
Richard Crasho(1613-1649) was born in London in a Puritan family, graduated from the Higher Church College in Cambridge. Later he converted to Catholicism and went to Paris, where he lived in poverty for several years. Thanks to the intervention of his friend Abraham Cowley, he received recommendations from the wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria, to the Pope and went to Italy, where he remained until his death. Acquaintance with Italian poetry left an imprint on his own work. The influence of the Italian poet J. Marino was especially significant, and a little later the influence of the Spanish mystics was added. Therefore, although his main work is a collection "Steps to the temple"(1646) and contains in the title an allusion to Herbert's collection "The Temple", it differs markedly from the religious poetry of English metaphysicians both in its subject matter and in its style. In addition to the common religious motifs that unite the Catholic and Protestant churches, in the "Temple" there are verses that are related specifically to the Catholic Mass, as well as hymns dedicated to the glorification of Catholic saints. The poetic style of Crasho is characterized by greater decorativeness and ornamentation compared to the English school. Crasho's poetry is connected with the Catholic tradition by his passion for color metaphors. Some researchers note the impact on the work of Crasho religious painting by Rubens, Murillo and El Greco. The most famous poem from the Steps to the Temple was the Hymn to Saint Teresa. Under the same cover as the first collection, in 1646, the second collection of poetry by Kresha was published, which included his secular poetry.
The extravagant imagery of Crasho in subsequent eras was not so much an object of admiration as a parody. His poetry received new recognition only in the 20th century, when interest in English metaphysical poetry arose.
The belated discovery of the merits of metaphysical poetry, which dragged on for more than two centuries, is due to the fact that only later did literature discover its kinship in some aspects with the literature of the 17th century. Echoes of metaphysical poetry can be found in the writings of Tennyson, in the poetry of the French Symbolists, but only the literature of modernism begins to fully feel its closeness with the English metaphysicians. Therefore, it is natural that it was the articles of the modernist poet T. S. Eliot on metaphysical poetry and on individual representatives of this school that became serious. theoretical justification her revival. By revealing the nature and place of this phenomenon in the English literary process of the 17th century, Eliot facilitated the entry into the field of influence of metaphysical poetry for other writers of his time and the subsequent era. Her influence affected the late poetry of William Butler Yeats, the work of Robert Graves, Wystan Huo Auden, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, and others. V. V. Nabokov was an admirer of E. Marvell; in his lectures on literature, he drew parallels between the work of Marvell and Pushkin . In the novel Pale Fire (1962), the writer used a large number of quotations from Marvell's poem "A Nymph Lamenting the Death of a Fawn".
Gorbunov A. II. "Another optics" - the poetry of John Donne //Donn D. Poems and poems. S. 369.
Plan
1. The main factors that determined the originality of the English Baroque.
2. John Donne's attitude to the Elizabethan poetic tradition.
3. Poetic innovation by John Donne:
Baroque "wit";
Artistic functions of metaphor-concepts;
Enrichment of poetic vocabulary;
Influence of Neoplatonist philosophy;
Changes in genre thinking.
4. Baroque attitude in religious lyrics.
5. Donne and Shakespeare.
Consultation
John Donne (1572-1631)- English poet. Born into the family of a wealthy merchant. Graduated from the School of Law in London. He took part in military expeditions of the British fleet to Cadiz and the Azores. For some time he was Lord Edgerton's secretary. He lost this place when it became known about the secret marriage of the poet with Egerton's niece. In 1615 he received the priesthood. In 1621 he became rector of St. Paul's Cathedral and held this post until his death.
During Donne's lifetime, only a few poems were published, the rest were known in the lists. For the first time, a collection of poems was published after his death in 1633. The exact dating of the creation of many poems of the early period of creativity is unknown. Donne turned to various popular genres of Elizabethan literature: satires, sonnets, elegies, songs, epistles, and so on. But many of the traditional genres under his pen underwent significant changes. As one of the characteristic tendencies of his work, one can note the rejection of the musicality of Elizabethan lyrics and an orientation towards colloquial speech. And although Donn was able to compose very melodic poems, especially in the genre of song, nevertheless, intonations of colloquial speech prevail in his poetry, and many poems resemble dramatic monologues.
The proximity to dramatic monologues is also determined by the originality of Don's satires. The main character in them is an ironic and witty narrator, able to sketch pictures from the life of London, portraits of his contemporaries with a few strokes and expose their vices in a comical or grotesque form - depending on the situation.
Dramatization of the poetic text in Donn is manifested not only in rhythm and intonation, but also makes itself felt in his characters. They are somewhat similar to actors pronouncing memorized words from the stage. And although the reader sometimes has a feeling of the utmost intimacy of the poetic monologues of the English author, it very quickly disappears. It becomes clear that this is just an illusion of intimacy. The hero never forgets about the audience, and this leaves an imprint on his behavior and speech. The "theatricalization" and "carnivalization" of the depicted life was especially close to baroque art, in line with which the work of John Donne developed. Significant changes in the life of European society and the crisis of the traditional picture of the world, provoked by a wave of scientific discoveries, gave rise to the impression of chaos and instability of the universe. In the poem "Anatomy of the World", Donne conveys the impressions of his contemporaries who happened to live in an "era of change":
Everything in the new philosophy is doubtful:
The fire has lost its meaning.
No Sun, no Earth - you can't understand
Where should we look for them now?
Everyone says that death threatens nature,
Once in the sky and in the firmament
So many new things; the world is doomed
It's shattered into atoms again
Everything collapses and the connection of times is gone,
Everything is relative now...
The attitude to life as a theatrical action also had to convey this new state of the world.
The invasion of the new prompts a revision of the literary experience of predecessors. John Donne has a different approach to the traditions of Elizabethan love lyrics. In many of his early poems, techniques are ridiculed that, from repeated repetition, have lost their vitality. He contrasts the excessive idealization of love relationships with the deliberate eroticism of his works, such poems as “Love Science”, “To Undress a Beloved”, “Love War” can serve as an example. In contrast to chivalrous fidelity in the service of a beautiful lady, he calls for a constant change of partners (“Change”). At the same time, the poet does not reduce love only to carnal relations; a true feeling between a man and a woman, in his opinion, is impossible without a spiritual connection, which is often interpreted by him in the spirit of Neoplatonism philosophy as a union of souls (“Ecstasy”, “Good morning”).
The parody itself acquires new qualities from Donn. If Shakespeare in sonnet 130 (“Her eyes are not like the stars...”), revealing the emptiness of poetic clichés, shows that it is impossible to create an image of a real person with their help, then Donne already uses other methods. So, in the poem "Anagram", the author jokingly suggests swapping the traditional epithets of female beauty: make the eyes small and the mouth large, give red color not to the cheeks, but to the hair, black - not eyebrows, but teeth, etc. This kind of play was characteristic of baroque art. In Baroque literature, a special kind of metaphor (comparison) was also born - concept, or concetto. In such a metaphor, it is not the comparison of one object or phenomenon with another that is important, but the unexpectedness of the comparison of far-flung and seemingly dissimilar concepts and the wave of associations that is born in the mind of the reader trying to find similarities between them is significant. Of Donne's concepts, the most famous is the concept from the poem "A Farewell Forbidding Sorrow", built on the likening of souls to the legs of a compass in love. Donn's concepts are usually distinguished by intellectuality and development (sometimes one concept forms the structural basis of the content of an entire poem).
The use of metaphor-concepts in the poetry of John Donne is one of the manifestations of a new type of artistic thinking that is being formed in the art of the Baroque. Very often this type of thinking is defined as "wit". Wit implies the ability to see the world in completely new and unexpected perspectives, to perceive it as something developing and moving. It relies on other ideas about harmony, different from the ideas of the previous period. Baroque harmony noticeably gravitates towards the paradoxical and asymmetric. In the works of Donn, the influence of the new principles of poetic thinking is manifested in a variety of elements. For example, in his poems one can often find a very sophisticated system of argumentation and evidence. However, the logic of the poet is very paradoxical and unusual. The hero can use the entire arsenal of scholastic logic in order to convince his beloved to undress (“Undressing his beloved”). The discrepancy between the scale of the means and the end (this can also be seen as a tendency towards asymmetry) gives the logical constructions a shade of absurdity. Or logical conclusions may not coincide with established opinions and ideas, and therefore also seem strange.
In the later period of his work, Donn turns to religious themes. Around 1601, he created a cycle of poems called "Sacred Sonnets". These works are distinguished by the same passion and intensity of feeling that was characteristic of the early love lyrics, only now his love is addressed not to a woman, but to God. In Sacred Sonnets, the poet also used the experience of religious meditation, which was developed and introduced into the religious practice of the Christian church by the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola. For the practitioner of this form of meditation, it was necessary to create in his imagination some scene from the New Testament, place himself among the characters, and then analyze his experiences and extract moral truths useful for the soul from the analysis. Often the poet in the Sacred Sonnets follows the same pattern.
John Donne and his followers greatly enriched the vocabulary of poetry. In their works, they willingly resort to scientific concepts, use medical, military terminology, as well as words related to jurisprudence, trade and many other areas.
Donne is considered the founder of the school of "metaphysical poetry" in English literature. John Dryden and Samuel Johnson were the first to use this term in relation to the poetry of the early 17th century. They put a negative meaning into it: by "metaphysical" they meant poetry that was overly complicated, devoid of logical clarity and harmony. However, the term has stuck in the history of literature. In addition to Donne, the metaphysical poets include E. Marvell, J. Herbert, G. Vaughan, R. Crasho and some other poets.
Questions for self-control
1. What poetic genres did John Donne address in his work?
2. What features of Elizabethan poetry does he parody in his poems?
3. What is new in the poetic rhythm of Donne's works?
4. How is the influence of the “spiritual exercises” of Ignatius Loyola reflected in religious lyrics?
5. Who for the first time and with what meaning used the concept of "metaphysical poetry" in relation to the work of John Donne?
6. What is "metaphysical style"?
7. What did Donne bring to the development of the sonnet genre?
Questions, assignments and materials for the lesson
To answer questions and complete assignments, use the materials that are offered on the disk.
