The Metaphors in Tiutchev's Philosophical Poems

Abstract

Two years ago, on a quiet autumn night, I stood in a dark passage-way of the Colosseum and peered through one of the window spaces at the starry sky. The big stars looked intently and radiantly into my eyes, and as I gazed into the delicate, dark-blue firmament, other stars appeared before me and looked at me just as mysteriously and just as eloquently as the first. Behind them, in the depth, there twinkled even more delicate sparkles, and little by little they in tum revealed themselves. Framed by the dark masses of the walls, my eyes saw only a small part of the sky, but I felt that it was boundless and that there was no end to its beauty. With similar sensations I open the poems of F. Tiutchev.1