Alexander Blok believed that only those who completely let in the pain would not become ordinary. He, like no other, felt all the pain of the era and reflected it in his philosophical lyrics. One example of this period of creativity of the great creator is "Night, street, lantern, pharmacy ...".
History of creation
The story of writing a poem is sad. The block was in the habit of strolling at night on the Islands of St. Petersburg, hence the words - night, street and a lantern.
The poet often went to the Bolshoi Krestovsky bridge. Suicide bombers rushed into the Neva from him. Sometimes, they did not succeed in conceived, and the drowned were pumped out with the help of medicines from the nearest pharmacy, so the name and plan came about.
Genre, direction and size
“Night, street, lantern, pharmacy ...” is the philosophical reflection of the author, filled with sadness, so the poem belongs to the genre of elegy.
Blok does not refuse ideas of symbolism and builds a work based on symbols. The size of the poem is a four-foot iambic with a cross rhyme.
Composition, images and symbols
The main symbols are night, a street, a lantern and a pharmacy, they begin a poem and close it, thereby organizing a ring composition. The composition itself is a kind of sign, it personifies the cyclical nature of life from its beginning to the end. Even reincarnation, according to Blok, will not save the soul from this cyclicality: "If you die, you will start over again." It would seem that the lantern in the context serves as a sign of hope, a kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but the closed syllable of the word means the end.
The lyrical hero acts as a contemplator. His behavior echoes the history of writing a work. Alexander Alexandrovich witnessed a suicide attempt. He, like a lyrical hero, saw a suicide jump into an ... icy ripple of a canal ... An involuntary observer thinks about life and death and does not notice the difference, because everything will happen again.
Themes, problems and mood
The main theme of this poem was thinking about why a person comes to this world. But Blok did not find a response to the dilemma: life is an empty cycle. Hence the theme of the cyclical nature of being.
Alexander Alexandrovich also raises an acute social problem - suicide, caused by the “terrible world”. The motive of the city and the killing of man passed through a poem as a red thread.
The mood after reading is terrible. Darkness, hopelessness, cold blow from every word and make you involuntarily startle.
Meaning
The poem can be divided into two parts: one about life, the other is about death. The main idea is a reflection of human being. The arrival and departure of a person does not change the world, at night everything will also burn a lantern, illuminate the street and pharmacy. And each life cycle will fit into this scheme.
The main idea of the poem also tells us that suicide is not a way out, nothing will change from it, and the pain that forces a person to leave this world willfully go away. And if he is offended by something, enraged and dejected by something, then all efforts must be devoted to correcting the mistake, and not to not notice how he is standing there now.
Means of artistic expression
The gloomy landscape helps to outline:
- parcellation and rows of homogeneous members (... night, street, street lamp, pharmacy ...),
- vivid definitions (... meaningless, dull, icy ...),
- alliteration (... meaningless and dim light ...).