1. Read John Donne's poem Good Morning. What genre traditions does the poet refer to here? What is the originality of the concept of love in this poem? How is it revealed in content? Describe the chronotope of the poem. What concepts does the poet use in the text? What concept is central in the poem "Good morning"?
| John Donne THE GOOD-MORROW I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov "d? were we not wean" d till then? But suck "d on countrey pleasures, childlishly? Or snorted we i" the seaven sleepers den? "Twas so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee, If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desir" d, and got, "twas but a dream of thee. And now good morrow to our waking soules, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controules, And makes one little roome, an every where. world, each hath one, and is one. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where we can finde two better hemispheares was not mixt equally; If our two loves be one, or thou and I Love so alike, that one doe slacken, none can die. | John Donne GOOD MORNING Where were we before? Breast sucking? Rocked in a cradle? Or fed meadow porridge? Or, like seven sleepyheads, they snored All years? So! We have slept so far; Between the ghosts of love my eyes wandered, I dreamed about you in any of Evina's sisters. Our souls have awakened only now, Woke up - and froze in anticipation; Love has locked our door Turning the closet into the universe. Who wants to, let him swim to the ends of the earth Golden worlds to open in the distance - And we found our worlds in each other. Our two dawning faces - The two hemispheres of the map of the bezchejnaya: How greedily our ardent hearts Are attracted to these joyful countries! There are mixtures that are doomed to death, But if our two loves are equal Neither their decline forever, nor death are terrible. Per. G. Kruzhkova |
2. Read Donn's poem "Dream". What, in your opinion, is the peculiarity of Donn's development of the theme of a dream, as opposed to Shakespeare and Sidney?
| John Donne DREAM My love, if not for you, I wouldn't want to wake up Is it easy to break away To wake up from a caressing dream? But your arrival is not an awakening From sleep, but a dream come true, You are so genuine, just imagine Your image - and you will see it vyav. Come into my arms, do me a favor And let everything that did not come true come true. Not with a rustle, but with a glint of eyes I was awakened, my dear friend, That is a bright-winged angel, I thought, beaming with surprise; But when you see what you're reading In my soul and thoughts you penetrate (In what angels have no power) and free Come into my dream where you reign alone I understood: it is you - with me, Fool who imagines otherwise! Confident in your closeness, Again I languish, looking for an answer: Are you leaving? Is that you? Love is weak if there is no courage in it; She smokes, a product of dust, From an admixture of Shame, Vanity, Fear. Perhaps (I am alive with this hope), Ignite my heat and put out, Do you keep me ready like a torch? Know: I am ready for death and love. | Philip Sidney SONNET 39 Come, O Dream, oblivion of worries, Mind bait, sorrows balm, Freedom to the captives, gold to the poor, Judge impassive mob and gentlemen! Your shield will save me from burning arrows. Oh, stop the internal fights And believe that I will generously reward you, When you interrupt the civil strife move. I agree that you take away the bed, My quiet bedchamber, And heaviness in eyelids, and garlands of roses; And if I give you everything But you do not go, as I pray about that, - I will show the face of Stella in my heart. William Shakespeare SONNET 43 Closing the eyelids, I see sharper, Opening my eyes, I look, not noticing, But the dark look of my eyes is bright, When in a dream I turn them to you. And if the night shadow is so bright - Reflection of your obscure shadow, - How great is your light on a radiant day. How brighter is reality than dreams! What happiness would be for me - Waking up in the morning, see firsthand That clear face in the rays of the living day, What shone on me in a foggy dead night. A day without you seemed like a night to me And I saw the day at night in a dream. |
3. Read the first of John Donne's Sacred Sonnets. Find in it the genre features of the sonnet (formal and meaningful). Pay attention to the system of contrasts and comparisons in the sonnet. Find in the work the features of prayer (address to God, naming His properties, wording of the request).
Pay attention to the connection in the first line of the sonnet of two provisions, the internal connection between which is already proof of the immortality of Man (1. God created Man. 2. Can a Divine creation be imperfect?) Compare the call of the last line of the sonnet with the request formulated in the second line. Is the poet ready to go through the pain of correcting his imperfections, which is necessary to achieve immortality?
| John Donne HOLY SONNETS Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay? Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste, I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday; I dare not move my dimme eyes and way, Despaire behind, and death before doth cast Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste By sinne in it, which it t"wards hell doth weigh; Onley thou art above, and when towards thee By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe; But our old subtle foe so tempteth me, That not one houre my selfe I can sustaine; Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art, And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart. | John Donne SACRED SONNETS You gave me life - can you really let me perish? Correct me, the outcome is in a hurry to me, I run to death, and death runs towards me, Everything palled, and the ardor had time to cool. The look dims, and I can’t move it - Neither back, where fear, nor meetings, where death frightens Sin destroys my weakened flesh - It's so heavy that I can't go to hell. Up there, you are alone. Let me look Raise grief - I will be able to rise again. But our old adversary is so cunning, That without support, an hour cannot last. Only your power keeps him from coves: You beckon the iron of the heart like a magnet. Per. A. Larina |
Read Sonnet VII. Analyze how the influence of the principles of religious meditation affected the content of this poem?
From the corners of the earth, although it is round,
Trumpet, angels! Rise up, rise up
From the dead, innumerable souls camp!
Hurry, souls, to your former bodies! -
Who drowned and who burned to the ground,
Whom war, court, famine, pestilence, tyrant
Or fear killed ... Who is illuminated by God,
Whom the darkness will not hide death! ..
Let them sleep. I'm bitterer than all to cry
Give, God, over my total guilt:
It's too late to hope for grace...
Favor me in this sinful life
Repentance all the time to teach:
For Your blood is a seal of forgiveness.
Per. D. Shchedrovitsky
4. What features in the cited poems by Donn allow us to attribute them to baroque literature?
5. Get acquainted with reviews of metaphysical poetry and the work of John Donne by various critics. What do you find in common with them? How has the assessment of metaphysical poetry changed over time?
Similar information.
Poetry by John Donne
John Donne (1572-1631) - the son of a wealthy merchant who was related to the great Thomas More, grew up in a Catholic family. This largely determined numerous problems for all its members during the reign of Elizabeth: because of his Catholic affiliation, John Donne, studying at Oxford and Cambridge, could not get a master's degree for a long time, but managed to graduate from law school in London. In 1596-1597 he took part in military campaigns against Spain. On his return to England, he obtained a secretary position from Thomas Edgerton, who held the post of Lord Privy Seal. In 1601 Donne married Egerton's niece Anna More. Anna's father was against this union. He did everything to send the young son-in-law to prison and protested the marriage. By court decision, the marriage of John Donne and Anna was recognized as valid. However, Anna's refusal to dowry doomed the young family to serious difficulties. Financial dependence was the cause of frequent quarrels and disagreements in the family.
In 1615, Donne took the priesthood. A treatise written prior to this year, directed against the Catholic Church, testified to Donn's change of religion. In 1621, Donne became rector of St. Paul's Cathedral. In this post, he became famous as a wonderful preacher. It is known that Donn associated his fame not with poetry, but with sermons, which he himself always carefully edited and prepared for publication. John Donne is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
The creative heritage of the poet John Donne is diverse. The collection of poems was first published only after his death - in 1633. It opened with an appeal not to readers, as was customary then, but to "those who understand." Understanding and exertion of the reader's mental powers were demanded by the Wanderings of the Soul (1601), the Sacred Sonnets (1609–1611), and the Anatomy of the World (1611–1612).
Donn is known to a wide circle of readers as the founder of the "metaphysician" school. John Dryden and Samuel Johnson were the first to designate the poetry of the early 17th century with this word. By "metaphysical" poetry they understood poetry devoid of logical clarity and harmony, excessively complicated for the reader to perceive. According to N. P. Mikhalskaya, the “metaphysical school” in poetry reflected the crisis of the Renaissance worldview. “The name of this school arose due to the fact that in the works of its representatives, the Renaissance full-blooded, direct, life-loving depiction of being is replaced by an intellectual, philosophical reflection on the problems of life, death, immortality.”
Among the genres addressed by the poet John Donne were satire, sonnet, elegy, message, song. In general, three groups of his works are distinguished:
- lyrical poems about love "Songs and Sonnets" (1590), messages-letters (1593; 1597);
- satirical poems and elegies (1597);
- religious and philosophical poems and sonnets (1611-1612), prose religious and ethical treatises - "Appeal to God in the hour of need and disaster."
According to V. N. Ganin, one of the most characteristic tendencies can be distinguished already in early works - the rejection of the musicality of Elizabethan lyrics and an orientation towards colloquial speech. This is evidenced, for example, by the “Messages.” Donn’s messages are not a conditional genre, but real letters that he and his friends exchanged in separation: for example, leaving plague-stricken London, going to war or on a diplomatic trip to the mainland.
It is known that long before taking the priesthood, Donne enjoyed communicating through messages with educated ladies of the court, such as Magdalene Herbert, who raised two poetic sons, or the brilliant Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, the decoration of the court of King James.
The messages reveal not only an elegant manner of writing, but also the ability of the poet to create a visible image with a few strokes, to show the manners and portraits of their bearers. Thus, the letters-letters to Thomas Woodward and Edward Gilpin were obviously written during the plague in London, and the letters to Thomas Wotton and Henry Goodyear belong to the later time of 1597-1599, when they were carried away by the favorable development of the court career - because then in these verses there are so many attacks against the Court and praises of Solitude. Especially characteristic is the message to H. Goodyear, "encouraging him" to leave England and go to the continent. I wonder how Donn motivates this advice:
In foreign lands No more sense, but at least less shame.
In a later epistle to Edward Herbert at Jullières (1610), the future preacher, the Rev. Dr. Donne, is already heard:
A man is like a ball of animals; The sage, humbling, leads them into the Ark. Fool, in which these creatures are in a swarm - Arena or a monstrous vivarium. Those beasts that, raging, gnaw here, They will devour everything human in it - And, climbing on each other like cattle, They will spawn countless new monsters. Blessed is he who tames these beasts And clears the forest of his soul! He protected his lands from evil And can expect fertility from the fields, He got himself goats and horses And he himself is not a donkey in the eyes of his neighbors. Otherwise, it will be an animal forest, At the same time a boar and a demon, Which forces you to rush headlong into the abyss. Worse than the punishment of heaven - whim and temper. From birth, we absorb, like a sponge, the Poison of the Original Misdemeanor, And worse than all well-deserved insults, the sting of regret stings us. The Lord crushes mint for us like chickens, And we, with our damned touch, Turn God's gift into hemlock, Bringing sinful cold or heat into it. In us, in ourselves - there is a barrier to salvation: God has no mysterious poison, Destroying without purpose and need; And even his anger is not from enmity. We multiply our own punishments And nurse the Devil in God's dwelling. To return back to the initial purity - Our earthly duty; those teach perversely, That they think of a man in a small circle: His greatness cannot be circumscribed by any oval, he will contain everything in himself. The mind will chew and faith will swallow, What would we not dare to invent them; The whole world is nothing more than a pill for them; Although not for anyone for the future, as they say: What is balm to one, poison to another; From knowledge, a fever can become in the brain - Or an icy hibernation of indifference. Your mind is not like that; truthful and bold, He managed to look into the depths of a person; Satisfied with both the spectacle and reading, Not only you yourself became eloquent, Your deeds are also eloquent: For this, praise from your friends. (Translated by G. Kruzhkov)
Donne entered literature during the decline of the Elizabethan era, when the theater still breathed, but already in the work of writers of that time serious internal conflict was increasingly revealed. It is no coincidence that one of the poet's contemporaries, Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), once exclaimed: “What is our life? Comedy of passions. It is in Raleigh's sonnet "Farewell to the Court" (published between 1589 and 1595) that the most audible echo with the mood of disappointment in the work of the late W. Shakespeare, indicated in the 66th sonnet:
All the joys have passed, like a false dream, Fun days are exhausted to the bottom. Love is deceived, the mind is dulled: Everything blows away, only sorrow remains. One wanders along an unknown path, Joy in the sea was carried away by a wave, The spirit goes out, life is in the hands of blind fate: Everything blows away, only sorrow remains. Like one lost in a foreign land, I call death to come on quickly, Summer is leaving, spring will not come: All the blow, only sorrow remains, - And to the goal before the arrival of winter days To bring me care orders her. (Translated by V. Rogov)
Understanding all the drama of the world, “John Donne became the cartographer of his own soul,” writes M. V. Thank you. - The intense inner drama of his poetic word, the constant search for truth, moments of delight and disappointment - everything merges into an inspired "dialogue of one" (a dialog of one), by definition of the author himself. "Shut up inside yourself" - this phrase of Marcus Aurelius became one of the symbols of the time of John Donne. But, looking into himself, the poet discovered the whole cosmos, the study and description of which became the goal of his life. “I "m a little world made cunningly / Of elements, and an angelic sprite." (I am a small world whimsically created from flesh and angelic essence. - Holy sonnets. V.) balancing on a fine line, beyond which the vain becomes eternal, an attempt to unite two worlds that equally have rights to it - this is the discordia concors that filled Donn's creations. " Hence there are so many chaotic and grotesque images in Donn's poetry. He is a clear successor of the baroque tradition. His comparisons are metaphorical in nature: the ship is shaking like a sick person in a fever; death is like an attack of nausea, and a person in his loneliness is like islands frozen in a calm.
