Analysis of the poem by N. A. Zabolotsky “On Beauty human faces».
The poet was always worried about the question of what is more important in a person: his appearance, cover, or his soul, inner world. The poem “On the beauty of human faces”, written in 1955, is devoted to this topic. The word beauty is already in the title. What beauty does the poet appreciate in people?
The poem can be divided into two parts. The first part is the reflection of the lyrical hero on the beauty of human faces: "There are faces like magnificent portals, Where everywhere the great seems to be in the small."
In these lines the poet uses unusual metaphors and comparisons. Portal is main entrance big building, its facade. Let's pay attention to the epithet "magnificent" - elegant, beautiful. Not always by appearance can judge a person. Indeed, behind a beautiful face, fashionable clothes, spiritual squalor can be hidden. It is no coincidence that the poet uses antonyms: "the great is seen in the small."
Further, a comparison sounds, opposed to the first: "There are faces similar to miserable shacks, Where the liver is boiled and the abomasum gets wet." The epithet creates an unsightly picture, emphasizes poverty, squalor: "a miserable shack." But here we see not only external poverty, but also internal, spiritual emptiness. The same construction of sentences in this quatrain (syntactic parallelism) and anaphora are used in order to strengthen, highlight the antithesis.
In the next quatrain, the author's philosophical reflections continue. The pronouns "other - different" are symbolic, emphasizing the uniformity. Let's pay attention to the epithets "cold, dead faces" and the metaphor-comparison "closed with bars, like dungeons." Such people, according to the author, are closed in themselves, never share their problems with those around them: "Others are like towers in which no one lives for a long time and does not look out the window."
The abandoned castle is empty. Such a comparison emphasizes the loss of a person's dreams, hopes. He does not try to change something in his life, does not strive for the better. The second part is opposed to the first in emotional terms. The union "but" emphasizes the antithesis. Bright epithets "spring day", "jubilant songs", "shining notes" change the mood of the poem, it becomes sunny, joyful. Despite the fact that the small hut is “unsightly, not rich,” it radiates light. The exclamatory sentence emphasizes such a mood: “Truly the world is both great and wonderful!” For the poet, the main thing is the spiritual beauty of a person, his inner world, what he lives with: “There are faces - the likeness of jubilant songs, Of these shining notes, like the sun, A song of heavenly heights is composed.”
These lines express the idea of the poem. It is such people, simple, open, cheerful, that attract the poet. It is these faces that the poet considers truly beautiful.
The author in his poem lists the types of human faces with the help of comparisons, personifications and metaphors. The poem consists of 16 lines, it contains 7 sentences. It speaks of the author's ability to think philosophically, his powers of observation, the ability to see what others do not notice. In total, the author presents 6 types of human faces, 6 characters of people.
The first type of faces is considered by the author as those that promise some greatness in themselves. The narrator compares them with "magnificent portals", sees them as mysterious and incomprehensible, even great. But when you get to know such people closer, you see that there is nothing unusual and great in him, so the author uses the word “strange”. This speaks of the deceit that lies in such types of persons.
The second type of face is compared to "miserable shacks." Such faces look sad. People with such faces suffer from unfulfilled desires, they are dissatisfied with their lives, and therefore the author says that liver and abomasum are boiled in such "shacks". Under the eyes of such people there are dark circles, the skin of their faces is yellow and sluggish. These people are sick. It is very difficult to cure them of the disease of melancholy and sadness, and all this is reflected on the face.
The third type of faces belongs to people with a tough and harsh character. These people are secretive, they experience everything in themselves, not letting anyone close to their hearts. The author calls the faces of such people cold and dead, and their eyes are windows that are covered with bars. The author compares the souls of such people with dungeons.
The author calls the fourth type of faces inaccessible, like towers. People with such faces are very arrogant, they do not see others worthy of themselves, considering themselves superior in everything. Such people are very vain, but when someone still manages to find out the essence of these people, it becomes clear that they are empty, there is nothing remarkable and expensive in them.
The author loves and remembers the fifth type of face with warmth. He devotes more lines to him than to the first. He compares this face to a poor, unremarkable hut. Such people may not have very beautiful faces, they may have wrinkles, but their amazing eyes shine on a spring day. Their kind, warm look makes people feel good. Usually such people have a rich inner world and good qualities character. Due to these advantages, they become very attractive.
The author admires the sixth type of faces, but no longer says that he met such people or communicated with them. Such people are very rare. The author compares their faces with jubilant songs, the sun and music reaching for the heavens. These people are usually very pure and sinless, they live an elevated life and inspire others to think about something sublime and beautiful. It is these people that everyone wants to have as friends, someone wants to be equal to them. They are wonderful in every way.
Analysis of the poem On the beauty of human faces according to plan
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"On the beauty of human faces" Nikolai Zabolotsky
There are faces like magnificent portals
Where everywhere the great is seen in the small.
