The analysis of «lily-image» in A. Rimbaud's poem «To the Poet on the Subject of Flowers»

The article makes an attempt to analyze the image of Lily in the poem by Rimbaud «To the Poet on the Subject of Flowers”. In the poem, to some extent, Rimbaud picks up Baudelaire's idea of «The Flowers of Evil», i.e. a different, subjective-associative rhetoric, the rhetoric of «vernacularism», displaying flora-image beyond the existing reality. Through the images of flowers Rimbaud encourages poets of his time to write differently than it was done in romanticism and «Modern Parnassus». Each of the «flowers» of rhetoric, having original connotative foundation, should open an infinite series of meanings. Lily, as a literary-artistic symbol, is revealed in the works of Rimbaud from new, most unexpected aspects: it is interpreted as Ophelia, as Venus, as drowned, finally, Rimbaud compares lily to enema, inviting poets of his time to convert sustainable units of speech into something else, independent and individual.