Like Quevedo, Donn builds complex associative links between the meanings of distant concepts, discovers their unexpected and undeniable unity. So, in the poem “Thrice Fool”, love passion poured out in verse reminds the poet of a seashore that has absorbed salt. The tears that reflect the face of the beloved in the “Farewell speech about tears” turn into minted coins with her portrait, and in the famous “Farewell, Forbidding Sorrow”, the legs of the compass become a metaphor for lovers, separation is equated to an earthquake:
Souls humbly in the night of Departure people will not hear. He is so quiet that some “rested”, They will say nothing, while others “breathe”. To part like this, dissolving In the mist, - not crying about anything, to us; It would be blasphemy to betray the secrets of the tie to the crowd of the uninitiated. Earth shaking will frighten: Everyone will be horrified by the collapse, But if somewhere the expanse of Heaven trembles, nothing will touch us. Likewise, Earthly love is shaken - and will not flare up again - by Separation: it will undermine Its pillars, its foundations. And to us, who soared To such a height above the rough passion, That they themselves would not even undertake To name ... what are eyes and lips to us? Their decay will not betray our union, They will leave, but it will not die: Like the thinnest layer of gold, It only expands under oppression. And if there are two souls in it, look, How they reach out to each other: Like the legs of a compass they are Within the same circle. Oh, how jealously the one in the center follows the other whirling, And then, straightening the camp, She is met by an approach. Let my path in a circle be far And the wrong step tends to the bottom, There are you - a support and a guarantee That I will return back. (Translated by A. Shadrin)
This poem, written during one of the most difficult quarrels with his wife, but with the thought of her, was the beginning of the poet's new spiritual wanderings. Already in it one of the central images of his poetry was designated - a circle, a perfect, stable geometric figure (love, social, spiritual circle). Donn's world is rather a system of concentric circles, merged into a pulsating spiral, changing properties and capable of taking the dimensions of the Universe and shrinking to a point, but the point, for the sake of the author's anthropocentrism, is certainly located in the center, and the guarantee of its stability is again a sphere or a circle ( "Sunrise"). Such a special cosmic intimacy, a painful reaction to the theory of heliocentrism, a feeling of the loss of former stability is noted both in Anatomy of the World and in Donne’s dying Meditation: “Our thoughts are born of giants: they stretched from East to West, from earth to sky, they not only contain the Ocean and all the lands, they embrace the Sun and the Firmament; there is nothing that my thought would not contain, there is nothing that it could not absorb into itself. An inexplicable mystery: I, their creator, languish in captivity, I am chained to a bed of illness, while any of my creations, from my thoughts, stays next to the Sun, soars above the Sun, overtakes the Luminary and crosses the path of the Sun, ”he says.
So, the distinguishing features of Donn's poetry are the complexity and unexpectedness of poetic metaphors and syntactic constructions, courage in conjugating concepts of different logical meaning and mixing different speech styles, unexpected experiments with poetic stanzas, harsh colloquial intonations that replaced the usual melodiousness of poems, the desire to achieve meaning. using the magic of numbers (“Primula”). Speaking of the manner of the “metaphysical” poets, J. E. Mazzeo writes: “For the metaphysical poets, the poetic image was valuable not because of whether or not it can be visualized - it is not had nothing to do with its "physical content". It appreciated the very nature of the connection established between phenomena.
However, the early work of J. Donn is permeated with other moods. It is characterized by proximity to colloquial speech, the desire for melody (especially when creating songs).
Otherwise, Donn approaches the description of earthly love. Unlike the poets of the Elizabethan period, he challenges many ethical concepts characteristic of the lyrics of that time: instead of glorifying the refined feeling, he emphasizes the deliberate eroticism of his poems, opposes the requirement of a constant change of partners to chivalrous fidelity - "Love Science", "Love War", "Change" or "Song". Heir to the Renaissance traditions, the young poet depicts the passion and desire of the flesh with amazing grace:
Hey, catch, the star is flying! Seduce the mandrake! Where are the past years? Who the hell cut the hoof? Know how to understand the song of the sirens, Kill the snake of envy! Where in the world Does the wind blow, What will it meet with honest greetings? And if you were born For miracles and revelations, Go on a journey through the distance of time, To comprehend the meaning of phenomena ... You will return in gray hair To announce miracles ... Let everyone listen and know: Faithful women do not exist. If at least one was found, I would take the pilgrim's staff... If they say: here she is, - I'll calmly pass by. Be at least an angel of purity, But while you write to me, That girl Will manage to fall in love with me with three. (Translated by B. Tomashevsky)
A special place in the poetic heritage of Donne is occupied by a spiritual theme. R. M. Samarin pointed out that the circle of mystical God-seeking moods and the delight of religious self-destruction, the feeling of time as a catastrophe brought Donn closer to the baroque poets. Indeed, as we have seen, baroque constants give a special sound to the poems of the poet Donne. But we must not forget that Donn's religious consciousness was not acquired, it was an integral part of him. Therefore, the sonnets included in the cycle "Sacred Sonnets" (1610), freethinking, testify first of all to the sincerity of a believer, therefore there is so much heartfelt and lyrical, individual in their lines:
I am a microcosm, a most skillful pattern, Where an angel is merged with nature, But sin sold both parts to the darkness, And both have become mortal since then... You, who opened up new countries of space And spheres that are higher than the sky, - Into my eyes, for crying , pour in the waters of the vast Seas: the whole world is my gaze - Wash. After all, the flood will not happen again, But, smoking with greed and envy, My world will burn: the heat of passions lurks in it... Oh, if only this stinking heat went out! And let another passion seize me - Your fire that heals, burning! (Here and further per. D. Shchedrovitsky)
The "Sacred Sonnets" were written in the late period of creativity, they partly contain the experience of the life of a person who has not found the "golden mean" between the temple and the light. Passion and detachment, philosophy and allegorism, a mixture of abstract phenomena and concrete concepts - character traits sonnets in the collections "Wreath of Sonnets" (1607-1609) and "Sacred Sonnets". Love for God determines the existence of their lyrical hero. Love for a woman recedes into the background. Using the method of meditation, which was developed and introduced into religious practice by I. Loyola (recreation and experience in the imagination of a lyrical hero as a participant in the events of any scene from the Old Testament), Donn reaches an extraordinary height of detachment from the philistine world, the height of introspection and revelation. A moral lesson is a natural outcome of meditation:
O Pharisees, spit at me, Sneer, kill, cursing! I sinned so much! .. And I was dying, groaning, - He, that he had not spent a single day in iniquity! I do not keep his covenants!.. Oh, who can measure His love? He - the King of kings - suffered for our sin! Jacob, dressed in goat skins, Waited for good luck from his trick, But God put on human flesh - So that, having become weak, He could endure torment! ..
The image of Christ becomes central in Donne's spiritual sonnets. Christ is endowed in Donne with both the traits of a man and the traits of a saint. In an effort to complete the image, the poet refers to the main events of the earthly life of Christ, recreates His living image.
The cycle "Wreath of Sonnets" consists of seven poems dedicated to episodes from the life of Christ, which are of particular importance for a more complete understanding of His life, deeds and teachings. Sonnets "Annunciation" and "Nativity" are dedicated to the circumstances of the birth of Jesus, "Temple" - to childhood. The poet focuses not only on events from the early earthly life of Christ, but also on various Christian paradoxes that emphasize His divine-human nature. Hence a large number of metaphorical images that convey the idea of the immortality of God during the reincarnation of the Son into Man and turn readers to the biblical tradition. Jesus is the omnipresent beginning of the earthly world, infinity, which has no beginning and end, the light that paralyzes the forces of darkness and entails, the Logos (Word) is the creative beginning of all things, in which life, grace, truth and glory are concentrated:
And with Mother - protection from adversity - Joseph entered, he sees: He who himself Gave sparks of understanding to the wise men, Fans those sparks ... He does not wait: And now the Word of God is speaking! He was wise beyond his years in the Scriptures, How did He know everything that was said there, And everything that only after that will enter into them ?! Surely, had He not been a God-Man, Would He have been able to succeed in knowledge in such a way? Those endowed from above with a long age have time to pore over the sciences ... And He, as soon as the rays changed darkness, Revealed to everyone in His miraculous power!
At the same time, the poet emphasizes the human nature of Christ. The touching picture of the birth of the God-man, the weakness and helplessness of the baby, peacefully sleeping in the manger and appealing to mercy with his appearance, inspire readers with tenderness and sympathy at the same time. In the religious lyrics, Donna is brought to maximum expressiveness and the motif of the crucifixion, which absorbs all the horror of this event in the life of Christ, which should evoke a mixed feeling of compassion and reverence ("Crucifixion"):
He revealed himself to everyone in his miraculous power: They burned with faith - these, with malice - those, Some - angry, others - in simplicity, - Everyone listened, everyone hurried after Him. But the evil ones prevailed: they made their judgment And they assign the fate to the Highest Purity - the Creator of fate: death on the cross ... Whose will predetermined all events - That cross bears amid torment and bitter tears, And, condemned to the gravest lot, He dies, nailed to the tree … Oh, if You would take me to the cross! The soul is a desert... Concluding the days, Moisten my soul with a drop of blood!..
Making the image of the Savior practically tangible, the poet endows Him with human features, according to biblical tradition, He is called the Lamb (Rev. 13:8). In this symbolic image, introduced by Donn in the sonnet "Ascension", such qualities as humility, gentleness, meekness stand out. Even being crucified on the cross, Christ with all his essence expresses humility, compassion and forgiveness; His face does not inspire fear, because he who has forgiven his enemies will never curse a person:
I will glorify the last - eternal - day, Meeting the Sunrise of the Son, And the crimson stream of sorrows will wash my flesh and burn His sorrows ... Here He ascended - the land is far, Here He, radiant, goes through the clouds: He reached the first heights of those heights, Where and for the track is ready for us. You opened the heavens, mighty Aries, You, the Lamb, irrigated my path with blood, You are the light of my path, and my path is even, You quenched your right anger with blood! And, if the muse went Your way, - Accept the wreath of sonnets: it is gossip!
Jesus Christ - the Son of God (Sonne) - is often identified with the sun (Sunne), the source of light (Rev. 21:8, 22, 23; 22:5). According to Yu. L. Khokhlova, this analogy, used by Donn, allows him to draw a parallel between the sunrise and the birth and exaltation of Christ, between the sunset and death on the cross. The poet contrasts the sun, illuminating the most hidden corners of the earth's surface, with Christ, who voluntarily gave himself into the power of death and triumphed over it with divine-human power, forcing even the flames of hell to recede, giving people freedom and salvation, crushing the power of Satan. Thus, Donn emphasizes the superiority of Jesus over the heavenly body, the triumph of His ideas in the world.
