We are poor and weak and feeble,
But, from this martyrdom of ours,
Has begun Thy reign on earth.
But, from this martyrdom of ours,
Has begun Thy reign on earth.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
net/2027/mdp.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 149
1
"Thou with. me and we alone.
Oh, the angels cannot feel
What I feel now in this hour.
Sister mine, to me it seemeth
That our holy one* ariseth
At this moment from the coffin. "
If only a dream, let him dream on. Let him and
her be of good heart, for, before the miracle shall
descend that will save them, they will not allow
j their hearts to bleed for doubt, their brows to
grow heavy with fear. In the inspiration of their
common dreams, driven by the storm of pain in
the sorrows of this changing life, " within, beyond
them, we feel God. " v
"We are the children of a mother slain, 'we
who never have beheld how a mother's eyes shine
as an angel's on her child. " They look to heaven
as an orphan looks. Moon, stars, and sun, nature's
beauty which is about them, as the boat cleaves
its way through the water, all make up one great
harp. Only the name of Poland is wanting to the
harmony of the universe. But, as God is in heaven, -
"evea^o will He restore her once again.
"To-day or to-morrow Thou wilt grant it to
us, Lord! Oh, grant it for Thy justice sake;
because Thou owest it, not to us, but to Thyself. "
"When I spoke thus, thou wast kneeling,
Wailing with thy harp's stringed wailing;
For thou leanedst thy snow-white forehead
On the strings the moon made shiver
All around in streams of gold.
* Poland.
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? POLAND
And, thus kneeling, thou wast sighing.
Pray, oh, sister, with thy sighing.
God knows well that in this day
Sighing is thy country's name. "
That country died a victim for the world's sin.
"Think you that who loves and dies can
perish? To your eyes,-to eyes of dust, but not
in sooth, nor to the universal life. Who died in the
hour of sacrifice has but passed into the lives of
others, and dwells in the hiding place of human
hearts; and with each day, each little moment,
living, shall grow within that tomb, giving to all
and giving self. " Invisible, she shall " burn with
fire the stones of hearts, soften with tears the
rocks of souls, and, by the sorrows and toils of the
grave, by the harmonious song of death, she shall,
though herself torn asunder, unite the nations in
one love. "
The body has been slain. But "know you not
that in the world of the spirit love and death are
one? Eternal is he who by his death gives birth
to life. But whoso by his life gives death he when
he dies shall rise no more. "
Then the apostle of the ideal, of spiritual forces,
pours forth his wrath upon the wielders of brute
might and those who seek to corrupt the soul.
And now begins the series of his visions. He had
been parted, as he once said to a friend, by the
sword of Damocles from the land of his youth;
and he asks of Beatrice:
"Knowest thou the love which eternally lures
the soul into the land of memory? Does the cry
of the angel of thy country call thee by night, and
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? ZTGMUNT KR4SINSKI 151
bid thee gaze into the living faces of those long
dead? " He leads her in fancy to the snow-
covered steppe where the bones of his ancestors
rest, above which shine the moon and one star
--the Polar star of the north.
"'Neath the earth is mournful ringing.
The burial place is trembling, living.
From the graves blow prayers and wailing.
Somewhere, swords are rattling hollow.
Clash of armour stern I hear,
As if our fathers, life remembering,
Turning on their sides, were dreaming
In death's sleep of Poland's sorrows. "
The tombs give up their occupants. Kings,
knights, senators arise. The poet falls upon his
face before them, weeping. What did they do
with their lives that they left to their descendants
neither power nor inheritance, only instead of a
country a dismembered body? A loud cry of
wrath goes up from the ghosts. The wraith of
Czarniecki, the great soldier of John Casimir's
days, answers that he grew, not from ease and
pleasure, but through pain. " To whom the Lord
gives torments He lays down His promises. " It
is not for the poet to seek the fault in his fathers.
They lived in their age as guests of other ages.
Fate was driving them to a higher calling: "To
the Poland which shall be. And from our blood
and from our sins, before this age shall pass away
shall rise the one people of the peoples. "
The steppe and the sky tremble and fade into
dreamland. The poet and Beatrice again float
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? 152
POLAND
upon the lake. The moon has sunk under a pall
of clouds. Surely that murmur they hear is no
sigh of the wind. A voice is weeping. The night
breeze carries to their ears a thousand wails. The
shores, the heights, become one prayer. The
spirits of the Polish dead are to appear to them
once more.
"On the waters there before us,
Like light dreams, a fluttering throng,
On the rocks and crags they float.
As will-o'-the-wisps, as wavering flamelets,
Now they sink, and now they rise. "
The poet cries to Beatrice to strike upon her
harp; to tear from the strings with the sound of
thunder the song of the legions: Poland hath not
perished. The voice of the harp rushes over the
water, throbbing in Krasinski's verse with the
music and the word echoes of the Polish language,
that make the passage impossible for English
rendering. The vast army appears to the watchers'
eyes. There wave the insignia of Poland's warfare,
the horsetails, the white plumes, terrible in many
a Polish charge, shields, banners, and coats of
arms, with the cross towering above all. In the
midst, the face of the Mother of Christ:
"As a star upon the darkness,
On high, on high suspended, rises,
Waning, glimmering, quivering, flaming.
Lo! her veil of blue and crimson
Shines about her as a rainbow.
