Bunin is highly complete. Ivan Bunin - The full month stands high: Verse. Analysis of Bunin's poem “The full month stands high...”
“The full month stands high...” Ivan Bunin
High full month worth
In the skies above the misty land,
The pale light silvers the meadows,
Filled with white mist.In the whiteout, in the wide meadows,
On deserted river banks
Only black dried reeds
Yes, you can distinguish the tops of the willow trees.And the river is barely visible on its banks...
Somewhere a mill makes a dull noise...
The village is sleeping... The night is quiet and pale,
The full month is high.
Analysis of Bunin's poem “The full month stands high...”
Not everyone knows that Ivan Bunin began his journey into literature not with prose, but with poetry. Subsequently, he often returned to poetry, considering them the most accurate and succinct form of expressing his thoughts and feelings.
The first cycle of his poetic works was written in his early youth, and already in 1887 the author published the poem “The Full Moon Stands High...”, dedicated to the Ozerki family estate. It was here that Ivan Bunin spent his childhood years, and he forever kept in his heart the memory of this happy period of his life.
The poem “The Full Moon Stands High...”, like many works of this period, is written in a lyrical and romantic vein. The author talks about how serene a moonlit night is in a village that is immersed in sleep. Only the silvery light of the month falls on the wide meadows and the empty river bank, where at this midnight hour only “black dried reeds and the tops of willows can be distinguished.” 17-year-old Bunin himself is an outside observer and tries himself as a verbal painter. He seems to be afraid of disturbing the night idyll, so he chooses his words very carefully. Perhaps for this reason, this and many of Bunin’s subsequent poems are particularly restrained, and one can only guess about the author’s feelings from individual phrases and hints.
Peace is the main leitmotif of this poem, and Bunin, with a minimum of figurative expressions, masterfully conveys this state of the surrounding world. “The village is sleeping... The night is quiet and pale,” the poet notes, and in every word one can feel the regularity of rural life, which is subject to its own laws. In the understanding of young Bunin, this is harmony, and its destruction seems to the aspiring poet a universal catastrophe. And this is another reason why he listens with excitement to how “somewhere a mill makes a dull noise,” realizing that such moments of life are a priceless gift.
It is noteworthy that this poem has a ring structure, that is, it begins and ends with the same phrase. Perhaps subconsciously the author wanted to emphasize the cyclical nature of what happens in the world around him. However, the paradox is that people sooner or later still fall out of this cycle. And not because they are leaving this life, but because of their inability to listen to silence and comprehend its innermost secrets. It was in those rare moments when this understanding was available to them that the poem “The full month stands high...” was written.
The work refers to early creativity Bunina. In the poem he describes the rural landscape and the impressions it generates.
The author talks about a village in the light of the moon, but he devotes more space to describing nature than to depicting what was created by man. The picture turns out almost static. The village is asleep and almost nothing disturbs the natural rhythm, except for the noise made by the mill, but this is not a transformation of nature, but an integration into it. A man-made structure becomes, in some way, part of the natural landscape.
The combination of the month, plants and water is complemented by the village located in the middle of it all. However, in this case, the author paints a picture of harmonious coexistence. Man here is not the enemy of nature. He, like the willow and the reeds, fell into sleep, obeying the order established by nature.
The month, apparently, should indicate this. It is also a symbol of the night, that is, sleep and peace. At the same time, the moon overhead can represent eternity, since, unlike everything living on earth, it invariably appears at the appointed time in the same form.
There are no mystical motives in the poem. The poet depicts the village and its surrounding nature during the full moon, but does not draw a single ominous detail.
The colors used to describe the landscape are emphatically faded and inexpressive. Probably, with the help of such a color scheme, Bunin wanted to emphasize the lack of movement and the reigning silence.
The presentation itself is structured to create a state of calm. There are no sharp transitions in the poem; the metaphors used also do not grab the reader’s attention. One smoothly flows into the other.
The author often ends the description with an ellipsis. By doing this, he enhances the feeling of half-sleep that he wants to create. He does not lead the reader further, as if calling him to stop and feel the peace reigning in the picture he painted, to become a part of it.
Bunin does not introduce a lyrical hero into the work so as not to destroy the picture of serenity he created. A person will certainly break the idyll he has drawn. The poet is trying to capture a moment that is almost absent in reality, when the world is immersed in undisturbed peace and harmony.
