Lead

by George Bacovia

The coffins made of lead were lying sound asleep,

So did the flowers made of lead and funerary vestment...
I stood there solitary, in the vault... and there was wind...
And the lead wreaths creaked.

Upturned, my lead love lay asleep

On flowers made of lead, and I began to call it
I stood there solitary, beside the corpse... and it was cold
And hung the wings of lead.

Violet Dusk
by George Bacovia

Autumn dusk, violet ...

Two poplars, in the background, in silhouette:
- Apolstoles in violet robes
-The whole town violet.

Autumn dusk, violet ...

Lazy, frivolous people in the street.
The whole crowd looks violet,
The whole town violet.
 Autumn dusk, violet ...
"From the tower, on the field, I see voivodes with locks".
Forefathers pass in troupes of violet,
The whole town violet.

Symbolism is a literary movement that appeared in the first period of the 20th century.
It was born in French literature and manifests as a reaction against romanticism. The
poem "Lead" was written in 1902 and published in 1916.
The theme of the poem is death, referring to the solitary human condition, referring to
human which is scared by the world in which he lives.
Therefore, the theme of the poem also refers to the condition of the poet in a hostile and
suffocating world, as in the second poem,: Autumn dusk”.
The title of this poem, “lead”, is the leitmotif because it is repeated six times throughout
the work, representing the core of the poem (“The coffins made of lead”, “flowers made of lead”,
“And the lead wreaths creaked”). We also can observe that the second poem has a leitmotif as
this poem.
When we say “lead”, we think about gray color, suggesting a heavy and depressing atmosphere,
as in the second poem, where the twilight contains the suggestion of the end, it is the time of a
dying world.
The poem is structured in two quatrains, each signifying a plane of existence. The first
stanza includes elements of a world closed by words like "coffin", “funerary vestment”, "cave",
“wreaths”, which become symbols of loneliness and isolation in a suffocating space: "The
coffins made of lead were lying sound asleep”. This verse, the first one, is a personification,
suggesting the supreme silence.
If we read the fourth verse,” And the lead wreaths creaked”, we can also hear and
imagine the atmosphere, a macabre one in a mortuary space.
The verb "sleeping" is used in the imperfect tense to suggest the continuity, the resistance in time
of this anguish. The word "lead" is associated with coffins, flowers, and crowns, all of them
being metaphorical symbols of death, of man becoming a tragic prisoner of some limits.
The poetic self seems buried by this agglomeration of objects that give it the sensation of
suffocation and bring the feeling of terror to life.
The second stanza has a compositional symmetry in relation to the first, suggesting
through repetition that there is not the possibility of escape from this picture. (“I stood there
solitary, in the vault... and there was wind... / “I stood there solitary, beside the corpse... and it
was cold”).
The adjective "returned" becomes a symbol of separation and estrangement.
The syntactic parallelism between the structures "lead flowers" and "lead love" is a technique
that highlights the identity between the outer world and the inner world.
In the last line, we have a metaphor, " And hung the wings of lead ". Although it is a symbol of
flight, the wing here has a downward direction, straight down, an idea suggested here is man's
renunciation of elevation and aspiration.
The image of the wings of angel on the graves is brought into the sphere of the human, in which
the human being drags any illusion or aspiration to transcendence to the ground and to
degradation.

"Violet Dusk" is a poem by George Bacovia published in 1916. It is representative of

Bacovia due to purple colors, but also for the sad, melancholic atmosphere present in all his
creations.
In this poem, we can find many of the symbolic features from which we remember the
presence of the symbol and the leitmotif, which generates the presence of literary motifs such as:
lonely park autumn, chromaticism, suggestion (“Two poplars, in silhouette”/ “Lazy, frivolous
people in the street”).
The title of the work is made up of two terms: “violet” and “dusk”. The first of which is
a motif of Bacovian lyricism.

In the first verse, twilight is associated with autumn, the season of nature's agony, which brings
the cosmic wasteland.
The second term "violet" creates the impression of an unreal picture, coming from beyond the
world. Also, it is the color of death and nothingness.
 The themes and symbolic motifs in this poem are the abandoned city, lonely poplars, frightened
people, and lazy people, too, symbols of solitude, increasing the sentimental feeling of
loneliness.
We meet in this poem, too, the leitmotif - the “autumn dusk, violet”.
As like in the other poem, “Lead”, the dominant theme of the work is the theme of death present
in the entire creation.
Despite of the first poem, “Lead”, where we can see that the human likes the world in which
lives, he does not glorify death, he detests it.
The poem is divided into three quatrains, where we can observe the repetition “Autumn
Dusk, violet…”, each time in the first verse.
In the first stanza, the two poplar trees seen in the distance (“Two poplars, in the
background, in silhouette”) suggest loneliness and the desert.

In the second stanza, the twilight is not only of the day, but also of the people, it is the
"late" of those who can no longer change your destiny.
The third stanza, obviously subjective due to the presence of the verb "see", is dominated
by the image of the medieval mound, inside which the lyrical self is projected: "From the tower,
on the field, I see voivodes with locks".
The repetition in this poem is intentional and motivated by the need to capitalize on all
the semantic valences of the word. “Violet” repeats itself ten times. He becomes the suggestion
of a disturbed soul, frightened by the specter of death
At a first reading, the poem appears to us as a gloomy pastel, dominated by twilight. The
violet accents of the autumn twilight make us think of the autumn of life, the old woman.
At the syntactic level, we observe the syntactic parallelism (first verse “Autumn dusk,
violet…”) which plays a role in the musicality of the text.
On a stylistic level, we observe the purple colour, accentuated by the epiteth “violet”.
As in the poem “Lead”, purple suggests death, hallucination and, sometimes, monotony,
being a color that is obtained by canceling red, therefore life.