Thanks to the artistic means used in Donn's lyrics, a capacious and deep image of Jesus Christ is created. Christ is understood not only as the Almighty, but also as an extremely authoritative mentor, burning with love for the entire human race, alleviating his suffering, whose life and death are completely merged with His all-saving mission.
The sentiments reflected in Donne's poetry are no less vividly represented in his sermons and prayers. In 1623, when Donne fell ill with an attack of the most severe "fever", "Appeals to the Lord in the hour of need and calamity" were written. The experience of approaching death, endured by Donn from illness, became the basis of "Appeals to the Lord ...".
“Appeal to the Lord…” is a direct experience of physical dying, recorded step by step. The book was completed by Donn within a month and immediately, at the insistence of friends, was sent to print.
"Appeals to the Lord ..." consist of 23 sections corresponding to a certain stage of the disease. Each section includes three parts: "Meditation", "Exhortation" and "Prayer". The sections are preceded by Latin poetic epigraphs, which, when read one after the other at once, form an allegorical poem. This division corresponds to Augustine's teaching about three levels of reality, comprehended through the abilities of memory (Donn's "meditations"), rational intellect ("exhortations") and will ("prayers"), which is set out in the treatise "On the Trinity".
On the other hand, Donne is clearly starting from the treatises on ars moriendi, the art of dying, popular at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. Donn could not have been unfamiliar with this kind of writings, telling how to properly and worthily leave this life for a Christian, how to say goodbye to loved ones and renounce earthly attachments and worries, how to prepare oneself for a meeting with the Creator. In England, two works of this kind were especially popular: the anonymous The Art and Ability to Die Worthy, written around 1500, and the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine's treatise On the Art of a Good Death, published in Antwerp in 1620.
The ars moriendi genre is characterized by an emphasis on the variability of the human lot and the unexpectedness of sorrows and trials, the crown of which is death. However, Donne's writing goes far beyond the ars moriendi treatises. Those were only practical instructions for the dying. Donn claims to be something much more. Almost in litigation with the Lord God.
“Exhortations” is a kind of legal analysis of the real situation of the client, which is Donn himself: “Am I just, like Job? But, like Job, I would like to speak to the Almighty and would like to compete with God (Job 13:3). My God, my God, will You soon force me to see a doctor? And how much will you betray me into the power of a doctor? I know that You are the Creator of both matter, and man, and the art of healing: do I, seeking medical help, withdraw from You (cf.: 2 Chronicles 16:12)? For clothes were not created by You before man knew the shame of nakedness, but you created healing before man became vulnerable to disease; You endowed the herbs with healing properties from the beginning; did you foresee our ailments then? You did not create us for diseases, just as not for sin: but you foresaw both sickness and sin, although providence is not predestination. Thus, Lord, You provided for the trees, the fruits of which are used for food, and the leaves for healing (Ezek. 47:12) ‹…›
Does not the one to whom Thy Wisdom was revealed speak of the art of healing: The Lord created medicine from the earth, and a prudent person will not neglect them (Sir. 38:4), - but about doctors: A doctor neglects a long illness (Sir. 10: eleven). Everything, all these words encourage us to seek the help that You send us in our ailments. But it is also said by You: whoever sins against Him who created him, let him fall into the hands of a doctor (Sir. 38:15)! How can I understand this? You yourself, having blessed, send us to the doctor, and if so, obedience to Your words cannot be a curse on us. But he is cursed who, falling into the hands of a doctor, rejects You, wholly entrusts himself to the doctor, relies only on him, listens to him alone and everything that comes from him, accepts and neglects spiritual healing, the gift of which You also gave to Your Church; therefore, falling into the hands of a doctor is a sin and a punishment for past sins‹…›».
Here, on the one hand, he relies on the tradition of law, which he met while studying at the school of jurisprudence, and on the other hand, on the book of Job.
If the “exhortations” are the most theologically rich parts of the “Appeals to the Lord ...”, then the “meditations”, to which Donn owes the fame of an excellent prose writer, are full of “the wisdom of this world”: “The heavens are no less constant because they are constantly in motion, for they invariably move in the same way. The earth is no more permanent because it is invariably at rest, for it is constantly changing, its continents and islands are melting, changing their outlines. In the same way, man, the noblest of earthly creatures, melts like a statue, as if created not from clay, but from snow. We see - the greed of desires undermines it, it melts, consumed by envy; he cannot resist the beauty that is given to another; he melts in the fire of a fever, not like snow in the sun, but like he is boiling lead, iron or yellow copper thrown into a smelting furnace: disease not only melts him, but calcifies, reducing the body to atoms, to ashes when the residue is not a liquid, but only black scale. And how quickly this happens! Faster than you get an answer, faster than you formulate the question itself; The earth is the center of gravity of my body, the sky is the center of gravity of the soul; these places are destined for them by nature; but are soul and body equal in their aspirations: my body falls without compulsion, but my soul does not rise without compulsion: ascent is the step and measure of my soul, but eruption is the measure of my body: Angels whose home is Heaven, Angels endowed with wings, - and they have a ladder in order to ascend to Heaven by steps (cf. Gen. 28:12). The sun, which covers hundreds of miles in a minute, and the stars of the firmament, which revolve even faster than it, - even they do not move as fast as my body tends to the earth. At the very moment when I feel the first attack of the disease, I realize that I am defeated; in the twinkling of an eye my vision is clouded; the taste of food becomes bland and empty; feeling of hunger disappears; my knees give way, and now my legs do not support me; and sleep, which is the image and likeness of death, flees me, for the Original itself - Death - approaches me, and here I am dying for life ‹…›.
Here we meet cosmography and alchemy, Platonism and hermetics. At the same time, Donn operates with a set of "general topoi" of his era - but he does it truly masterly. The magnetism of his text is explained not by the originality of the images, but by their unexpected conjugation.
The work of John Donne had a serious influence on English literature of the 17th century. The followers of his poetry continued to solve certain mystical problems of being, to develop ideas, emblems, images that have a hidden meaning, which made it possible to deepen philosophical lyrics, to consolidate psychological trends in revealing the lyrical world of a lyrical hero in English poetry of the post-Renaissance period.
Assignment for independent work
1. Make a plan-outline on the topic “English literature of the 17th century. The Significance of Puritanism for Its Development".
Creative work on the topic
1. Write an essay on the topic "The work of English poets-"metaphysicists".
Colloquium questions
1. Features of the development of English literature in the 17th century.
2. Genre originality of the creative heritage of John Donne.
It is believed that the first to use the concept of "metaphysical poetry" in 1585 was Giordano Bruno in the book "On Heroic Enthusiasm", dedicated to the English poet Philip Sidney. In a general sense, metaphysics is understood as the doctrine or knowledge of the supra-empirical, super-experimental, super-sensible laws of being. This is knowledge about fundamentally unknowable human consciousness principles, other laws
At the head of the direction was John Donne. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by the feeling of the disintegrated universe and the loss of the integrity of the idea of it.
A large group of Donne's best works dates back to the 90s of the 16th century. This is primarily a lyrical cycle "Songs and Sonnets". Love lyrics, with its all-conquering sensual passion, with its pagan admiration for the beloved, still fully belongs to the poetry of the Renaissance. The features of Renaissance realism live in the poet's satires; they contain live sketches of the customs, manners and types of English society at the turn of the 16th-17th centuries. Donne's elegies are quite remarkable. The poet gave this genre depth and emotionality of direct perception of reality, cultivated in the English elegy of subsequent times. The tradition of the Renaissance is also strong in two epistles of Donn - “Storm” and “Calm. But already in them the theme of the insignificance and frailty of earthly existence begins to sound, complaints about the miserable human nature appear.
This theme becomes the main theme in his great lyrical poem The Path of the Soul (1601) and especially in Anatomy of the World (1611), a frantic jeremiad (a long literary work in which the author bitterly laments the state of society, denouncing its vices along with false morality and, as a rule, , predicting his imminent decline.) about the frailty and insignificance of man. With great bitterness, the poet writes about the impotence and weakness of a mortal, about the tragedy of his delusions, about the futility of his impulses and about the insignificance of his knowledge and accomplishments. With suicidal pathos, Donn tramples on human dignity and all the values of humanism, destroys the proud image of a man created by the Renaissance, sings of a man who realized his dependence on God's providence. In these works, the author painfully parted with other ideals that were dear to him earlier. Here sounds the historical repentance of the flagellant, scourging himself for his imaginary sins, infinitely tempting for him and now and therefore especially terrible. J. Donne's poems are perceived all the more tragically because they are created almost at the same time when Shakespeare defends the ideals of humanism in The Tempest and Cymbeline, and Ben Jonson forms his own aesthetics, true to the primacy of indestructible reason.
Donne's personal intellectual drama was probably exacerbated by the fact that, having taken the priesthood at the insistence of King James I, he eventually became one of the most popular preachers in the spirit of Anglo-Catholicism, had to remind himself and the flock again and again, admiring him art, about the inviolability and firmness of their faith. Donn's poetry bears the stamp of a crisis of consciousness, mutually contradictory contradictions, it touches on the theme of the need to humble a miserable person before the omnipotent power of a deity. Donn firmly chooses for himself the path of a minister of the church and a preacher. Gradually, his poetry moves away from past Renaissance themes, and its main images become a miserable, sinful, frivolous person, a servant of God, and an omnipotent, all-seeing merciless principle, to which the thoughts of the poet’s lyrical hero, tormented by doubts in himself and in those humanistic ideas that were for him until recently a shrine.
A whole school of English poetry of the mid-seventeenth century is associated with Donne's influence, sometimes called the "school of wit" ("school of wit"), sometimes the school of "metaphysical poets." The first name came from the tendency, widespread in those years, to introduce witty and intricate paradoxes and witticisms into poetry, to build entire poems as a detailed aphorism (similar phenomena in Italian poetry of the 17th century were called concetti; hence the other name of the “school of wit” is conseitism). The "Metaphysical school" of Donn's followers was first defined by J. Dryden. This was repeated by the famous philologist of the 18th century. S. Johnson and was assigned to a group of poets of the 17th century, whose work is characterized by an atmosphere of mysticism, religious and ethical quests, and poetic self-deepening. This group primarily includes the poets J. Herbert (1593-1633), G. Vaughan (1622-1695), R. Creshaw (1613-1649), F. Quarles (1592-1644).
Despite their different religious views, the “metaphysical poets” are really united by their appeal to lyrics, permeated with God-seeking moods. They contrasted the world of earthly passions and comforts with intense contemplation and prayerful ecstasy. The motives of seclusion, the condemnation of the vain life are characteristic of "metaphysical poets". Nature for them is a temple or a chapel. Their poems often pour into the genre of poetic prayer, confession or high moral reflection. In any life phenomenon, “metaphysical poets” are looking primarily for some hidden mystical meaning, the disclosure of which turns into a problem solved by the poet. "Metaphysical poets" willingly develop and deepen the technique of poetic allegory inherited from medieval, religious lyrics and translate it into a system of mottos and emblems, images that have a hidden religious meaning. Emblematism is especially widely represented as one of the important and original aspects of the poetry of the "metaphysicians" in the works of F. Quarles.