Literary analysis
The work belongs to the poet’s early work, written in his youth in the lyric-romantic genre. The main theme of the poem is the description of a village landscape at night full moon, expressing the harmonious relationship between nature and man.
The compositional structure of the work, which is circular, is built of three stanzas, ending with the same line as it began. The poet chooses peace as the key leitmotif of the poem, conveying the cyclical nature of the natural state, expressed in the description of the regularity of a peaceful, serene rural picture. In this case, the poet uses different rhyming stanzas in the form of cross and paired ones using masculine rhymes that place emphasis on the last syllable.
A distinctive feature of the poem is the use of artistic media expressiveness in the form of numerous epithets, describing the melodiousness of nature, personifications expressing silence and night pallor, as well as metonymies, possessing poetic restraint with short phrases and half-hints, transferring a rural dream into a place of description.
The poet refuses to use the image of a lyrical hero in the poem, preferring to personally be a verbal painter as an outside observer, trying not to disturb the idyllic natural picture of a quiet night, carefully selecting every word in poetry.
The poem does not have a mystical content associated with the full moon period, describing only in black and white colorful shades the appearance of foggy whiteness, the silveriness of moonlight and the pallor of the night, while the use of sound writing allows you to feel the dimensional cycle of life and nature, located in beauty and peace.
The sound of soothing, smooth, musical and thoughtful sounds expresses the drawn night look, conveying natural rustling and tranquility. The description of the sleeping village is included in the overall picture of the full moon night as a harmonious environment of a charming landscape.
Analysis of the poem High full month stands according to plan
The work is an example of combining into one image a real event in the author’s life and the historical associations that they evoked in him. The result is a vivid picture that reveals the poet’s inner world.
High full month worth
In the skies above the misty land,
The pale light silvers the meadows,
Filled with white mist.
In the whiteout, in the wide meadows,
On deserted river banks
Only black dried reeds
Yes, you can distinguish the tops of the willow trees.
And the river is barely visible on its banks...
Somewhere a mill makes a dull noise...
The village is sleeping... The night is quiet and pale,
The full month is high.
Analysis of the poem “The Full Moon Stands High” by Bunin
For his debut in the creative environment, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin chose not prose, but poetry. The first selection of poems also included the work “The Full Moon Stands High,” created in the classical tradition.
The poem was written in 1887. Its author is 17 years old; he left the gymnasium without finishing his studies. I. Bunin's parents reacted calmly to this decision, and his brother Julius became his home teacher. By genre - landscape lyrics, by size - three-foot anapest with cross and adjacent (in stanza 2) rhyme, 3 stanzas. Rhymes are open and closed. The lyrical hero is not clearly identified, he is simply an observer who is almost the only one in the village who does not sleep that night. The composition is circular, with a return to the first stanza.
At that time, the young poet lived in his father’s estate Ozerki. After 4 years I had to say goodbye to the house and it was sold. The family no longer got together. The impressions of those years are constant companions of I. Bunin’s work throughout his life. From here he sent his first poems to the editor, and here he first fell in love. The last time I. Bunin saw the house was already in the year of the revolution. After another 25 years, it was completely destroyed and dismantled for firewood.
"Silent night", fog, Moonlight, loneliness - these images seem to echo the work “I Go Out Alone on the Road” by M. Lermontov, however, I. Bunin sets himself a different task: not to express himself, but to present a detached picture of night nature. He is afraid to frighten away the silence, to wake up the sleeping village. Without exclamations or questions, he paints a dim landscape. The ellipses of 3 stanzas make the reader sleepy: and the river in the banks is barely visible... The poet uses repetitions: pale, pale, in a white haze, in a white haze, a river in the banks, river banks. Finally, the first and final lines are identical. The landscape is not colorful, only “white” and “black”. The silence is almost complete, only “somewhere a mill makes a dull noise.” The poet wants to capture in his heart this simple but mysterious picture of Russian nature: meadows, river, willows and reeds, a mill and the houses of the villagers. Seems, lyrical hero itself becomes a detail of the landscape. He doesn't show his feelings. Epithets: silver with a pale light. Personifications: the village sleeps, filled with darkness, the month stands. Synecdoche: reed (the particular is used to mean the whole).
I. Bunin spent his childhood and youth in rural areas. Nature and peasant life become the main images of the poetry of the seventeen-year-old poet.
