"And our grief grows lighter, our hearts ache
less, knowing that the flame trembles in every
little spark," and that great luminaries may be
fashioned in time out of united stars.
less, knowing that the flame trembles in every
little spark," and that great luminaries may be
fashioned in time out of united stars.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
"The
moment eternally great and holy sweetens, with a
breath of Paradise," his tears and sufferings
under the cross. "Blessed be he who remembereth,
somewhere in the years gone by, the sweet,
strange, pure, and winged life, his first beginning.
He who, in the torment of fleshly fetters, lifts his
hands to heaven daily, yearneth to his ghostly
memories. "
These "ghostly memories" of the "winged
life" on the steppes veil the whole poem with
an atmosphere of mystery that enhances at once
its romance and its charm. The mother of
the poet's fancy has gone. But, ere he descends
to the turmoil of life, he is caught up on his
wings to the skies, "God's tent of molten gold. "
He is among the choirs who sing Hosanna before
the throne. The angels are praying for him whose
trial on earth is about to begin. He spreads his
wings for the flight to the highest things; but,
for the first time, his thought knows bewilderment,
and he returns " sad, to the abyss " of earth.
Then succeeds the poetical description of
Bohdan's orphan boyhood and of his youth till the
cry resounds from afar: "Poland, thy country! "
With tears, he, who " with each breath draws in
the music of the steppe," says farewell to his
family and to those same steppes. He is swept by
the Rising into exile and into the tempest of the
world. Poverty, temptation, sadness surround
him. Toiling for his daily bread, he finds himself
following in the secret of his thoughts the flight
of the crane, living the life of the birds in the
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? 202 POLAND
free, untrammelled steppes. Ghosts of ages pass
dimly before him. He feels called to praise God
in a new song. An angelic voice summons him, as
with a blast of thunder, from on high : " Return,
oh, exile, to thy country. " He wakes, weeping.
To which country, that on earth or the one in
heaven? He returns to the land he loves; but
not in the flesh, only in a vision.
Once more, then, his is the " winged life. "
"Breath of God, eternal breathing,
Wind of steppes, blowing light and dry,
Spreadeth as a couch beneath me,
Blows the down about my shoulders,
Swaddles me in its warm bosom. "
It rocks him above the graves of those fallen in
the Ukraine, which was for centuries the scene of
border warfare in Polish history. He sees the
Black Sea, glittering as a counterfeit of the splen-
dours of dawn. " I see marvels, I hear marvels. "
In a burst of light and music, the wizard-singer,
Bojan, the patriarchal poet of the Slav peoples,
sings to his golden- stringed zither his country's
welcome. Its sounds ring high and low over the
steppes, and the buried ages wake, till the fire and
the song alike fade into mist.
Floating on the wind, the poet then has a series
of visions, unrolling themselves over the steppes,
of the nations that have risen and fallen since the
beginning of the world. He begins with Eden and
the fall of man, reaches the Crucifixion, the
mission of the apostles, the ruin of Israel.
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? THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 203
"Slept my spirit. I dreamed sweetly
In a light, blest spirit dream.
Shoreless time and time in space
Shineth by the word of God,
Singeth out the mighty epic.
Million lights and million shadows,
Worlds in flowers--the world's history--
Blow in incense to the Lord. "
He thus prefaces each stage of the chronicle
of the world that he passes in review. Hoofs
thunder in the steppes across which the hordes
sweep to the destruction of Rome. The wind
whispers mysterious messages to the forefathers
of his race. Rome falls, and the Rome of the
Papacy rises in her stead. The poet gives a rapid
summary of the centuries that follow, coloured
by his deep religious sense. Men sin repeatedly,
and the penalty ever descends afresh upon human-
ity. Then his spirit sleeps, and in his dream struggles
to escape as though to home. The voice of an
angel sighs in his ear: "The time of thy trial is
fulfilled. Behold this country, thine own land";
and with the eyes, not of the body:
"I see, I see a lovely land,
Spaces stretching of broad meads,
Mountains, forests, and two seas;
And a loved and mighty race,
Sad and yearning, gaze through tears. "
"Their great mother is in mourning. The
Poland of the Piasts, of the Jagiellos, once mistress
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? 204
POLAND
of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Silesia, has now no corner
of her soil free. "
"Silent everywhere our language,
Language in our hearts beloved.
As the instrument of angels,
? Even so fair its melodies.
Must it then be whispered only?
Hear, oh, Lord, our little children
Wailing from a hiding place.
Saddest fate! they learn to fear
Their foe before they fear their God.
1 And our women, weak and fainting,
For long years weep in the dust.
Their sons, their brothers, lie in graves,
Or wander at the world's far ends. "
And the prophet-poets cry aloud with all their
strength the Polish songs: their voices are as
the wailing of the orphaned.
The singer is carried again on the wings of the
wind of the steppe, and swept to the Tatry--the
Carpathians--into the vision up to which the
whole poem has been leading. He sees on the summit
C i of the Polish mountains his mother Poland, but
| I a figure far removed from that under which
Mickiewicz and Krasinski delighted to symbolize
her. Here she is the beautiful repentant sinner.