Despite their creative one-sidedness and stylistic monotony, the "metaphysical poets" to some extent expanded the problematics of English poetry, consolidated the genre of philosophical lyrics in it, determined the psychological trend, and brought poetry beyond the limits of the comparative genre narrowness that emerged by the end of the 16th century.
Carolingian School" (or the school of poets-cavaliers) - the heir to the tradition of Renaissance poetry and at the same time another English modification of the Baroque (Writers and poets in the Baroque era perceived the real world as an illusion and a dream). Its name comes from the Latinized name of King Charles I. It included "cavalier" poets, supporters of the king, who created court-aristocratic poetry. Anacreontic (consciously cultivated enjoyment of the joys of life) and pastoral motifs are widely represented in it, peaceful fun reigns, nature, beauty, comfort are sung. The most notable poet of this school was Robert Herrick. Most of Herrick's poems were published in 1648 in the poetry collection "Hesperides" - "Hesperides, or Secular and Spiritual Works", which presents pastoral, anacreontic, religious lyrics. The world of love recreated in Herrick's poetry is a happy and carefree world, not like the world of John Donne or Ben Jonson. The secular section of the book contains 1130 different poems, testifying to the extreme versatility of the author. Here you can find sorcery spells, and odes in the style of Horace, and songs about nature, and drinking songs, and exquisite trinkets addressed to an imaginary lady of the heart, as well as poetic tales and epigrams.
Russian spiritual poetry. Analysis and differentiation of various concepts united under the general term "metaphysics": spiritual poetry, philosophical and religious lyrics, mystical and esoteric poetry, biblical poetry, pagan poetry of the Slavs. (On the example of the section "Metaphysical Poetry" in the new textbook "Poets and Poetry of the Bronze Age: Contours of Russian Poetry of the Second Half of the 20th Century").
RELIGIOUS AND METAPHYSICAL POETRY
Having found the section “Metaphysical poetry” in the new textbook “Poets and Poetry of the Bronze Age: Contours of Russian Poetry of the Second Half of the 20th Century” (Compiled by: A. Korablev, N. Olkhovaya; Gorlovka, 2007), I became interested. In modern Ukraine, you rarely find anything related to poetry on biblical themes on the pages of newspapers and magazines, not to mention books and textbooks.
RELIGIOUS POETRY: SPIRITUAL POETRY.
spiritual poetry
I used to refer to the concept of "", " religious poetry"In general, all literary work using biblical motifs, as evidenced by my first study in this area, which was called:" spiritual poetry". It was published in the collective collection of Orthodox articles “Orthodoxy. Heretics. Black Magic (Zaporozhye, Paritet, 1994). This article due to lack contemporary research for some reason, this topic was in demand. I still meet complete strangers who remember her and have not lost interest in her. But I wrote it without taking into account the firm opinion of the hierarchs of the Church about what exactly is meant by spirituality. I took poetry beyond theological criteria and examined it using, as it is now customary to do, purely literary standards. No, I don’t want to say that it is necessary to look at this from the point of view of the Church, everyone has their own opinion and experience. Poetry that deals with faith and the foundations of being, religious poetry, is such an important subject that it is worth looking at it from all sides. From this understanding it will only benefit. That is why one should take into account the opinion of those who, by occupation, are connected precisely with questions of spirituality.
Let's find out whether we really have the right to classify literally everything that contains allusions to the Bible as spiritual poetry.
First of all, what do church hierarchs themselves consider spiritual poetry?
Spiritual, as any clergyman will tell you (in any case, I heard this from a very large number of Orthodox hierarchs, both simple and with degrees), only the poetry of deeply religious and, moreover, necessarily churched, can be considered spiritual. constantly observing all the prescribed rituals and illuminating them in their work.
Goals of Spiritual Poetry
Goals of Spiritual Poetry practically coincide with the goals of the Church: this is enlightenment on matters of religion, Holy Scripture (i.e. the Bible) and Holy Tradition (i.e. the teachings of the holy fathers of the Church, canons, dogmas) and attracting their hearts to faith, these are calls to fulfill the commandments through an appeal to the voice of conscience of each reader and a poetic glorification of the Almighty and His world.
Just as an ordinary believer does not have the right to question the established canons of church knowledge, to have his own private view on them, so one who creates in line with spiritual poetry cannot express his personal, private opinions to the detriment of what the Church teaches. Any philosophizing about faith in the church environment is considered unacceptable:
Confident in my good will
"Who art thou in heaven"
give humility - do not sow heresy,
believing is just... not the deepest of all.
(Svetlana Kekova, Saratov)
No need to seek solace anywhere -
neither in running water, nor in a green star,
nor in the sound of a magic horn,
but only with the Lord God.
(Svetlana Kekova)
If nowhere, then, neither in the beauty of nature, nor in wise and kind secular books, nor in classical secular music and art. Nowhere, except in the church and in the writings of the holy fathers. This is exactly how the spiritual hierarchs look at it and teach their parishioners this. Culture and spirituality are not the same concepts for them. To assess the quality of a spiritual work, according to priests, what is important is not the level of skill and not the depth of understanding of how the Almighty arranged the world, but the manifestation of humility, the absence of pride in the author.
Yes, my God, me too - it's all my fault!
Yes, Lord, I myself - first of all - will execute!
(Stanislav Minakov, Kharkov)
But in the church's understanding of spiritual poetry there is also a danger to poetry itself as an art in general. For some reason, the question does not even arise about its quality, about the possibility of inadvertently including a stereotyped verse in its category. If the Orthodoxy of a poetic work seems to you ostentatious, loudly proclaimed, moreover, with an illiterate construction of sentences (“God grant peace in the world that is around me. / I ask that everything be honest and fair. / I’m afraid, dishonest self-interest, powerful enticing, / Mercilessly kill the holy marvelous”), if didacticism and moralizing, straightforwardness and narrative are intrusively sticking out, if the “value” of the proclaimed common truths is worthless, which, even when clothed in rhyme, make a miserable impression (“So how much does a sacred book cost? / Perhaps it is priceless. / Deliver from the vulgarity of the nasty yoke / And become a handful of grain”), this cannot lower the significance of such a work for the servants of the Church. They also consider chanting to be spiritual lyrics, while the laity, who are not sufficiently versed in the religious sphere, consider it to be philosophical lyrics. In fact, this is supposedly philosophizing, like:
And light the candle again
But only in a different dimension.
I feel like I'm flying
Under the influence of attraction.
Unable to keep flying
Alas, such is fate.
What will happen and what awaits us -
Neither you nor I know.
So flat to say about the great question of life and death?! The languor of the heart, its impulses, dissatisfaction and disappointment, vague longing and craving for something ... Virshevik authors, combining "foggy coast and surf", "fantasy stunned", "phantom of a lost paradise", "singing of the Virgin" and " ray of an angel”, claim to carry some higher values, bright ideas, but all that can be learned from their work is a call to “explain with exquisite words” and “worship with your soul and body”.
Of course, the clergy, who devoted their whole lives to the cause of faith and spirituality, have the right to have their own opinion. From within their system, they see these phenomena differently than those who have devoted their lives to literature. After all, the Orthodox Church has had two thousand years to decide on opinions regarding certain aspects. But, as you understand, literary critics have their own professional tasks and their own approach to evaluating works. Therefore, on the one hand, I completely agree that everything that touches on the topic of spirituality should understand clearly and deeply what they write about; and also with the fact that the authors of literary studies in this area necessary to understand all the intricacies of faith no less than the poets themselves, otherwise they risk, considering the poetry of biblical themes, even with a fairly good knowledge of the subject, to hit the sky with a finger and show themselves not with better side before those readers for whom faith is not an empty phrase. On the other hand, slightly rhyming, flat and inept chanting can probably be called spiritual. But it cannot be called poetry. Therefore, in this research on religious poetry
, I simply do not consider spiritual virsheviks (i.e., amateur poets).
spiritual poets
And I'll start, to demonstrate the difference, with this:
And that's it. And God? And what is God?
Yes, just the one who opened the borders,
Who could not fit in Himself,
The one who can't fit in anyone.
Who has a million eyes
a million hands, planets and stars and yet
can't live without each of us,
can't do without you and me.
And there is such an unknown law -
heavenly account of countless efforts:
we die lest He die.
And He is immortal so that we all live.
This is Zinaida Mirkina. Once again, I carefully leaf through her collection “Loss of Loss” (Moscow, 1991). Is it possible to call Zinaida Mirkina not churched? “And the Soul learned to be completely silent before its God”; “I love rain for meekness and humility. / For the fact that, in the branches with drops of rustling, / allows us to hear how a transparent shadow / flows along the channels of the world soul”, “A solemn intimacy is coming / Souls with their Creator”... I I can cite many more such lines - and freeze in bewilderment. Because Zinaida Mirkina is absolutely Orthodox and church-going, her restraint and humility are obvious. But for all that, there is not one iota of didacticism and tediousness in it:
Death of the world. The fading of the day.
But don't believe your eyes.
The light has died to enter me
And give me life by your death.
The earthly summed up
And all guesswork is useless.
This is how God dies
Entering from the outside into the chest abyss.
This is spiritual poet...but rather spiritual Poet. Forgive me if I could not make such a subtle difference obvious to Orthodox believers.
I cannot but write about another spiritual poet, also from Moscow, but by the will of fate - in recent years - Ukrainian: this is whose work, both in Russia and in our country, is still very little known. An undoubted Orthodox tradition is felt in her works, she is a deep, serious, thoughtful and rather virtuoso poetess in terms of mastering the technique of verse:
In leaving lurks the fire of return,
the fifth day of Lazarus and the rod of Aaron...
So sin, bumping into the mercy of forgiveness,
gloomy icicle, without touching the soul,
melt, melt... Oh, bold tenderness,
Gerda's rescue of the stubborn Kai!..
Marguerite is akin to the symbolists of the "Silver Age".
Holy clothes, the simplest in cut,
and the brilliance of the whiteness of the ermine is regal ...
Favor is not for everyone; three were chosen.
Any other number is not acceptable secret.
Please come! That rumor is worthless
that there is no You, only space above the houses ...
It is not prayer that rules me, but prayer!
There is a difference between these words.
Nevertheless, with all the complexity and philosophy of the form, the breath of her lyrics is pure and transparent:
Not Bathsheba - no! - and even more so - not Virineya,
I say to you, O God, let your will, not mine...
I'm always in trouble and I'm only alive in trouble,
it oppresses others, but improves me.
That's why I set myself a task:
waiting, hard waiting.
All genius is yours, mine is one villainy.
I believe silence is from the Word
and therefore there are more words.
This Orthodoxy is not drum-like, as with the Virsheviks, and does not lead away from the upbringing of the soul, as with secular authors - masters of stylization for spirituality. Margarita is sincere even when it comes to her inner doubts and struggle with herself, which is actually inherent in believers as well as non-believers.
Let's be silent for a minute. How scared Jonah!
I myself, like him, and in sweat and blood I am.
Instead of requests for love - cigarette smoke to the sky.
To write about Myslyakova and not to highlight the work of our other contemporary, which is the Saratov poetess Svetlana Kekova, impossible. The inner relationship of their lyrics and - in some ways - even creative style are obvious. Here the same clearly expressed spiritual poet position:
And so my God does not need words
you need to learn how to live in this world again,
draw water in the hole, silently chop wood,
for pigeons to crumble the remaining bread for breakfast.