Set with pearls, and set with flowers,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 153
Flashes out her crown of diamonds.
Welcome, welcome! to the Queen,
Long a widow of her people,
To-day returning to her kingdom
Which, in Polish Czenstochowa,
Once our fathers gave to her.
And these fathers o'er the billows,
Lo, she leadeth. " * (
Let the harp cease. Its power sinks silenced
before that celestial rainbow. God's light has
touched the army of spirits. Dawn sparkles on
their helmets. The wings on their armour shine
as those of angels. In their glittering battle array --
they sweep, with swords upraised in her defence,
after their queen. She has descended to crush the
serpent's head for the second time. The hour of
mercy has struck. "Now, oh, now, and for all ages,
God will wipe our tears away. "
The heavenly hosts pass, and disappear into the
east, the dawn. They have gone, with their hope *
and the light as of a more splendid day that lit
the lake and mountains. All is now dark, as before.
But in the poet's heart they have left faith and
joy. "All is mine," cries he to Beatrice; "all is
fair. Mine the earth, the plains of heaven. I ring
forth the voice of life, for God's word is in my
heart. My Poland, Poland shall be! Praised be
1
* In gratitude for the repulse of the Swedes in 1655 at the walls
of Czenstochowa, which saved Poland, John Casimir proclaimed
the Blessed Virgin as Queen of Poland, and under that title she is
still addressed by the Polish nation. The ancient Byzantine
Madonna in the church of Czenstochowa has been for centuries
specially venerated by the Poles, and is described by Krasinski in
the above passage.
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? 154 POLAND
all and everything. Praised be through the ages
unto ages God, the spirits, man, and thou, and
praised the dead within their graves, and praised
be all who are alive, and praised the universal
world for ever, evermore! And to the skies
will I repeat: 1 Praise to Thee, Lord, I am
happy. '"
The third vision follows: neither on the waters
or mountains or clouds, but in some fathomless
region, where no man can say. We have here a
, piece of pure Messianism. Krasinski sees his
country, immortal, glorious, as the archangel of
humanity. The purple garland of dolorous
memories engirdles her brow; but her pain is
over, and the spirit of God flashes as lightning
from her countenance, and her fetters hang shat-
tered. Beyond her is the countless multitude of
the nations to which her sufferings shall give birth,
crowned with the verdure, not of the things that
are past, but of new hope and life, all doing homage
to Poland as their queen. God's voice proclaims
that she, who descended to the grave as a unit,
rises in the day of victory re-baptized by the name
of all humanity, with God's thought entrusted
to her, by which she shall lead the world to its
higher spirituality. As one god-like thought, the
poet beholds the universe flame, the all-present,
formless, endless glory of God, stars upon stars,
suns upon suns. Through worlds of light, where
one great hymn of praise thunders forth, lies the
path of the nations to their Creator: and the
poet looks upon his Poland leading the procession
on this road, till she is lost to sight in the im-
mensity of God.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSK1
"Whose eye
Can overtake her to those heights?
Who shall bow his earthly forehead
On the feet of the Creator?
Who shall soar with the archangel
Where humanity takes flesh?
Now my heart faints in my bosom.
The image fades, my thought is failing.
Oh, so madly I entreated,
Oh, so long I prayed to God
For that one, that only moment :--
And I saw!
"In that hour,
Oh, remember that we were
On the highest height of souls--
There, whence flows the source of life.
At the source of life we drank.
With our very eyes we grasped
What is still without a name. '
Sister mine, we, in that moment,
- Lived in our eternity.
"Throw off sadness, throw off terror.
Well I know what toil remaineth
On the road; what pain, what sorrow.
Trust thee to the poet's vision.
The dawn of victory now shines.
"In our native land, immortal,
On that soil so dearly loved,
On that soil, that soil of ours,
Shall arise a race renewed,"
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? i56
POLAND
to work the will of God in the government of the
universe, to bring back brotherly love, to trans-
form the earth.
"Then that new world all rejoicing,
As a church shall flower to God.
The Polish land, the Polish Eden,
The desert of an agelong sadness,
Is desolate no more nor mourning.
Nor behind me nor before me
Is there darkness any more.
All is light and all is justice.
Clear is now our hallowed past,
Clear our purgatorial anguish,
And our sorrows and our bondage. "
Poland cannot die, for she has risen above the
storms of this world to the land of the idea. They
who do not live by the idea shall perish without
hope. All that is visible to the eye alone must be
destroyed, "but the idea shall not pass away. "
Therefore, she who is the representative and the
torchbearer of the idea is to him no longer merely" a
country, a place, a home," but " faith and truth. "
So, at last, he has found that answer to which
he had journeyed through the fires of mental
travail and distress. God's ways are justified. The
sufferings of the nation that had wrung the hearts
of those who loved her are sanctified, and made
fruitful and glorious for herself and all mankind.
"God Eternal of our fathers!
Thou, Who high and far away,
Ever clearer through the ages
Descendest to us, and, dawn-like, strewest
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 157
From the eternal gates Thy sparks
O'er time's waves until time flameth!
Now, again, Thy dawn is dawning
Which Thou in Thy love dost grant us.
In the graves the bones shall tremble
Sighing in a hymn to Thee.
"For our souls' and bodies' sufferings,
For our hundred years of torment,
We do give Thee thanks, oh, Lord.