There are faces - the likeness of miserable shacks,
Where the liver is cooked and the abomasum gets wet.
Other cold, dead faces
Closed with bars, like a dungeon.
Others are like towers in which
Nobody lives and looks out the window.
But I once knew a small hut,
She was unsightly, not rich,
But from her window on me
The breath of a spring day flowed.
Truly the world is both great and wonderful!
There are faces - the likeness of jubilant songs.
From these, like the sun, shining notes
Compiled a song of heavenly heights.
The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky felt people very subtly and knew how to characterize them according to several features or accidentally dropped phrases. However, the author believed that most of all about a person can tell his face, which is very difficult to manage. Indeed, the corners of the lips, wrinkles on the forehead or dimples on the cheeks indicate what emotions people experience even before they directly say it. Over the years, these emotions leave their indelible imprint on faces, “reading” which is no less fun and interesting than a fascinating book.
It is about such a “reading” that the author talks in his poem “On the Beauty of Human Faces”. This work was written in 1955 - at the dawn of the poet's life. Experience and natural intuition allowed him by this moment to accurately determine the internal "content" of any interlocutor just by the movement of his eyebrows. In this poem, the poet gives a classification to various people, and it turns out to be surprisingly apt. Indeed, even today one can easily meet faces “like magnificent portals” that belong to people who are nothing special, but at the same time trying to look more weighty and significant. Another variety of such individuals, according to the author, instead of faces has "the semblance of miserable shacks." Unlike pompous persons, such people are aware of their worthlessness and do not try to disguise it under intelligent glances and skeptically twisted lips. Face-towers and face-dungeons belong to those who are almost completely closed to communication. for various reasons. Alienation, arrogance, personal tragedy, self-sufficiency - all these qualities are also reflected in facial expressions and eye movements, not going unnoticed by the poet. The author himself is impressed by the faces that resemble small huts, where “the breath of a spring day flowed” from the windows. Such faces, according to Zabolotsky, are like a “jubilant song”, because they are filled with joy, open to everyone and so friendly that you want to look at them again and again. “From these, like the sun, shining notes, a song of heavenly heights is composed,” the author notes, emphasizing that the inner, spiritual beauty of each person is always reflected on the face and is a certain barometer of the well-being of the whole society. True, not everyone knows how to "read" facial expressions and enjoy knowing people through their faces.
The poem "On the beauty of human faces" was written by Zabolotsky in 1955 and published for the first time in the magazine " New world» for 1956, in No. 6.
In the last years of his life, Zabolotsky was extremely suspicious. He was afraid that he would be arrested again, he was afraid of the betrayal of his friends. It is not surprising that the poet peered into the faces of people, reading their souls from them and trying to find sincere ones.
The poem belongs to the genre of philosophical lyrics. The problem of true, spiritual beauty worried Zabolotsky during this period of time. She, for example, is dedicated to one of the most famous poems poet - the textbook "Ugly Girl".
In 1954, the writer experienced his first heart attack and faced the insincerity and hypocrisy of his loved ones. Last years In life, he greatly appreciated everything real, true, including beauty.
The philosophical theme is stated in the title of the poem.
The main idea: the beauty of human faces lies not in external features, but in the soul, reflected in the look, in the expression.
The poem consists of four stanzas. The first two describe four types of unpleasant faces. In the third stanza, a face appears that gives joy. The last stanza is a generalization: the lyrical hero is delighted with the grandeur and harmony of the universe, in which there are faces of divine, heavenly beauty, reflecting the divine nature of man.
The main trope of the poem is a comparison formed using the words “likeness” (2 times), “like” and “like” (1 time each).
The first type of faces are "like magnificent portals." With the help of antonyms in the second line, the lyrical hero reveals the "mystery" of these faces: "The great is seen in the small." The impersonal verb "stranges" immediately betrays the "secret" of such a Significant Person (Gogol's parallel suggests itself), which consists in the fact that in fact there is no secret, there is only pompous impudence. The “beauty” of such faces is external, hypocritical.
Another type of person is ugly even outwardly. They are like miserable shacks, but inside they are disgusting, filled with stench and dirt, offal (metaphor "the liver is boiled and the abomasum gets wet").
The second quatrain is entirely dedicated to dead faces and dead souls. Here is the third type of person: their lyrical hero characterizes them with the epithets "cold, dead". They are compared to the closed bars of a dungeon. These are the faces of indifferent people. But there are souls that are “even deader” (and here Gogol’s artistic logic is again traced), and this is the fourth type: abandoned towers (a fresh metaphor) of a once mighty fortress built for centuries, now, alas, meaningless and uninhabited. No one has been looking into the windows of these towers (a metaphorical image of human eyes) for a long time, because “no one lives” in the towers - and who could live there? Of course, the soul. This means that the spiritual life of a person, physically still alive, has long ceased, and his face involuntarily betrays this death of the soul.