True Orthodox position. Moreover, repentance is inherent in the work of Svetlana Kekova, it is impossible to reproach her with pride:
To your best words
a shadow falls like Adam's sin.
And, listening to the sounds of someone else's crying, sobbing, moaning,
you pray in the night for your soul, damned sinner.
The sign of the cross again irrigates the chest and forehead,
like a stream of salty, not knowing, I will hold back tears.
I want to note that at the same time, both Myslyakova and Kekova do not focus only on internal spiritual experiences, they also have a civic position, a reflection of the social problems of the era. Compare: “I created food. As a result, she remained hungry. / Sculpted a baby. And the melancholy and the candle came out ”; “with the eyes taking in that layer of being, / where not we, but objects have a price”; “The world has again made a fool of me, / making me a timid servant of everyday life. / A housekeeper, accustomed to saving / crumpled money ... Oh, poverty, do not threaten us! / I need to buy so much today, / slither through the shops like a dexterous snake! “I won’t learn to get up from the dust / in the country of great antitheses, / where, uprooting fir trees, / a great thunderstorm is coming ... / But hundreds of hands raised in sorrow / will present us as a “yes” vote! - at Myslyakova. Or “To the rich, the word is like bread to the poor, / but to the poor, bread is God’s word”; “Even if the earth is a vale of tears and sadness, / the growing forest silently reaches for the sky of children”; “The old cloak is worn to holes... / You will say, having reached the edge: / - God, God! The world is broken, / we are afraid of its fragments ”- from Kekova.
Even sizes and rhythms are common (favorite) for both of them, as well as a certain complexity, I would say, “philological” construction of phrases, i.e. architectonics of poems (no wonder they are both philologists, candidates of sciences). But there is also a difference. For Margarita Myslyakova, this complexity does not apply to the very meaning of the phrases. Svetlana Kekova often has contradictory, illogical lines, clearly written in a conceptualist manner, lines that evoke associations no longer with church harmony, but with the disharmony of the surrounding world:
Like everything in the world, the Lord will save us with you,
because children fly from blue heights.
Perhaps this is done deliberately, to convey the very spirit of our era - the spirit of division, disunity, tragic loneliness, and then Svetlana Kekova, as an observant creator, is absolutely right.
If the speech ceased, and the sound arose from the silence,
if the peach pit wants to lie down in the ground,
for a start, we will tie a reed to the bed,
between us we put a cold sparkling sword.
In the examples given, each subsequent phrase does not logically follow from the previous one, although grammatically (“because”, “if”) it is built with a claim to logic and philosophy. This is the reflection of the break as a tragedy of the era.
In addition, Svetlana Kekova has common features with the "neo-modernists". For example, a tendency to use familiar, everyday images and furnishings, as if forcing their names:
You look - you try to understand
remember what those things are.
mug, mirror, bed,
hammer, chisel, tongs,
nails, mirror, chest of drawers,
glass, dusty bottles,
slice of bergamot pear
and plastic forks.
In Margarita Myslyakova, furnishings are found in poems, but without oversaturation. It is felt that she feels equally free in both types of space, material and spiritual, she does not have a subconscious craving for signs of everyday life as something soothing and fundamental.
Thirdly, there are obvious differences in the technique of verse. Myslyakova sets for herself the most important task to defend as far as possible from the banal ways of rhyming, if at the same time the accuracy of the rhyme can be observed: “protesting - I will read”, “into him - Heavenly”, “I have the right to be healthy”, “customs - slowed down”, “ Be! - a crossroads", "in the face of a goal", "the beast - by faith". Her rhymes are brilliant, unexpected, elegant, and attention to form is no less attention to content. Kekova, on the other hand, does not value form so highly, she rather has a truly folk spirit of creativity, her poems are precious gems, bright clumps of folklore inclusions in almost every line:
As in water boiling with seven springs,
move the seven fins of the fish.
The time is approaching when not the Lord, but fate
will throw a mitten on wolfskin under our feet.
Above the grass the bird sings: shadow-shadow,
you need to take grass on Ivanov's day,
in the blue forests, at the crossroads of the rivers.
The shepherd with his pipe has disgusted me,
I threw three coals into a ladle of water
from thunderstorms, tears, aches, dryness,
from the forgotten traces of your gait.
Therefore, Kekova's rhymes are close to folk, deeply traditional, even grammatical, rarely unexpected: "pernicious - weedy", "sinful - inconsolable", "scratch - drip", "live - crumble", "speech - shoulders", "time - burden", "water - trouble".
And the river laughs and frowns,
atoning for the banality of the rhyme.
This is an approach very close to Anna Akhmatova. She, too, believed that complex or unexpected rhyme diverts attention from the meaning and, moreover, scares off the average reader. - An opinion shared by modern traditionalist poets and rejected by adherents of other directions.
Such a wonderful spiritual poet as Yuri Kublanovskiy, a dissident of the Soviet period, who was forced to emigrate to Paris due to issues of faith, with faith, deep and genuine, everything is imbued in his spiritual poems, even those lines that talk about carnal love.
But closing eyelids
with a lamp smoking in a blizzard,
Do you remember, which
the font accepted you.
Which jordan
washed from little finger to forehead,
when to the funeral
fate was shaping fate.
Yury Kublanovskiy's poetry is naturally religious - this is an internal quality, inherent in the soul, suffered through:
No wonder the hand of the Most High
puts a stigma on us poor ones:
there are threads, secret yet,
already binding many.
And looking out of the darkness - into the Dormition canopy,
We are looking for mercy, not vengeance.
And maybe you're just a pale shadow
That future - after forgiveness!
And I'm no longer a cocoon containing lies,
Wintering in the black rafters,
And the one whose hand you willingly take
In the grave opened for the Miracle.
This is what Orthodoxy teaches. The spiritual poet, churched, reflects the world in exactly this way - through condemnation of himself, through the feeling that his soul is in the filth of lies and pride, and salvation from this is only in communion with the life of the Church and in absolute humility and obedience.
PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS LYRICS.
Philosophical and religious lyrics
If we do not want to confine ourselves to the framework of a purely ecclesiastical (in this case, Orthodox) tradition, we cannot disregard another interesting layer of religious poetry, from the point of view of criticism and literary criticism, which I propose to name. The paradox of this trend is that it largely coincides with spiritual poetry: the same convinced religiosity, absolute sincerity in the presentation of the topic, the difficult bearing of the soul, like butterflies in a cocoon. But the differences are glaringly obvious. So much so that when considering religious poetry, I would single it out as an independent, separate from the spiritual, trend.
The fact is that philosophical and religious lyricists are not strictly canonical, in their works they go beyond the church fence and try to convey their vision of each problem, and their vision does not always coincide with the opinion of the Church. It is impossible to call it non-religious, the feeling of sacred awe is certainly present:
Exchanged the Golden Word
three-ruble note with a crumpled mountain.
Thank God I'm still with you
non-icon, real mine...
You stand in memory, as in a sea of light,
containing and holding everything in Himself.
How can you not tremble
affectionate female soul? ..
It is also difficult to call it spiritual in the church's sense, as you see.
The motif of fusion with all nature, love for all living things, the awareness of homo sapiens is not the crown of creation and not the king of nature, but a fellow bug on the planet. Moreover, even the planet is felt as a living and intelligent being, like any stone on it. See for yourself:
And a dream by a stone - maybe not a dream, but
dumb-over
when he absorbs the marble womb
Universe top?
And I looked at them: here, here
living altar! Where is more alive?
River and sky, fresh sage leaf
and sun orange bow.
But is it paganism? To this assumption, the authors respond:
It's been that way for centuries
that the poets prayed to the One in different -
and fools threw themselves at them with "paganism" idle,
false, crafty, who came "from the Serpent."
Thus the accusation of paganism is rejected with indignation. Therefore, we are not talking about pantheism, although such lyrics are similar to it in terms of cheerfulness of sensations.
Shepherd's purse, bluegrass, horsetail,
lupine, St. John's wort, leaf wort
the soul is full, simplified, spare
she is a wife, lost, by you ...
And that's why it's unthinkably easy
for overflights of aura and dope
at the distance of a small jump
from the oversaturated azure.
What meekness, what Christian humility and disgust for a fallen world can be seen in this poem, full of mischief and delight, joy and ecstasy? But we are talking, like Mirkina, like Kublanovsky, about the soul.
I'd rather put myself together
with "He Who" - his simple and childish power:
by right of a daughter. Is there anything stronger
trusting unity between us?
I am not on the sites - I go on the air,
bypassing the Internet: so, directly,
how to directly conquer the world.
Did you feel pride in this, the denial of mediators between God and us? And I would say, on the contrary, there is some kind of childish naivete here, but not in the mental sense, but in the sense of the author’s being too open to the reader, the bareness of the birth of every thought and every impulse (of course, not always highly moral). Even when such lyrics are enthusiastic, they are tragic at the same time. And being indignant and laughing at herself and other people's shortcomings, she wants the impossible from us: perfection.
This is another paradox: philosophical and religious lyricists are characterized by the closest attention to the education of the soul, even more than that of spiritual poets, for whom it is still more important to reflect in the work the essence of religion, its canons and rituals, prayers and holidays. One can feel in these lyrics, along with an enthusiastic feeling of closeness to nature, the most merciless asceticism in regard to morality. Orthodox take everything easier. For this, there is a feeling of repentance, a sense of one's own fall and insignificance, and as a saving way out - the rite of confession and removal of sins by the priest, who in this case plays the role of a messenger from above. And the lyric poets of the philosophical and religious direction of the removal of sins are not enough. It is not repentance itself that is important to them, but its consequence - the extraction of a life lesson from each difficult situation. Those. the perception of any incident as sent to us for a deeper understanding of ourselves, our true values, preferences, desires, etc. There is something from the heroes of Dostoevsky in this. Isn't this an old Russian tradition of "self-digging"?
Nor stubborn bows to beat,
nor in shabby rags to walk
my Lord did not teach me -
Well I'm from the essence of His pinch.
And I will repent - how I will laugh,
life-torture I will pray,
because you lose the pain -
and you won't be able to handle yourself.
It is precisely the complex moral situations, according to the ideas of the poets of this direction, that are capable of changing us radically. They put us in front of a mirror, they say, “This is what you really are. Now make your choice." - And the one who saw his mercilessly truthful reflection, either finds the strength to overcome weaknesses, or does not withstand temptation and already consciously surrenders to him.
And therefore - who is right, who is wrong,
when someone hurts? Believe it or not, but
you are a Savior to everyone, and Pilate,
and life cross behind the rock dark door.
One and the same acquaintance of ours in different circumstances can be for us, metaphorically speaking, both an angel and a devil, depending on how he should influence our fate and what to push. In principle, sometimes even unpleasant meetings help us to think about things in our lives that we are usually too lazy to think about in order to avoid the following (and painful) need for action: “and it sounds to us from above every now and then: / - Are you suffering? You wanted it!". In order to shake up the mind, to make us think and act, and not passively sigh, just the poems of a philosophical and religious orientation serve. Perhaps, in some ways, this is morality on the verge of the unlawful, provocative - however, the circumstances in which we find ourselves provoke us in exactly the same way. But such a position helps to avoid the temptation to these circumstances and blame everything. She, as it were, expresses her consent: yes, this is a provocation from above, but you wanted the truth, right? You wanted change, some kind of movement? Now decide.