"She has loved and she has wandered. She has
knelt for years in ashes. " Her hair streams in
grief and penitence, dishevelled, to the wind.
Her cheek has faded for mourning. Beside her sit
her sisters who have shared her fate: Lithuania,
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? THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 205
taking refuge in her bosom, the Ukraine, "beauti-
ful, incarnate song," who weeps, and through her
tears looks upon "me, her son. " The procession
of Poland's dead heroes gathers about her: and
her sisters, kneeling, cry to heaven the word so
beloved by Zaleski:
"Great her sins, but surely, Lord,
Greater still Thy mercy is. "
Rainbows flash from heaven, and ever louder
is the song of the angels and of the apostles of
Slavonia: "Honour and glory to the Magdalen.
We carry the absolution of the Lord. Raise the
penitent's head. The Lord is arming the arch-
angel. The time of the Holy Ghost draws nigh.
The world shall gather strength in the grace of
the cross. From the seed of repentant Poland the
future generations shall flower in fruit to the
Lord. The archangel himself at their head shall
lead them to the last battle with evil. " Amidst
the hosannas of numberless multitudes of the
saints, the poet beholds his nation arise from the
dust of her repentance, her youth given back to
her. "I see marvels, I hear marvels. " In this
supreme moment he returns to the mystic note of
the Ukraine. The same light and music that
flashed around the steppe when he returned there
in spirit from his exile, now beat from the heavenly
fires. Once more the voice of the wizard and the
sound of his zither peal over the Ukraine. "Glory,
honour! She shall rise! " is the song of Bojan.
He stretches his instrument over all the countries
of Slavonia; and the sweet melody streams
forth.
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? 206
POLAND
"The flock, the snow-white flock, is floating,
The wizard-singer's swan-like song
Sounds one long prophetic word
To the future, hope in song.
Still that word rings in my ear,
Ever dwells within my heart,
In my heart for ever fondled.
14 Let our Poland rise for ever!
At the day of the great banquet,
In the choir I will, Slavonia,
Repeat to you the song of Bojan.
Suffering in one flash shall pass. "
Again, on the " wind of the steppe, the breath
of God, his aerial couch," he is carried in the mists
that are gathering about him. Through the
whistle of the winds, he hears a sad, wild melody.
The third cock crows. Voices of the dead un-
baptized children who, in the Ukrainian legends,
wander through the snow and storm, crying for
baptism and Paradise, wail in the tempest. Like
them the poet, a son of earth, hungers too early
for the " angelic bread" he may not touch yet.
Like them, he is unable to enter heaven, for he is
fettered by the vesture of flesh. He returns to his
own place in a hard world. He sees no more the
vision, the memory of which wakes eternal sad-
ness in his soul.
"Where that flight, that far, wide flight?
Where heard I that mighty epic?
Worlds in flowers, the world's history?
- Where that golden-stringed singer f"
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? THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 207
He has gazed on the miracles of the universe,
and they cannot perish from his eyes or heart.
Man may call what the poet saw a dream. "Are
the tears of my life a dream? Poland, the
Ukraine, a dream ? " he asks, with the mingled
passion of the patriot and the mystic who, in the
body or out of the body, had beheld things unseen
by mortal eyes. "Blessed be he who remembereth
somewhere in the years gone by, the sweet, strange,
pure, and winged life, his first beginning. He
who, in the torment of fleshly fetters, lifts his
hands to heaven daily, yearneth to his ghostly
memories. "
"According to Zaleski," said Mickiewicz in
the College de France, "it is not the desire to
sing the exploits of some celebrated chief, it is
not the love of popularity, it is not the love of art
that can form a poet. You must have been pre-
destined, you must have been attached by myster-
ious bonds to the country that you are to sing
one day: and to sing is nothing else than to reveal
the thought of God, which rests on that country
and on the people to which the poet belongs. "*
* Adam Mickiewicz, Lts Slaves,
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? CHAPTER VII
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI
BY the year i860, the great triad of Polish
poets, Mickiewicz, KrasinsH, and Slowacki,
had passed from the world. But, in a
certain measure, their mantle may be said to have
fallen upon a poet of the succeeding generation,
whose poetry has appealed so strongly to the
hearts of his countrymen that his famous Chorale
has passed into the treasury of Polish national
songs. Kornel Ujejski--born in 1823, dead in
1897--can scarcely, in point of birth, be considered
as belonging to a younger generation than Zygmunt
Krasinski, who was only eleven years his senior;
but he survived him by nearly forty years, wrote
under different conditions, and had been,
moreover, a mere child during those disasters of
the thirties that changed the lives of Mickiewicz,
; Krasinski, and Slowacki. Thus his work, from a
literary and moral standpoint, reads as that of
one who came later.
He was the son of a noble house in Austrian
Poland. The poet's private life, with the exception
of the year of massacre in 1846, was outwardly
prosperous, and experienced none of the afflictions
which fell to the lot of Mickiewicz and Krasinski.