We are poor and weak and feeble,
But, from this martyrdom of ours,
Has begun Thy reign on earth. "
And the poet ends his poem in a paean of
ecstasy and joy, which is doubtlessly inspired not
only by a national hope, but by the deliverance
of his own soul from the shadow of death in which
he had dwelt. The might of Satan's rule is no
more. The weak are oppressed no longer. Earth
is one song of harmony and rejoicing. The dark
days behind us were only a dreadful dream.
"Long the power of that dream.
We believed it. We believed
In eternal pain and toil.
They were but the sanctuary's entrance;
But one step upon the stairway.
They were but the night of merit.
"Human heart, where now thy shame?
Look into thyself, oh, gaze!
Where of old was rage and weeping,
Groans and cries and lamentation,
Lo, to-day of heaven's high mercy
Is the second house of God. "
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? 158 POLAND
Forbidden by the censor, this poem yet found
its way into Poland, and was watered with the
tears of those who read. *
In Dawn Krasinski had found his standpoint
and never modified it. His subsequent teaching
was rather in the nature of crystallizing his warn-
ings to his people in special moments of national
necessity; of reducing his general principles to
practice. He had in his epilogue to Dawn said he
would sing no more, for the only prayer worthy
of the Creator knows no division between thought
and deed. "Never, never again will I string my
harp. Other are the roads that lie open before us.
Perish, my songs! Arise, my deeds! " But in
KrasinsH's relations with his nation his poetry
was his deed. He wrote not so much from a poet's
inspiration as from a patriot's. He had no vision
of literary fame. When the voice of Poland called,
he wrote for her sake. At other times he remained
silent.
The Psalms of the Future, which followed Dawn,
are# therefore, in a manner episodical. But Kras-
inski is never merely topical or individual. He
spoke seventy years ago. While these words are
being written during the most terrible convulsion
of modern times, the language and the tenets of
the Polish poet rise instinctively to the mind, as
almost strangely apposite to the needs and events
of the hour.
* S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 159
The first in order of date in the cycle of the
Psalms is the Psalm of Love. The Psalm of Faith
and the Psalm of Hope were written shortly after-
wards as a sort of introduction to the third Psalm.
We will therefore take them first. The occasion. of
all three Psalms, and most especially of the Psalm
of Love, was Krasinski's foreboding of the danger
that threatened his country from the democratic
propaganda that was then proceeding.
As the title implies, the Psalm of Faith (1845)
is Krasinski's confession of personal and national
faith, and of his belief in the relations of God
with the future of humanity.
The soul casts off the body and mind, worn out
by a thousand trials. Men call that moment
death; but it is her second birth. She does not
die. Taking to herself new and " unwearied wings,"
she soars into a higher region, leaving behind her
the waning tracts of the past, with before her the
endlessly stretching fields of measureless space,
till she reaches " Him Who is all and enfoldeth all,
the beginning and the end of Heaven and of
earth. "
"To Him I travel without pause. Thither
must I first go through the pains of hell, through
the toils of Purgatory, till I begin to put me on
body and soul more radiant, and ascend to the
other world. There, is eternal life and life un-
ceasing. " Hymning Paradise, as the desire of God,
"love without bounds, that is life without end,"
he turns to the contemplation of Him Who is
"Being, Thought, and Life, the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost. And we in His image must live im-
mortally, must live together with Him, born of
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? 160 POLAND
His bosom to live in His eternity. " As He created
us, we must create and draw from ourselves thai
which He has given to us to create. " Inasmuch
as we can, poor, in angelic lowliness, that which
Thou gavest us of Thy mercy, we must give back
to Thee, oh, God, and thus live eternally in Thee
by eternal love. "
This, then, leads up to Krasinski's national and
political mysticism. "The history of humanity
is the school of the soul. " Christ will. judge the
nations on the day of resurrection; for to each
of these nations has been given some deep thought
from the heart of the Creator, as their special
predestined work for the human race. " And some
are chosen before all others to combat for Thy
beauty on the earth; to carry the cross in a
bloodstained track; to give out the more love
and greater brotherhood in exchange against the
murderer's knife. "
"Such a one, oh, God, is Thy Polish nation.
Tho' the world gives her such pain that she could
even doubt of hope, may she hold out in this -
unheard of suffering. For she is surely anointed in
Thy spirit, for she is surely Thy high priest on
this earth, if she will understand that Thou lovest
without bounds those sons whom Thou dost
crown with thorns; for the thorn, steeped in
blood, is the everlasting'flower, and with it Thou
shalt renew the youth of all humanity. "
He concludes with a mystical analogy between
the history and the calling of the human race, and
the Divine pattern of Him Who came to save it.
[ " Christ ever dwelleth in thee, oh, humanity.
