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Average rating: 4
Total ratings received: 41.
Lyrical elegy “Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails” by O. Mandelstam is an example of using ancient culture to think about the eternal moral and philosophical category of love. The poem is studied in 11th grade. We invite you to familiarize yourself with a brief analysis of “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails" according to plan.
The material was prepared jointly with a teacher of the highest category, Kuchmina Nadezhda Vladimirovna.
Experience as a teacher of Russian language and literature - 27 years.
Brief Analysis
Before reading this analysis, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the poem Insomnia, Homer, Tight Sails….
History of creation - the work was created in 1915, when the poet was in Koktebel. It was first published in the second edition of the debut collection “Stone” (1916).
The theme of the poem is the Trojan War; power of love.
Composition - The poem is a monologue-reflection on the stated topics. In terms of meaning, it is divided into three parts: a story about insomnia, which forced him to turn to Homer, an appeal to the “Achaean men,” reflections on love.
Genre : elegy.
Poetic meter - written in iambic hexameter, ring rhyme ABBA.
Metaphors - “this long brood, this crane train”, “everything moves with love”, “the sea... approaches the head with a heavy roar.”
Epithets – “tight sails”, “divine foam”, “black sea”,
Comparison - “like a crane’s wedge... where are you swimming.”
Paths and images
In this, as in many (especially early) poems by Mandelstam, the epithet is the king and god of the lyrical plot; it is the epithets that convey both the logic of action in the Homeric era and the way the lyrical hero comprehends it.
Tight sails immediately, from the first verse, fill the entire poem with wind and storm. Long brood, crane train - metaphorical epithets create a comparison of the Achaean ships with a flock of cranes. Immediately, literally every other line, there is an obsessive repetition of the epithet - a crane wedge into someone else's borders: an inhuman, inexorable, elemental force is wedged into the borders of the Trojans - apparently with the same heavy roar as the sea - to the head (headboard) of the lyrical, powerless in its thought hero.
The sea is black (with a small letter, because we are not talking about describing the Crimean coast of the Black Sea, but about eternity), and one of the main attributes of the sea element, foam, becomes a divine attribute of the ancient kings, indulging in the elements of war and the sea , love and jealousy, resentment and revenge - freely and thoughtlessly, without reflex, because they do not have “culture” as an experience of reflection (neither Homer nor Archilochus were born yet).
History of creation
It is known that Osip Mandelstam was a student of the Faculty of History and Philology of the Romance-Germanic Department. He never graduated from the university, did not receive a diploma, but this period of his life left an imprint on the poet’s work. Philology students studied the Iliad in full. They considered reading a list of ships a proven cure for insomnia. This fact also found its place in the analyzed poem.
As a student, Mandelstam devoted himself to poetry. His creations were noticed by his older brothers. In 1915, the young poet stayed in Koktebel in the house of Maximilian Voloshin. This is where the work “Insomnia” was created. Homer. Tight sails." Close friends of the poet claimed that he was inspired to write poetry by the wreck of an ancient ship he saw in Koktebel.
Analysis of the poem “Insomnia” (Mandelshtam O.E.)
The analysis of the poem “Insomnia” (O.E. Mandelstam) sends us back to distant ancient times, which fascinated the young poet. Mandelstam studied at the Faculty of History and Philology. And although the poet never graduated from it, his education nevertheless had an influence on his, especially his early, work.
The theme of word search ran through the poetry of one of the most mysterious and secretive poets of the Silver Age. He needed a word with which he could express his thoughts. That is probably why Mandelstam abandoned symbolism and joined the Acmeists at a more mature age. It was Acmeism, in his opinion, that, through the use of a large number of artistic means, helped to fully express thoughts and feelings through words. In the poem “The Insomnia, Homer, Tight Sails,” Acmeism and quite vivid images and symbols surprisingly coexist. But romanticism, which Mandelstam often turned to at the beginning of his creative career, also influenced the mood and theme of this work.
In 1915, Mandelstam vacationed in Koktebel with his friend M. Voloshin. Most likely, the stars aligned in such a way that such a poem was destined to appear. After all, Mandelstam knew ancient literature very well, and the romance of the Black Sea and love inspired the poet to create a whole philosophical poem from the banal account of the ships of the Iliad, which was considered an excellent way to combat insomnia among students of the Faculty of History and Philology.
The poem intersects the themes of the Trojan War and love. Through an appeal to his ancestors, Mandelstam tries to find his answer to the eternal question. Unfortunately, Mandelstam does not find a direct answer, but this is understandable: the history of the Trojan War speaks for itself. And the young man in love is finally convinced that love is a spontaneous and all-consuming feeling that is worth giving his life and not only his own for it. This conclusion can be considered the idea of the poem.
The structure of the poem completely coincides with its compositional division into parts: each stanza is the next part of the work. Moreover, it is so logically structured that the main idea develops gradually, first through the lyrical hero’s appeal to Homer due to insomnia, which smoothly transitions to an appeal to the “Achaean men” in search of an answer to his question. The lyrical hero moves from internal dialogue to a monologue-reasoning in the third part. In it we read about his thoughts on love.
The poem is quite sad and philosophical, so it can be classified as an elegy.
So, the lyrical hero is tormented by insomnia, and he, as always has always happened, begins counting the ships. But he only managed to count to the middle and was interrupted by thinking about the event that forced him to pull the sails tight and set off on a crane train to war. He calls the ships a long brood; they line up like a crane wedge. Of course, Mandelstam knew that this was exactly how ships were lined up in the days before our era.