However, the very principles of morality here do not entirely coincide with the traditional Orthodox ones. For example, regarding marriage:
If you have any respect,
if gratitude is strong in you -
my dear, what is liberation for?
Is the old wife worse?
But when you hurt each other
constantly, furiously, sobbing,
will not save from the vicious circle
evil enmity - the humility of prayers ...
What will endure - will become vulgar.
What falls in love - is sick,
squinting at you in half a face
and quietly suffocate.
Some mischief -
in dislike vkupelozhestvo.
Some kind of mistake
shameful fake.
This is not a preaching of permissiveness, but a poetic formulation of a frequently occurring situation when relationships have exhausted themselves and there is not even a mutually binding factor - children.
The spiritual poet speaks about good and evil only in the categories inherent in the Church. So that, God forbid, they would not think of him as possessed by pride, who took upon himself the mission of teaching without asking. And since that's what readers usually think, he's right. But at all times there have been people, including those in the field of education and culture, who believe that by taking care of the little, you can lose something much more important, according to the proverb “throw out the baby with water”. Even the first director of the Lyceum, where little Pushkin studied, V.F. Malinovsky, who, according to his position, was obliged to monitor the morality and spirituality of his pupils, emphasized in education primarily on the development of thinking: “having opened the mind, accustomed to distinguish between good and evil, and so that they do not do without reasoning and do not speak and do not think. He taught to “value higher the small inner good against the great outer good—even to destroy it,” i.e. to destroy the ostentatious goodness and to value the inner motives for goodness - "and for this more freedom to think is allowed," because freedom "as air is necessary for human existence." Malinovsky urged the pupils of the Lyceum to live "for the common good." No wonder the Lyceum has produced so many poets and great statesmen!
Guided by the "common benefit", the philosophical and religious lyricist expresses himself on aspects on which a church-going Orthodox simply would not allow himself to discover his own opinion. He speaks not for the sake of outrageousness, but for the sake, as he believes, of some facets of truth:
And the glance will not be slow to notice that our Being is different,
and we judge Him like drowned mice in everyday life.
Create me again, Father, You can, You can!
Cut me with light, blind me in pieces.
You, too, are of light—or rather, the light is in You too—
like all flesh from the temple. And all creation in infinity is a temple.
Non-standard understanding of God. If “different”, “and light too”, does it mean that something else is also observed?
Sometimes in such lyrics, the reader seems to have some impudence, even a challenge:
Not paid, not church -
not lost cornflower blue.
A blue fairy tale - consonances of honey ...
He invests in us besides us
streams of speech, colors or sounds,
and what if we believe sometimes
into Her Pseudo-Majesty Science!
And yet, this “pride” is just apparent - its protest concerns something deeply personal, too sore and connected not at all with faith itself, but with hypocrisy, rudeness and fanaticism of some “believers”. The inner core of such poetry is spiritual asceticism, stoicism and a clear understanding of one's place, which can in no way be called pride:
Not to be crushed by His immensity
and not be deceived by His glory.
Realize where God is and where creation is,
not puff up the role of co-creator.
This lyrics helps to understand some of the nuances that the Church does not give answers to or these answers run counter to the new facts known today about the structure of the world. This is not about some new faith, the lyrics of this direction may well adhere to Orthodox dogmas. They only combine in their work the way it is customary to interpret the Bible in an Orthodox environment, with the data of science, and from here arises, as they believe, a more harmonious worldview.
And that's why we don't know
Why is there a star above your head...
Maybe we can be with you
the finest fabric in the world.
It is impossible to call this heresy for a very simple reason: philosophical and religious lyricists do not elevate their personal spiritual vision to the rank of spiritual teaching, they do not turn it into a new religion. They do what all authors do - they simply reflect the world as they see it, and do not pretend to be teachers and prophets. Often they are reflected not even in publications - in writing “on the table”. Nevertheless, sometimes it is significant for them to have considerable spiritual experience, in the reflection of which religious convictions and firmness of position are combined with the intensity of mental activity and depth of thinking. Creativity is just as, and even more mercilessly sincere than that of spiritual poets, and just as simple and clear, addressed directly to the heart of the reader. Not the difficulties of style, but the difficulties of inner growth, not so much the originality of manner, but the originality of thinking and view. It is not always easy to read such lyrics - simply because not all readers agree to perceive what is a little further than the church fence, usually people do not have a particular desire to absorb spiritual experience that makes them think. “Not transparent, not tamed, / I sow the seeds of the dumb.” Simple in form, this lyric is not simple in essence, it teaches to think, to distinguish things and phenomena of our world, to educate and nurture one's soul, and not only to repent of sins.
It's very hard to find yourself
understand and write this world in my own way,
every shriveled and shriveled leaf loving
like the germ of a sad and bright story...
It's very difficult to go your own way.
crazy road, not heeding the offensive,
and forgive the sons of men,
and taste your unenviable rumor,
and carry it, like a cross, easily,
and stubbornly hold on to the "whims of the holy fools",
because the Word is not far away -
Well, at least not farther than home.
Truth, which in the Orthodox tradition is called the "narrow path", looks multifaceted and paradoxical to such authors.
No matter how narrow the Truth is,
The ocean will pave it in breadth and in Russian,
adding royally all others meanings,
so that - over all - unified was a rocker.
Niello, enamel, filigree lines
they will release things,
will cause a fairy tale in-essence-walkers!
B-essence-walkers - this is lyrics of philosophical and religious direction, in literature, usually loners: "And he who knows himself in vain / flutters alone." Such walkers will bite into the essence, in spite of any prohibitions, the so-called "love of truth" is in their blood. And Truth and God are very close concepts for them.
So that the Quiet Light indestructibly rivers
inside of me otherwise...
Float on the waters of the cloud with a ferry,
irresponsible connection with the Word!
For some reason I became a postman,
although not born with faith in the soul.
And now I still see Your lights
and cloisters remember amber and agate,
my only one, you save my-on-blood,
most controversial The source of my kilowatts...
Creativity of such a plan testifies to sincere faith, touches the essence of religion deeply, not superficially, not tediously instructive, but draws conclusions a little different from what is customary. And sometimes it is expressed even with a hint of mischief and irony - however, unlike the conceptualists, this is laughter precisely at oneself, so there is no need to talk about pride:
“Do not acquire the temporary,” whispers the fire of the soul.
If only the “roof” did not break from the ascent ...
By all these signs, we can safely attribute such works to the section of philosophical and religious lyrics.
METAPHYSICAL POETRY
metaphysical poetry
And now, considering poetry hearts, religious poetry, we can move on to poetry crazy, which I propose to call the term " metaphysical poetry».
In fact, critics and literary scholars, being overwhelmingly worldly people, unfortunately, prefer to call this term - “ metaphysical poetry”- in general, everything at once: both spiritual poetry, and philosophical and religious lyrics, and religious poetry of philosophizing and mysticism, and non-religious poetry of biblical themes, and even pseudo-spiritual poetry inhabited by devils, ghouls, witches and other evil spirits. The author of the textbook "Poets and Poetry of the Bronze Age" A. Korablev cites the following opinion of the literary critic I. Shaitanov: "... metaphysical poetry... is a predominantly linguistic, stylistic phenomenon. Donne's elegy "On the Undressing of the Beloved" and his cycle of "Sacred Sonnets" equally belong to him. In verses on sacred plots - the former language of love explanation, sometimes on the verge of parodia sacra. - A statement that is completely unthinkable in the context of the view of church hierarchs reflected above on spiritual poetry! It turns out that parodia sacra, a parody of spiritual lyrics, is for literary critics " metaphysical poetry»?!
Let's take a look at " Dictionary Russian language "Ozhegov and Shvedova:" Metaphysics: 1. A philosophical doctrine that affirms the immutability of once and for all given and inaccessible to experience the beginnings of the world. 2. Non-dialectical way of thinking - consideration of phenomena outside their mutual connection and development. 3. Something incomprehensible, abstruse, too abstract (colloquial). What conclusion can be drawn after all that has been said? Only one. Since we cannot call a philosophical doctrine, nor a "non-dialectical way of thinking" poetry, there remains an understanding metaphysical poetry as "a phenomenon of linguistic, stylistic", as well as "incomprehensible, abstruse, too abstract". I think that not all of these "phenomena" are related to spiritual experience. That is why I propose to distinguish between the concepts of " religious poetry" and " metaphysical poetry».
Poets of Metaphysics
Probably start consideration features of metaphysical poetry it is necessary from the author, who of all the famous metaphysicians with the most compelling reason claims to be a religious poet, is a Muscovite Olga Sedakova. A dissident, well-known in Western Europe and America back in Soviet times, she was one of the few who dared then to publish works of a metaphysical nature in the West, bypassing Soviet ideological censorship. Her creative manner is a clear continuation of the line of Pushkin and the Symbolists. From Pushkin - solemn archaic vocabulary, long and smooth meter, musical sound, a simple way of rhyming, not excluding grammatical rhymes. From the symbolists - abstraction and transcendence of worldview, the complexity of images, constant allusions to the Old Testament.
The will falls, and the body does not want,
and will not see. But he will say, ending:
there is nothing that life does not prophesy,
only you in the depths meaning!
The Prodigal Son will return, Joseph will come to Canaan
young as always, and a wonderful dreamer.
And the water of the depths, and the fire of inverted countries
again the future will be and in the future will be doubled.
Style dominates - here he is the king and god and rules over the images and clutches of thoughts indisputably. As if even higher than the One Who is all around! Absolute philology and aestheticism, elevated to the rank of Law, are also reflected in the abundance of quotations in Latin and Western European languages, as well as in the choice of poetic form: Sedakova often has ballads, canzones, stanzas, steles and inscriptions, elegies and other exotic.
Everything is smooth, light, sublime, very stylish - and at the same time, it seems to be even religious:
'Cause up like a pennant
raises the heart of grace,
because there is love and death,
and they are sister and mother.
But somehow everything is very academic, detached, without what strikes the heart. It lacks something intimately touching, the delight of faith or the nakedness of spiritual anguish, because of which I could call this lyrics spiritual. A small, inconspicuous stroke betrays a genuine essence of metaphysical poetry: self-doubt is necessarily characteristic of an Orthodox believer, who always treats his soul with attention, and is contraindicated for mystics and metaphysical poets, for doubt is something from the underworld of the soul and an unaesthetic phenomenon. Neither Olga Sedakova, nor the other authors of this trend have any doubts about their significance, and the majority let in such a thick fog of abstruseness that one wants to immediately, without reasoning, believe in their dedication. But what kind of initiate admits to being an initiate? Will he play the king of cleverness before the reader? Saints - Sergius of Radonezh, for example - behaved extremely modestly.
Yes, and would not do true religious poet such clear slips that happened to Olga Sedakova in the essay “Praise of Poetry”: “poetry does not need protection in front of people who are limited by their own will, who quickly learned to hate the world and everything from the world” (a pebble in the garden of the monastic view of things ); “Perfectly poetic verses... there are very few in the world... I instinctively want to lower my eyes before such verses, instantly forget them... and not consider them, convincing myself and others of the inexhaustible possibilities of this beauty. She is not only unsafe, she is really saving, and there is no thing more terrible than salvation ... There is no need to dream about this, everything has already been said ”; “Artistic sincerity, in contrast to simple, is historical: it took into account everything that had already been heard before it. The great lyricist ... is sincere - and not boring, not indecent, not deceitful and not false, like any sincere person ”; “This is courtesy among one’s own, where boring retelling and pathos are indecent.”