His blood is thine. His body is thy body. With
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 161
reats thee shall be what did befall to Him. He bore all
5 tiu thy vicissitudes within His flesh. To thee He
imnc manifested all thy hopes. Whence art thou born?
ffiid From a pure virgin womb, because from God's
: bad own thought in godly likeness. Whither dost thou
Ik go? To thy Father's city. By what road must
thou pass? Through pain and labour. And when
lane Christ on the summit of Mount Thabor was
mitv wrapped around with the eternal dawn, seest
: tie thou not what that sign to thee foretelleth?
each Thou, too, oh, human race, shalt be transfigured,
wit' Thou shalt leave at the foot of the dark moun-
>cial tains all that deceives, and all that is of sorrow;
,ne and thou shalt take spiritual knowledge with thee,
flir ^ and the eternal, unending love of hearts. And, in
, j the strength of these two holy powers, as Christ
ore - shalt thou ascend to globes of light. All sin shall
tie' be erased from thy forehead. Light as feathers'
shall thy wings be. Thy hands shalt thou stretch
j. . forth on the white air, and in it shalt thou poise--
as air thyself. "
? ' Having enunciated his dogma of faith, Krasinski
j proceeded to its natural sequence--the Psalm of
u - Hope. Here, for once, there is scarcely a trace of
jt the sadness, which overshadows the work of the
. t poet whose heart was broken with sorrow for his
t - nation.
"Long enough," thus opens the Psalm of Hope,
m "has the grief of the poets sounded the strings.
Now is it time to strike on a second string, on the
steel of deeds. "
The poem is instinct with life, freshness and
joy. The Revealer, the promised Paraclete, is nigh.
With Hjm will begin the third and spiritualized
M
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? POLAND
epoch. It is not the thrones or crowns who
will be the first to perceive the advent of the
Consoler, but she who, guiltless, is martyred.
Then neither the merchant's cupidity, nor the
executioner's hand, can prevail against Him Who
is to' change the universe.
"Oh, come more quickly, spring of the world!
Oh, come more quickly, God the Spirit! Fare-
well, oh, earth, with thy pain and with thy
mourning. The new Jerusalem is shining on the
vale of this old earth. The road was long, and the
toil heavy. A sea of tears and blood has flowed.
But the angelic time draws near. Poland! thy
grave was only as the cradle of the dawn.
"Tear aside the cloud of ages. Let us praise
the Lord Who comes. Strew ye palms and strew
ye psalms, flowers below and songs on high. Oh,
cast songs and cast ye flowers! Lo, He comes, the
Lord is coming. Now no more the Man of sorrows,
choosing thorns and nails and wounds "; but
"transfigured, from beyond the starred walls of
the universe, as the blue all-horizon," He comes.
"Oh, drink ye with your souls that heavenly
blue. Though you are tortured, you are tempted,
oh, believe ye in my hope. "
But neither here nor elsewhere in Krasinski's
teaching will he allow that hope to be anything
but conditional. It is to be proved in the fires of
action. It is to be secured only at the price of
individual and national self-discipline. "From
your faith shall your will be, from your will shall
your deed be. " And on his trumpet note, " It is
time to strike on the steel of deeds," the Psalm
of Hop concludes,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 163
We know how the Polish Rising, projected in
the forties of the nineteenth century on democratic
lines, was pushed by Austrian machinations into a
different movement, and ended in the Galician'
massacres. Krasinski's piercingly clear political
acumen was never obscured by the mystic tend-
ency of his mind. He saw whither a class agitation
would be likely to lead a nation groaning as
was Poland under abnormal and intolerable con-
ditions. Before the disaster befell, trembling for
the moral danger that threatened his country,
Krasinski sent forth a passionate cry to those of
his fellow Poles, who were working a national'
rising as a social revolution, to stay before it was
too late. That warning is his Psalm oflLove. The
Psalm of Love is a plea to the human race, no less .
than to one people, to shun the works of bloodshed
and violence: the poet's attestation that one
only element can save a nation, namely, love.
"Carry your arms against hell. Slay the black
brood of demons. The guillotine and pillage are
the weapons of the human race in its infancy; rage,
the liberty, not of man, but of the beast. Now is
the time to take to oneself the toil of angels, the
time to cast off every stain, and by that very act
to conquer slavery. Destruction is not action.
There is but one truth, divine, fruitful in deed;
transfiguration through love. "
With his soul's whole strength, he pleads that the
Poland he loved to call holy, who he believed was
to prove to mankind that virtue and love are
stronger than brute force, must never, by stooping
to unworthiness and violence, lose her destined
vocation. .
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? 164
POLAND
"Who changeth sorrow into crime, who forgeth
fetters into knives, not into swords, cursed be he. "
"When geniuses have descended to this world,
they have led their cause by a different road. No
one of them was a dictator of the ages through
murder and the torture chamber. Rather, they
live in peril, in the end they die, but their victory
lasts for ever. Only the weak soul chooses butchery.
His name is Marius, his name is Robespierre. "
Then he bids such of his countrymen who
would sweep away the ancient nobility of Poland
to look upon what the latter have done for their
country. They have died for Poland in battle. They
have perished for her in Siberia. And who, asks
the poet, could we find who are faultless ? " Only
one, He only Who was man and God; and from
the sinner another man soars upward through
suffering, changed as the phoenix, and immortal. "
Search the world; the Alps, the waters of the
Mediterranean, the Spanish sierras, the snows of
Russia, the battlefields of France, where the
Polish nobles have sown "the seed of future
Poland, the god-like grain, their own blood;
and you are the children of that pain. " They
lead that nation which, far from thrusting men
down to the pit, is to uplift them as she mounts
ever higher. But near her stands the tempter.
Evil thoughts "grow where there are chains. "
Siberia and the knout are nothing to the poison
sown by slavery. "But the corrupted spirit of a
nation, that only is the pain of pains " ; conscience
warped by a mass of suffering, reason confused by
the' wandering of perverted pride, crime repre-
levied as virtue, children taught to look on murder
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 149
1
"Thou with. me and we alone.
