Lead by George Bacovia
original title: plumb
The poem "Lead" by George Bacovia was published in 1916 in the volume with the same title, in the middle of the First World War, justifying its predominant theme, death. Bacovian lyricism, from the perspective of hypertext, is proposed to the reader, in this volume, as a decadent projection of the human being. The text has the character of a defining poetic art for symbolism, inscribing itself in the lyrical universe specific to the author through the use of synesthesia and lyrical motives approached at the level of discourse, but not only. The author, G. Bacovia, is the communicative court outside the work that directly expresses his feelings, through the lyrical self, in the first person, in a subjective perspective: "We were alone in the grave ... and it was wind ..." .
The poetic architect is made up of two quatrains, each suggesting one of the two planes of existence: the outer and the inner. The correspondence between soul feelings and the elements of nature is, for symbolists, a way to suggest the reality they contemplate through the prism of sensitivity. The paratextual level of discursive analysis implies the title of the poem, represented by the noun “lead”, which has as correspondent in nature a heavy metal, gray, the relationship between this symbol and the lyrical self not being expressed, but only suggests oppression, monotony, anxiety, the capacity for suggestion being both a component of the symbolist current. The word "lead" appears three times in each stanza, in rhyme or caesura, becoming a leitmotif, a feature of symbolist creations because it supports the musicality of discourse.
The hermeneutic de-construction of discourse focuses on the two poetic sequences. The first stanza symbolically expresses the closed, oppressive topos in which lives the lyrical self that can be society, one's own soul or destiny, hypotextual elements suggested by "lead coffins", "tomb". The Bacovian universe can thus be defined as a tight, limited, cloistering and cold space. The state of the lyrical self, of loneliness, is symbolized by the phrase "we are alone", which - along with the other symbols - reveals the vanity of the soul, neurosis, spleen, symbolic for the self-universe relationship. The imagistic symmetry of the “lead” symbol, placed as a rhyme in the first and last verse of the stanza, closes the space, evoking the inability of the lyrical self to escape from the suffocating emotional pressure that handcuffs it.
The second stanza of the poem illustrates especially the inner, affective space, by suggesting the feeling of love, illustrated by the structure "sleeping back", "on lead flowers", suggesting the despair of the poetic self trying a release - "I began to shout ”. But in a morbid loneliness - "we stand alone beside the dead" - love bears the stamp of a cold touch, with no prospect of fulfillment - "its leaden wings hung", the lyrical subject becoming more than ever the spectator of its own evolution towards a strange, unnatural projection. The presence of the word “lead” as a rhyme at the end of the first and last verse renders the parallelism of the lyrical discourse structure, closing, once again, the space, locking the poetic self inside and suggesting its condemnation to a perpetual loneliness.
The prosody is given by the iambic rhythm, alternating with the amphibrah and the pawn. The rhyme is embraced and performed by words ending in deaf consonants, ensuring a serious musicality, reaching gloomy dimensions at the level of suggestion and lyrical correspondence. The measure is 10 syllables.
Building his universe as a space of a mechanical existence, in which the ego wears the mask of a puppet of evil destiny, the lyrical self realizes a tragic vision of the world as a spectacle, as N. Manolescu states: “Bacovia composes a mask, makes out of suffering a style, a convention, which is decadent mannerism. The poet plays himself (...), but not to disguise himself, but to express himself ”.