It seems to be the absolute sincerity of faith... But to be afraid of salvation, because everything will have already been said?.. But contempt for simple, and not artistic sincerity, because it is childishly direct, not feigned (not "stylistic") and therefore boring? .. But such a persistent and unshakable “decency” in everything, from which you sometimes want to hide much more than from pathos? .. Yuri Kublanovskiy It was not for nothing that he wrote about the times of his youthful dissidence:
Then among the lights lofty
not yet revealed to us
that many are called, few are chosen
and confined to the worlds.
His poetry, perhaps, is not so defiantly solemn, not so emphatically crowned as Sedakova's, but it is completely and undeniably spiritual and lies on everyone's heart. Olga is characterized by the smoke of mysticism - cold, mysterious, majestic, like the ruins of a distant Colosseum.
Where does she have what, according to the Church, should be inherent in a spiritual poet - obedience to the will of the Creator, glorification of the Almighty and the world created by Him, repentance for her own imperfection and internal torment? Where is the pushing apart of the “frames” when looking at the world, which is characteristic of the insights of philosophical and religious lyrics? Too obvious "literary" faith. I do not argue, it is very beautiful and fascinating, some kind of mystery and depth is constantly seen in this. Constantly - i.e. including even when they are not there: “there, the dream garden sorting out and giving”; “not into a dream hostile to awakening, / but only into a dream a free step”; "I'm sorry this life doesn't mean anything"; “I will stretch out my hand so that I am gone. / And I know how empty it is - / the plant of emptiness that lost / everything that the emptiness absorbed”; "O death - the overflow of a miracle. / Father, I want horror"; “where the inner horror sits at work, / to go outside and make a move”; “Like a winter path, so you, soul, are dark”; “so that everyone reads about his desire - / but there was neither mystery nor joy in it”; “Oh, how the heart misses, what a misfortune!”; "And swallowing life as a great insult." Can this be called insight? The same obscure languor as that of spiritual virsheviks is another matter, that it is conveyed with the help of amazing language and style, which in itself is capable of causing catharsis in a sensitive reader.
Unlike the Virsheviks, who hit the reader with theological dogmas right in the forehead and backhand, Olga Sedakova is disgusted even with the very concept of an “idea”. “In the element of free culture,” the poetess believes, “there is no place for any ideology”; “Everything that is ideological, moral, ready-made refers precisely to this space from which you need to get out.” In this case, Olga did not take into account that faith is also a kind of ideology (in the sense of worldview and worldview). And this clearly indicates that the literary nature of faith in other cases may be fraught with generally going beyond the bounds of faith. This is where the confusion in terms comes from. I don't doubt the faith of Olga Sedakova herself, but where is the guarantee that the numerous masters of stylization, having longed for Sedakova's laurels, will not be able to pass themselves off as religious poets? The Orthodox, of course, will figure out that they want to fool them, but far from all philologists who have weight in science and the right to “distribute titles” are Orthodox.
A very convincing explanation of where the authors metaphysical sense there is a panic fear of "little aesthetic" sincerity and repentance, "boring" and "boredom" of high pathos, I found in Naum Korzhavin's article "Playing with the Devil" ("Almanac of Poetry" No. 59, 1991). Truth, Naum Korzhavin wrote about decadence and the influence of this worldview even on such strong lyricists of that time as Alexander Blok. But the essence of this influence remains true for later times. Korzhavin rightly noted: “not only vulgarity is dangerous, the fear of vulgarity is also dangerous - hypertrophied hatred of it ... Dangerous and disgust caused by it in relation to ordinary life, and fencing off from it ..., and the fact that this leads to a loss of interest and mutual understanding with other people, to indifferent contempt for their concerns - and since you yourself are a person and many of these concerns are not alien to you yourself - then to lie. Thomas Mann, who at one time also paid tribute to this fad, which seized the best, cultured, sophisticated people of his circle, called such an attitude "the barbarism of aestheticism." Having figured out the true background of aestheticism, Mann realized that individualism is, ultimately, the death of individuality, and aestheticism is the enemy of the aesthetic. Is there anything further from beauty than cult beauty, but from the thin strings of the soul - than cult refinement? Reading and not understanding metaphysical poems some aesthetes, being captured by the melody of the verse, the brightness of the images, the generous vague allusions to something higher, the reader, as Korzhavin describes it, in the simplicity of his soul believes that the author “has discovered some secrets before which ... one should prostrate (the specifics of these secrets, by the way say, is that they remain secrets, that no one seeks to reveal them). In essence, the reader is simply infected by the author's love for himself, for his uniqueness, devotion, magnetic power... This is a strange delight. Not only does it not give the reader the opportunity to feel deeper ... himself, to discover in himself spiritual riches, which he may not have guessed before (and this is precisely the task of art), but, on the contrary, it leads him away from real self-awareness, hints to the fact that beauty is something that lies outside him and has nothing to do with his life. Aestheticism Korzhavin calls "cheap shamanism" and notes that Alexander Blok never suffered from it, since in his decadent works he remained mercilessly sincere, maintaining the tone of confession.
It is worth considering what the ministers of the Church understand by spirituality and spiritual poetry. Including when, according to professional criteria, the analyzed work is among the irreproachable.
In A. Korablev's textbook, in the chapter " Metaphysical poetry"The name of Olga Sedakova is only mentioned, but is considered as indisputable metaphysical leader
Joseph Brodsky. Probably, using his example, it will be even more correct to show the features of metaphysical poets, what makes me treat their work as non-religious.
When Brodsky speaks of the spiritual, he achieves this only by comparison with something bodily, tangible: "small, like the soul in relation to the flesh." He did not suffer from faith and treated it very freely ... to say the least. “I am against the mercantile psychology that pervades Christianity: do this, you will get that... Or even better: trust in the infinite mercy of God. I am closer to the Old Testament God who punishes... The idea of self-will... In this sense, I am closer to Judaism than any Jew in Israel... If I believe in something, then... in a despotic, unpredictable God ( ...) Language is the beginning of beginnings. If God exists for me, then it is language” (from an interview with Sven Birkerts).
And most importantly, what kind of love for one's neighbor can a poet talk about, for whom “a person brings with him a dead end to any point in the world”, and “human pork lies on the floor”; who “cannot distinguish themselves from the trousers taken off” and glorifies those who went “to the abortion clinic in the sixties, saving the fatherland from shame”? If this is considered only accusatory towards humanity, indignant and revealing lines, and not the author’s deep conviction that everything around has gone and aimlessly, then I would like to see those of his lines that offer something higher instead of this, they call somewhere, open the way or at least purify the soul. Alas... Where will the catharsis come from in an author with a deeply ironic mindset that combines incompatible things? “I, too, however, are not for nothing: / And in Rome too / Now there is a place to shout “Fuck!”, / Sigh “Oh God.” Yes, Joseph Brodsky has quite a few allusions to Holy Bible, for example, this: “And the golden Yegory dunks into the throat of the dragon, like in ink, a spear.” But can the works be called spiritual based only on allusions? But then what about Brodsky's own confession: “Temporary goddesses! It is more pleasant for you to believe than constant ones. Hail, round belly, ladvi with delicate skin! and even more definitely: “And, therefore, there will be no sense / from believing in yourself and in God”? But what about the definition: “This is, you see, / The role of matter in / Time is to transfer / Everything to the power of nothing”? Brodsky himself understood himself much more honestly:
From a mouth that said everything but "Oh my God"
Breaks out with the noise of abracadabra.
No, Joseph Brodsky never claimed to be a spiritual leader, teacher or prophet, such a thing would have sounded ridiculous and stupid to him.
However, the concept metaphysics» The lyrics of Joseph Brodsky correspond. He himself considered himself metaphysical poet”, bestowing this title on those who wrote in the same vein as him. For example, about the poetics of Yevgeny Rein, Brodsky said that it “gives out in him ... metaphysics or, in any case, an individual who instinctively feels that the relations between the things of this world are an echo or an interlinear ... translation of the dependencies that exist in the world of infinity. It should be noted how he further deciphers metaphysical poetry, acknowledging that "Rine's standard poem is 80% nouns and proper names" and noting "excessive oversaturation", "a tendency to name, to enumerate the things of this world, an infantile almost greed for words". The point, it turns out, is that "the Rhine is a poet of erosion, decay - human relations, moral categories, historical ties." So after all, this is exactly what it is - “to transfer everything to the power of nothing”! And also pay attention: hinting at the connections of things with infinity in articles and interviews, Joseph Brodsky does not open these connections anywhere in his poems, preferring to name and list everything just as richly. This is what metaphysics is in his understanding and in the understanding of philologists who are far from questions of faith. The swirling, mysterious chaos of the world, with only a vague suspicion about its internal nature as a reflection of higher ideas (see Kant). When reading the lyrics of Joseph Brodsky, a stable association with erosion and decay arises. The higher plan and religare (the connection of the higher with the lower, the spiritual nature in ourselves) is almost completely absent in the poems of the émigré period of this author's work. But after all, it was precisely this period that Joseph Brodsky considered decisive for himself and wished that his previous poetic activity be remembered as rarely as possible. What kind of faith and conviction can there be in a skeptic poet, a poet of merciless irony, a poet of materiality, density, who conveyed the almost physically felt emptiness and aimlessness of the existence of the world?! With all the height and perfection of the form of Brodsky's works, we have no right to call these works religious.
If we consider biblical poetry in this vein, raking everything into one pile called " metaphysical poetry”, then any fairly professionally written work based on biblical motifs, but not meeting the criteria for spiritual poetry by church hierarchs, can fit into collections and anthologies on spiritual topics.
It is all the less reason to call religious (and even more so spiritual!) the poetry of numerous modern followers of Joseph Brodsky, however, as well as the symbolist mystics of the Silver Age. This is either a stylization, a fake for spirituality of "abstractly believing" poets who believe not in something, but, so to speak, "in general"; or the speculations of authors who are very well-read, but do not realize that their work has nothing to do with the upbringing of their own souls. And for believers, this is the main thing.
Wouldn't like to metaphysicians confused with philosophical and religious lyricists. The latter never talk about their "mysterious dedication" and some kind of "beyond knowledge", their poetry is addressed primarily to the voice of conscience. If this is not the Orthodox "narrow path", then, in any case, it is capable of leading there. And equipping the fabric of the verse with supposedly esoteric (but in fact - just vague) rantings that give nothing to the heart or mind are not able to induce the reader to either remember the soul or think about the problems of morality and world order, if their church consideration does not satisfy him. .
That is why it is worth distinguishing between the concepts of "religious poetry" (that is, spiritual and philosophical-religious) and "metaphysical poetry" and not replacing one with the other. Let's be more careful with words - especially when these are terms in textbooks.
And finally, I have considered poetry related to aspects of faith, basing my analysis on Orthodoxy. Which does not mean the absence of interesting works of religious subjects from authors of other faiths.
More on this topic: Sergey Petrov
© Svetlana Skorik
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