Oh, the angels cannot feel
What I feel now in this hour.
Sister mine, to me it seemeth
That our holy one* ariseth
At this moment from the coffin. "
If only a dream, let him dream on. Let him and
her be of good heart, for, before the miracle shall
descend that will save them, they will not allow
j their hearts to bleed for doubt, their brows to
grow heavy with fear. In the inspiration of their
common dreams, driven by the storm of pain in
the sorrows of this changing life, " within, beyond
them, we feel God. " v
"We are the children of a mother slain, 'we
who never have beheld how a mother's eyes shine
as an angel's on her child. " They look to heaven
as an orphan looks. Moon, stars, and sun, nature's
beauty which is about them, as the boat cleaves
its way through the water, all make up one great
harp. Only the name of Poland is wanting to the
harmony of the universe. But, as God is in heaven, -
"evea^o will He restore her once again.
"To-day or to-morrow Thou wilt grant it to
us, Lord! Oh, grant it for Thy justice sake;
because Thou owest it, not to us, but to Thyself. "
"When I spoke thus, thou wast kneeling,
Wailing with thy harp's stringed wailing;
For thou leanedst thy snow-white forehead
On the strings the moon made shiver
All around in streams of gold.
* Poland.
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? POLAND
And, thus kneeling, thou wast sighing.
Pray, oh, sister, with thy sighing.
God knows well that in this day
Sighing is thy country's name. "
That country died a victim for the world's sin.
"Think you that who loves and dies can
perish? To your eyes,-to eyes of dust, but not
in sooth, nor to the universal life. Who died in the
hour of sacrifice has but passed into the lives of
others, and dwells in the hiding place of human
hearts; and with each day, each little moment,
living, shall grow within that tomb, giving to all
and giving self. " Invisible, she shall " burn with
fire the stones of hearts, soften with tears the
rocks of souls, and, by the sorrows and toils of the
grave, by the harmonious song of death, she shall,
though herself torn asunder, unite the nations in
one love. "
The body has been slain. But "know you not
that in the world of the spirit love and death are
one? Eternal is he who by his death gives birth
to life. But whoso by his life gives death he when
he dies shall rise no more. "
Then the apostle of the ideal, of spiritual forces,
pours forth his wrath upon the wielders of brute
might and those who seek to corrupt the soul.
And now begins the series of his visions. He had
been parted, as he once said to a friend, by the
sword of Damocles from the land of his youth;
and he asks of Beatrice:
"Knowest thou the love which eternally lures
the soul into the land of memory? Does the cry
of the angel of thy country call thee by night, and
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? ZTGMUNT KR4SINSKI 151
bid thee gaze into the living faces of those long
dead? " He leads her in fancy to the snow-
covered steppe where the bones of his ancestors
rest, above which shine the moon and one star
--the Polar star of the north.
"'Neath the earth is mournful ringing.
The burial place is trembling, living.
From the graves blow prayers and wailing.
Somewhere, swords are rattling hollow.
Clash of armour stern I hear,
As if our fathers, life remembering,
Turning on their sides, were dreaming
In death's sleep of Poland's sorrows. "
The tombs give up their occupants. Kings,
knights, senators arise. The poet falls upon his
face before them, weeping. What did they do
with their lives that they left to their descendants
neither power nor inheritance, only instead of a
country a dismembered body? A loud cry of
wrath goes up from the ghosts. The wraith of
Czarniecki, the great soldier of John Casimir's
days, answers that he grew, not from ease and
pleasure, but through pain. " To whom the Lord
gives torments He lays down His promises. " It
is not for the poet to seek the fault in his fathers.
They lived in their age as guests of other ages.
Fate was driving them to a higher calling: "To
the Poland which shall be. And from our blood
and from our sins, before this age shall pass away
shall rise the one people of the peoples. "
The steppe and the sky tremble and fade into
dreamland. The poet and Beatrice again float
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? 152
POLAND
upon the lake. The moon has sunk under a pall
of clouds. Surely that murmur they hear is no
sigh of the wind. A voice is weeping. The night
breeze carries to their ears a thousand wails. The
shores, the heights, become one prayer. The
spirits of the Polish dead are to appear to them
once more.
"On the waters there before us,
Like light dreams, a fluttering throng,
On the rocks and crags they float.
As will-o'-the-wisps, as wavering flamelets,
Now they sink, and now they rise. "
The poet cries to Beatrice to strike upon her
harp; to tear from the strings with the sound of
thunder the song of the legions: Poland hath not
perished. The voice of the harp rushes over the
water, throbbing in Krasinski's verse with the
music and the word echoes of the Polish language,
that make the passage impossible for English
rendering. The vast army appears to the watchers'
eyes. There wave the insignia of Poland's warfare,
the horsetails, the white plumes, terrible in many
a Polish charge, shields, banners, and coats of
arms, with the cross towering above all. In the
midst, the face of the Mother of Christ:
"As a star upon the darkness,
On high, on high suspended, rises,
Waning, glimmering, quivering, flaming.
Lo! her veil of blue and crimson
Shines about her as a rainbow.
Set with pearls, and set with flowers,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 153
Flashes out her crown of diamonds.