The first line is represented by short incomplete nominal sentences. Their function is to more clearly convey the mood of the night, silence, and tormenting thoughts of the lyrical hero. They, like images, grow in the reader’s imagination one after another in the sequence in which they arose in the thoughts of the lyrical hero. In addition, nominative sentences are designed to immobilize reality, which is why insomnia seems to hang in the air, the image of Homer appears and ships are waiting for a long journey.
In the second stanza, even more unusual mysterious images appear: kings with divine foam on their heads, Helen, Troy. The lyrical hero asks a question to the “Achaean men,” but as if he knows the answer to it in advance. This is evidenced by his own reasoning in the second part:
Where are you sailing? If only Elena...
Elena is the true cause of the war. The author does not believe for a second that they needed Troy:
Why is Troy alone for you, Achaean men?
Here Troy is reconquered seemingly casually, becoming just the cause. But the real war is fought over love. Only love pushes people to kill each other.
“Divine foam” on the heads of the kings is a sign of their divine destiny on earth. But this also contains a reference to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It was she who emerged from the sea foam. Foam is also a symbol of love. So even the heads of the demigods are covered with it: everything is driven by love in this world. The lyrical hero bows to the kings, but still accuses them of deceit and dishonesty, even to himself. They are majestic and unshakable in their power, but love is stronger than anything. Mandelstam himself was in love at the time of writing the poem, so the mood of the Achaeans was also close to him.
In the third part, the lyrical hero sums up his guesses about the all-consuming power of love. They become obvious to him:
Both the sea and Homer are all driven by love.
Now he has no doubt that love is life itself, it moves everything and everyone in this world.
But he asks a rhetorical question, to which he himself finds the answer:
Who should I listen to? And so, Homer is silent, And the black sea, swirling, makes noise...
Homer fell silent in this silent argument with the lyrical hero. The sea “swirls and makes noise.” Ornate means that he tells the lyrical hero his truth. But what is this truth? I think you can guess this from the last line:
And with a heavy roar he approaches the headboard.
The sea makes noise and caresses the thoughts of the lyrical hero, and one can assume that under its noise and orbits he falls asleep, finally finding the answer to his question, or rather, confirming his conjectures.
It is also characteristic that the sea here is black. This adjective reminds us of the place where the poem was written. Perhaps the Black Sea, next to which the author was, lulled his thoughts. After all, he also has his own foam of love.
Much of Mandelstam's lyrics are remarkable because symbolism and acmeism are closely intertwined in the poems, which makes them unusually musical and beautiful in content and form. This is what happened with this poem. All symbols refer to an ancient Greek poem. The image of Elena is of great importance here, because it was she who was chosen by Paris as the most beautiful woman in the world. And, perhaps, she deserved that the Achaeans would start a war for Troy because of her. The symbol of Aphrodite's divine foam also symbolizes love. Even the symbol of a string of ships preparing for a voyage symbolizes love, because insomnia due to this feeling forced the lyrical hero to count them.
But perhaps the symbol of the dispute between Homer and the sea is of greatest importance. Homer was a man driven by reason. But even the mind becomes silent when such a free element as the sea makes noise about love. The sea here is also a connecting link between the poet’s past and present. It is here, next to him, floating about love. Therefore, there is no point in looking for another answer.
The poem is also quite rich in means of artistic expression. Thus, the epithets “tight sails”, “foreign boundaries”, “divine foam”, “black sea”, “with a heavy roar” take us to the distant past and create beautiful pictures of the sea element. The metaphors “crane train” and “crane wedge” create images of ships going to war.
With the help of the personification “orbiting”, the sea becomes a living organism living for many thousands of years on the planet. That is why it probably turns out to be wiser than the brilliant Homer and knows all the secrets of human love.
The poem “Insomnia, Homer, Tight Sails” is difficult to understand and feel if you don’t know the story. But many poets and writers turned to the past in their search for answers to eternal questions, not finding them in the present day. Perhaps the past has always been romanticized, and it seemed that the whole truth of life was there. But, alas, it will not give accurate answers, especially in such matters as love. So Mandelstam’s lyrical hero falls asleep only when the sea “with a heavy roar approaches the head of the bed,” calming him down by talking about love. Once again the elements turn out to be wiser than man, and once again poetry proves the idea of a grain of sand in space, which is man.
The theme of the poem is not new: many have written about love and will write again and again. And again each of us will seek our own truth. And you probably need to experience insomnia and receive a response from the elements in order to understand: love has been and will be the main feeling in a person’s life. Only she is capable of truly great deeds. But she can not only save, but also conquer entire cities, destroy them, and push them to do terrible things.
Subject
Ancient literature influenced the work of poets of different eras. O. Mandelstam, with the help of it, tries to reveal the eternal philosophical theme of love. The author's focus is on the Trojan War.
The lines of the poem are written in the first person. Thus, the reader can follow the lyrical hero’s train of thought directly. In the first stanza, the hero admits that he could not sleep, so he began to read the list of ships. He reached the middle, and then this process was interrupted by thoughts about the causes of the war. The lyrical hero believes that the “Achaean men” fought not for Troy, but for Helen.
In the first verse of the last quatrain, the author expresses the key idea: “everything moves by love.” He doesn’t mind thinking more about this philosophical category, but he can’t find answers to his questions.