The development of the metaphor of windows (in the meaning of eyes), but already in a positive sense, we see in the third stanza, which describes the face of a person who remains alive not only in body, but also in soul. Such a person does not build fortresses with impregnable towers with his face, there is no ostentatious greatness in his face, his “hut” is “unsightly” and “not rich”, but the context of the entire poem gives these seemingly purely negative epithets the opposite - positive - meaning, and the metaphor The "breath of a spring day", which "flows" from the window of the hut, completes the image of a delightful, spiritualized face.
Finally, the fourth stanza begins with a line of faith and hope of the lyrical hero: “Truly, the world is both great and wonderful!” Both epithets in this context shimmer with all shades of their meanings. These are not only evaluative epithets: "great" in the sense of greatness and "wonderful" in the sense of "beautiful". But this is the belief that the world is so huge (“large” in the sense of size) and durable that the dull reality surrounding the lyrical hero is, as it were, a very special case caused by the current sad circumstances. Truly human faces are a miracle (and in this sense "wonderful"), they similar songs, made of notes, each of which shines, like a sun(two comparisons strung on top of each other).
The poem is written in four-foot amphibrach, the rhyme is adjacent, female rhymes alternate with male ones.
The writing
The poem "On the beauty of human faces" was written in 1955. The main theme is already stated in the title. The author lovingly describes every facial expression, which speaks of his humanity and worldly wisdom. After all, true complacency can come only through a subtle understanding of life.
The poem is based on a metaphorical comparison, which leads to great poetry and lyricism of images. It is written in multi-footed iambic, the stanzas are not facilitated by pyrrhic, which leads to a rather harsh intonation of reading, chanting. But such a construction of stanzas has another purpose - the emphasis is on each word, so not one of them is lost in the general fabric of the work.
Anaphoric repetitions (“there are faces”; “others” - “others”) in the first and third lines have a symbolic meaning. Thus, the first and second, third and fourth characteristics merge into one negative image. The rhyming in the stanzas is in pairs. In the first two lines there is a masculine rhyme (“portals” - “small”), in the third and fourth lines there is a feminine rhyme (“for a long time” - “window”). This corresponds to the figurative system of the poem - at the beginning of the poem, each person is given two lines.
With his poem, Zabolotsky claims that the character of a person, his inner world can be read not only in the eyes, but also in the face. And in fact, there is an opinion that character with age is imprinted on the face. Even the location of wrinkles can say a lot.
By composition, the poem can be divided into two parts: the first describes unpleasant faces, and the second describes loved ones and loved ones. This is an antithesis. The opposition is used by the author for an even more subtle and clear characterization of what is being described.
So, here is the portrait that opens the gallery of images in the first part of the poem:
There are faces like magnificent portals
Where everywhere the great is seen in the small.
In two lines, the poet painted the whole picture! The reader is immediately presented with a full, slightly puffy face, a haughty look, contemptuously lowered corners of the lips and a slightly upturned nose. This impression is created primarily by alliteration: “under”, “pysh”, “pore”. The combination of a hollow "p" sound with vowels immediately creates an association with something soft and puffy. In addition, the epithet itself - "magnificent portal" - draws something inaccessible and majestic in the reader's mind.
The next image is drawn using the sound “h” (“shack”, “liver”, “abomasum”). The author does not accidentally use the word “likeness”, it characterizes the owner of such a person in the best possible way. Spiritual poverty is their main quality:
There are faces - the likeness of miserable shacks,
Where the liver is cooked and the abomasum gets wet.
The second pair of negative characters, overall quality for which is alienation and coldness, is characterized as follows:
Other cold, dead faces
Closed with bars, like a dungeon.
Others are like towers in which
Nobody lives and looks out the window.
The most common combinations of sounds in these lines are “tr” and “s” (dead, bars, closed, which ...). This creates the sound of an animal roar; "sh" (towers) - the hiss of a snake; "o" is the image of a vicious circle. In addition, the color associative scale of these verses is gray.
In the second part of the poem, the images are completely different. The first person, apparently, represents the image of the beloved woman. Its indispensable attributes are the hearth, the warmth of love. In the poem, they are paraphrased, and a “hut”, “breath of a spring day” appears:
But I once knew a small hut,
She was unsightly, not rich,
But from her window on me
The breath of a spring day flowed.
The unpretentiousness of the beloved face is contrasted with the splendor of the first image. Alliteration with the letter "e" ("her", "me", "spring") symbolizes tenderness.
There are faces - the likeness of jubilant songs.
From these, like the sun, shining notes
Compiled a song of heavenly heights.
In this poem, the poet appears as good psychologist, noticing the slightest shades and colors of the world. For him, there are no unimportant details, everything is filled with meaning. And, most likely, his face is like a jubilant song. Only such a person can exclaim: “Truly the world is both great and wonderful!”