Welcome, welcome! to the Queen,
Long a widow of her people,
To-day returning to her kingdom
Which, in Polish Czenstochowa,
Once our fathers gave to her.
And these fathers o'er the billows,
Lo, she leadeth. " * (
Let the harp cease. Its power sinks silenced
before that celestial rainbow. God's light has
touched the army of spirits. Dawn sparkles on
their helmets. The wings on their armour shine
as those of angels. In their glittering battle array --
they sweep, with swords upraised in her defence,
after their queen. She has descended to crush the
serpent's head for the second time. The hour of
mercy has struck. "Now, oh, now, and for all ages,
God will wipe our tears away. "
The heavenly hosts pass, and disappear into the
east, the dawn. They have gone, with their hope *
and the light as of a more splendid day that lit
the lake and mountains. All is now dark, as before.
But in the poet's heart they have left faith and
joy. "All is mine," cries he to Beatrice; "all is
fair. Mine the earth, the plains of heaven. I ring
forth the voice of life, for God's word is in my
heart. My Poland, Poland shall be! Praised be
1
* In gratitude for the repulse of the Swedes in 1655 at the walls
of Czenstochowa, which saved Poland, John Casimir proclaimed
the Blessed Virgin as Queen of Poland, and under that title she is
still addressed by the Polish nation. The ancient Byzantine
Madonna in the church of Czenstochowa has been for centuries
specially venerated by the Poles, and is described by Krasinski in
the above passage.
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? 154 POLAND
all and everything. Praised be through the ages
unto ages God, the spirits, man, and thou, and
praised the dead within their graves, and praised
be all who are alive, and praised the universal
world for ever, evermore! And to the skies
will I repeat: 1 Praise to Thee, Lord, I am
happy. '"
The third vision follows: neither on the waters
or mountains or clouds, but in some fathomless
region, where no man can say. We have here a
, piece of pure Messianism. Krasinski sees his
country, immortal, glorious, as the archangel of
humanity. The purple garland of dolorous
memories engirdles her brow; but her pain is
over, and the spirit of God flashes as lightning
from her countenance, and her fetters hang shat-
tered. Beyond her is the countless multitude of
the nations to which her sufferings shall give birth,
crowned with the verdure, not of the things that
are past, but of new hope and life, all doing homage
to Poland as their queen. God's voice proclaims
that she, who descended to the grave as a unit,
rises in the day of victory re-baptized by the name
of all humanity, with God's thought entrusted
to her, by which she shall lead the world to its
higher spirituality. As one god-like thought, the
poet beholds the universe flame, the all-present,
formless, endless glory of God, stars upon stars,
suns upon suns. Through worlds of light, where
one great hymn of praise thunders forth, lies the
path of the nations to their Creator: and the
poet looks upon his Poland leading the procession
on this road, till she is lost to sight in the im-
mensity of God.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSK1
"Whose eye
Can overtake her to those heights?
Who shall bow his earthly forehead
On the feet of the Creator?
Who shall soar with the archangel
Where humanity takes flesh?
Now my heart faints in my bosom.
The image fades, my thought is failing.
Oh, so madly I entreated,
Oh, so long I prayed to God
For that one, that only moment :--
And I saw!
"In that hour,
Oh, remember that we were
On the highest height of souls--
There, whence flows the source of life.
At the source of life we drank.
With our very eyes we grasped
What is still without a name. '
Sister mine, we, in that moment,
- Lived in our eternity.
"Throw off sadness, throw off terror.
Well I know what toil remaineth
On the road; what pain, what sorrow.
Trust thee to the poet's vision.
The dawn of victory now shines.
"In our native land, immortal,
On that soil so dearly loved,
On that soil, that soil of ours,
Shall arise a race renewed,"
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? i56
POLAND
to work the will of God in the government of the
universe, to bring back brotherly love, to trans-
form the earth.
"Then that new world all rejoicing,
As a church shall flower to God.
The Polish land, the Polish Eden,
The desert of an agelong sadness,
Is desolate no more nor mourning.
Nor behind me nor before me
Is there darkness any more.
All is light and all is justice.
Clear is now our hallowed past,
Clear our purgatorial anguish,
And our sorrows and our bondage. "
Poland cannot die, for she has risen above the
storms of this world to the land of the idea. They
who do not live by the idea shall perish without
hope. All that is visible to the eye alone must be
destroyed, "but the idea shall not pass away. "
Therefore, she who is the representative and the
torchbearer of the idea is to him no longer merely" a
country, a place, a home," but " faith and truth. "
So, at last, he has found that answer to which
he had journeyed through the fires of mental
travail and distress. God's ways are justified. The
sufferings of the nation that had wrung the hearts
of those who loved her are sanctified, and made
fruitful and glorious for herself and all mankind.
"God Eternal of our fathers!
Thou, Who high and far away,
Ever clearer through the ages
Descendest to us, and, dawn-like, strewest
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 157
From the eternal gates Thy sparks
O'er time's waves until time flameth!
Now, again, Thy dawn is dawning
Which Thou in Thy love dost grant us.
In the graves the bones shall tremble
Sighing in a hymn to Thee.
"For our souls' and bodies' sufferings,
For our hundred years of torment,
We do give Thee thanks, oh, Lord.
We are poor and weak and feeble,
But, from this martyrdom of ours,
Has begun Thy reign on earth. "
And the poet ends his poem in a paean of
ecstasy and joy, which is doubtlessly inspired not
only by a national hope, but by the deliverance
of his own soul from the shadow of death in which
he had dwelt. The might of Satan's rule is no
more. The weak are oppressed no longer. Earth
is one song of harmony and rejoicing. The dark
days behind us were only a dreadful dream.
"Long the power of that dream.
We believed it. We believed
In eternal pain and toil.
They were but the sanctuary's entrance;
But one step upon the stairway.
They were but the night of merit.
"Human heart, where now thy shame?
Look into thyself, oh, gaze!
Where of old was rage and weeping,
Groans and cries and lamentation,
Lo, to-day of heaven's high mercy
Is the second house of God. "
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? 158 POLAND
Forbidden by the censor, this poem yet found
its way into Poland, and was watered with the
tears of those who read. *
In Dawn Krasinski had found his standpoint
and never modified it. His subsequent teaching
was rather in the nature of crystallizing his warn-
ings to his people in special moments of national
necessity; of reducing his general principles to
practice. He had in his epilogue to Dawn said he
would sing no more, for the only prayer worthy
of the Creator knows no division between thought
and deed. "Never, never again will I string my
harp. Other are the roads that lie open before us.
Perish, my songs! Arise, my deeds! " But in
KrasinsH's relations with his nation his poetry
was his deed. He wrote not so much from a poet's
inspiration as from a patriot's. He had no vision
of literary fame. When the voice of Poland called,
he wrote for her sake. At other times he remained
silent.
The Psalms of the Future, which followed Dawn,
are# therefore, in a manner episodical. But Kras-
inski is never merely topical or individual. He
spoke seventy years ago. While these words are
being written during the most terrible convulsion
of modern times, the language and the tenets of
the Polish poet rise instinctively to the mind, as
almost strangely apposite to the needs and events
of the hour.
* S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 159
The first in order of date in the cycle of the
Psalms is the Psalm of Love. The Psalm of Faith
and the Psalm of Hope were written shortly after-
wards as a sort of introduction to the third Psalm.
We will therefore take them first. The occasion. of
all three Psalms, and most especially of the Psalm
of Love, was Krasinski's foreboding of the danger
that threatened his country from the democratic
propaganda that was then proceeding.
As the title implies, the Psalm of Faith (1845)
is Krasinski's confession of personal and national
faith, and of his belief in the relations of God
with the future of humanity.
The soul casts off the body and mind, worn out
by a thousand trials. Men call that moment
death; but it is her second birth. She does not
die. Taking to herself new and " unwearied wings,"
she soars into a higher region, leaving behind her
the waning tracts of the past, with before her the
endlessly stretching fields of measureless space,
till she reaches " Him Who is all and enfoldeth all,
the beginning and the end of Heaven and of
earth. "
"To Him I travel without pause. Thither
must I first go through the pains of hell, through
the toils of Purgatory, till I begin to put me on
body and soul more radiant, and ascend to the
other world. There, is eternal life and life un-
ceasing. " Hymning Paradise, as the desire of God,
"love without bounds, that is life without end,"
he turns to the contemplation of Him Who is
"Being, Thought, and Life, the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost. And we in His image must live im-
mortally, must live together with Him, born of
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? 160 POLAND
His bosom to live in His eternity. " As He created
us, we must create and draw from ourselves thai
which He has given to us to create. " Inasmuch
as we can, poor, in angelic lowliness, that which
Thou gavest us of Thy mercy, we must give back
to Thee, oh, God, and thus live eternally in Thee
by eternal love. "
This, then, leads up to Krasinski's national and
political mysticism. "The history of humanity
is the school of the soul. " Christ will. judge the
nations on the day of resurrection; for to each
of these nations has been given some deep thought
from the heart of the Creator, as their special
predestined work for the human race. " And some
are chosen before all others to combat for Thy
beauty on the earth; to carry the cross in a
bloodstained track; to give out the more love
and greater brotherhood in exchange against the
murderer's knife. "
"Such a one, oh, God, is Thy Polish nation.
Tho' the world gives her such pain that she could
even doubt of hope, may she hold out in this -
unheard of suffering. For she is surely anointed in
Thy spirit, for she is surely Thy high priest on
this earth, if she will understand that Thou lovest
without bounds those sons whom Thou dost
crown with thorns; for the thorn, steeped in
blood, is the everlasting'flower, and with it Thou
shalt renew the youth of all humanity. "
He concludes with a mystical analogy between
the history and the calling of the human race, and
the Divine pattern of Him Who came to save it.
[ " Christ ever dwelleth in thee, oh, humanity.
His blood is thine. His body is thy body. With
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 161
reats thee shall be what did befall to Him. He bore all
5 tiu thy vicissitudes within His flesh. To thee He
imnc manifested all thy hopes. Whence art thou born?
ffiid From a pure virgin womb, because from God's
: bad own thought in godly likeness. Whither dost thou
Ik go? To thy Father's city. By what road must
thou pass? Through pain and labour. And when
lane Christ on the summit of Mount Thabor was
mitv wrapped around with the eternal dawn, seest
: tie thou not what that sign to thee foretelleth?
each Thou, too, oh, human race, shalt be transfigured,
wit' Thou shalt leave at the foot of the dark moun-
>cial tains all that deceives, and all that is of sorrow;
,ne and thou shalt take spiritual knowledge with thee,
flir ^ and the eternal, unending love of hearts. And, in
, j the strength of these two holy powers, as Christ
ore - shalt thou ascend to globes of light. All sin shall
tie' be erased from thy forehead. Light as feathers'
shall thy wings be. Thy hands shalt thou stretch
j. . forth on the white air, and in it shalt thou poise--
as air thyself. "
? ' Having enunciated his dogma of faith, Krasinski
j proceeded to its natural sequence--the Psalm of
u - Hope. Here, for once, there is scarcely a trace of
jt the sadness, which overshadows the work of the
. t poet whose heart was broken with sorrow for his
t - nation.
"Long enough," thus opens the Psalm of Hope,
m "has the grief of the poets sounded the strings.
Now is it time to strike on a second string, on the
steel of deeds. "
The poem is instinct with life, freshness and
joy. The Revealer, the promised Paraclete, is nigh.
With Hjm will begin the third and spiritualized
M
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? POLAND
epoch. It is not the thrones or crowns who
will be the first to perceive the advent of the
Consoler, but she who, guiltless, is martyred.
Then neither the merchant's cupidity, nor the
executioner's hand, can prevail against Him Who
is to' change the universe.
"Oh, come more quickly, spring of the world!
Oh, come more quickly, God the Spirit! Fare-
well, oh, earth, with thy pain and with thy
mourning. The new Jerusalem is shining on the
vale of this old earth. The road was long, and the
toil heavy. A sea of tears and blood has flowed.
But the angelic time draws near. Poland! thy
grave was only as the cradle of the dawn.
"Tear aside the cloud of ages. Let us praise
the Lord Who comes. Strew ye palms and strew
ye psalms, flowers below and songs on high. Oh,
cast songs and cast ye flowers! Lo, He comes, the
Lord is coming. Now no more the Man of sorrows,
choosing thorns and nails and wounds "; but
"transfigured, from beyond the starred walls of
the universe, as the blue all-horizon," He comes.
"Oh, drink ye with your souls that heavenly
blue. Though you are tortured, you are tempted,
oh, believe ye in my hope. "
But neither here nor elsewhere in Krasinski's
teaching will he allow that hope to be anything
but conditional. It is to be proved in the fires of
action. It is to be secured only at the price of
individual and national self-discipline. "From
your faith shall your will be, from your will shall
your deed be. " And on his trumpet note, " It is
time to strike on the steel of deeds," the Psalm
of Hop concludes,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 163
We know how the Polish Rising, projected in
the forties of the nineteenth century on democratic
lines, was pushed by Austrian machinations into a
different movement, and ended in the Galician'
massacres. Krasinski's piercingly clear political
acumen was never obscured by the mystic tend-
ency of his mind. He saw whither a class agitation
would be likely to lead a nation groaning as
was Poland under abnormal and intolerable con-
ditions. Before the disaster befell, trembling for
the moral danger that threatened his country,
Krasinski sent forth a passionate cry to those of
his fellow Poles, who were working a national'
rising as a social revolution, to stay before it was
too late. That warning is his Psalm oflLove. The
Psalm of Love is a plea to the human race, no less .
than to one people, to shun the works of bloodshed
and violence: the poet's attestation that one
only element can save a nation, namely, love.
"Carry your arms against hell. Slay the black
brood of demons. The guillotine and pillage are
the weapons of the human race in its infancy; rage,
the liberty, not of man, but of the beast. Now is
the time to take to oneself the toil of angels, the
time to cast off every stain, and by that very act
to conquer slavery. Destruction is not action.
There is but one truth, divine, fruitful in deed;
transfiguration through love. "
With his soul's whole strength, he pleads that the
Poland he loved to call holy, who he believed was
to prove to mankind that virtue and love are
stronger than brute force, must never, by stooping
to unworthiness and violence, lose her destined
vocation. .
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? 164
POLAND
"Who changeth sorrow into crime, who forgeth
fetters into knives, not into swords, cursed be he. "
"When geniuses have descended to this world,
they have led their cause by a different road. No
one of them was a dictator of the ages through
murder and the torture chamber. Rather, they
live in peril, in the end they die, but their victory
lasts for ever. Only the weak soul chooses butchery.
His name is Marius, his name is Robespierre. "
Then he bids such of his countrymen who
would sweep away the ancient nobility of Poland
to look upon what the latter have done for their
country. They have died for Poland in battle. They
have perished for her in Siberia. And who, asks
the poet, could we find who are faultless ? " Only
one, He only Who was man and God; and from
the sinner another man soars upward through
suffering, changed as the phoenix, and immortal. "
Search the world; the Alps, the waters of the
Mediterranean, the Spanish sierras, the snows of
Russia, the battlefields of France, where the
Polish nobles have sown "the seed of future
Poland, the god-like grain, their own blood;
and you are the children of that pain. " They
lead that nation which, far from thrusting men
down to the pit, is to uplift them as she mounts
ever higher. But near her stands the tempter.
Evil thoughts "grow where there are chains. "
Siberia and the knout are nothing to the poison
sown by slavery. "But the corrupted spirit of a
nation, that only is the pain of pains " ; conscience
warped by a mass of suffering, reason confused by
the' wandering of perverted pride, crime repre-
levied as virtue, children taught to look on murder
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