And yet over the greater part of his poetry, and
especially over its finest portion, hangs a not less,
perhaps even deeper, sadness than that stamped
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 209
on the writings of his predecessors. So terrible
was the ordeal through which every devout son
of Poland passed in the early years of her mourn-
ing, the thirties of the nineteenth century, that
an inheritance of profound melancholy was the
inevitable birthright even of those Polish poets
who were only children at the time. The Polish
child was of necessity not only brought up on a
chronicle of sorrow, but those sorrows were living,
were present to him. Dismembered Poland was
harassed by oppression. Ujejski said of himself
that from his early childhood an atmosphere of
tragedy enveloped him; that his first impres-
sions of the world were such as to banish from his
heart all childish joy, and to make his poetry a
song of grief. * "Bitter is the condition of the Pole
in every part of the wide earth," wrote Krasinski.
This of itself alone would suffice to explain the
general tone of Ujejski's work; and when we
remember that, after he had reached manhood, he
beheld the calamities of 1846 and of the sixties
overwhelm his nation, it is little wonder that his 1
poems are among the saddest in Polish literature.
Like the other great poets of his race, Ujejski's
poetical ideal, early conceived and put into
practice equally early, was that of a moral and
national teacher. We have seen how Poland looked
to her poets for help and guidance. Ujejski, then,
chose his calling, and remained faithful to it all
his life. His prayer was, so he sings in his poem on
the death of Mickiewicz, to follow in the latter's
footsteps, and speak to his people of the same
national faith that Mickiewicz taught^ albeit he
* A. Mazanowski, Kornel Ujtjtki (Polish). '
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? 2IO
POLAND
confesses he cannot do so with a power like to
that of the greater poet; to use the Polish lyre,
however heavy the burden to himself, as an
instrument of blessing, and never of evil, to his
nation.
His love for his country soon found its way
into verse. In one of his first poems--The Song of
the Grain (1843)--the never-dying hopes of
nature can teach him and his nation, for all their
weary hearts, the moral of a new life to be born
again. The sun sets, and with it the symbol of
liberty. But the stars rising remind him that there
are other stars, the stars, that is, of the faith and
homely virtue of the peasants tilling the fields,
that shall be as guiding fifes to all Poland.
"And our grief grows lighter, our hearts ache
less, knowing that the flame trembles in every
little spark," and that great luminaries may be
fashioned in time out of united stars.
Then, going out into the meadows at daybreak
to sow the grain, when " all the air is singing like
a lark," he learns the lesson of the wheat. The
reader will remember how in Frank Norris' noble
novel The Octopus: The Epic of the Wheat, after
long anguish Vanamee, wandering through the
night, sees the dawn flaming over ranchos once
bare, now white with wheat, and reads therein
that life springs from death, immortality from
corruption, joy from pain, even as the seed
fructifies out of dark places. To the young Pole,
writing half a century earlier, the wheat speaks in
like manner and, as he watches the peasants
sowing the grain, he consoles himself in his heavy
sorrow by the thought that the sons will reap
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSK1 zn
where the fathers sowed. The sower will pass to
the grave with the words on his lips:
"41 die, but the seed will not die. ' Oh, it
were sweet to dream thus in the hour preceding
death! "
And another will take his place who can sow in
his turn, and who will not spare his toil. Storms
may beat upon the furrows; but Mother Earth
shields the seed in her bosom, and slowly the spirit
breathes and gives it life. And at last the poet
beholds the fields golden with the harvest while
the reapers load the waggons, singing songs of
joy and freedom.
A year after he had written this poem, Ujejski
saw Warsaw for the first time. This visit to the
capital of his country, then groaning beneath the
heel of Nicholas I. , had a far reaching influence
on the young poet's subsequent life as a writer.
Not only did it lay the foundations of the poem
Marathon by which he made his name, but it was
in Warsaw, with the spectacle of the nation's
suffering before him, that he was inspired with
the clear comprehension of his particular vocation.
He tells us in the poem The Lyre of Jeremias,
which he wrote in Warsaw, that now he casts his
old lyre underfoot:
"For I can sing no longer for myself. I stretch
my hand to Jeremias' lyre to string it to the wail-
ing of my brothers. I renounce myself. I cast all
my own sorrows to the bottom of my heart; let
them perish without echo. My whole nation is my
family. Mine are the tears from her eyes, mine
the blood from her wounds. Suffering her pain,
I will sing. Ah, I suffer! "
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? 212
POLAND
He sits sorrowing and alone, with a city in
mourning about him. His friends are gone, slain,
or in the living graves of Siberia; and, as he
watches at night,
"I hear the subterranean hollow drag of chains.
I hear far off the beating of the hammer. It is my
brothers toiling in the mines. "
He sees his people in the snowy deserts, perish-
ing of hunger and cold, dying with no memory
left of them. And, likening the tears of Poland
to those of Jerusalem, the poet, falling on his face
for grief, cries upon the spirit of Jeremias, his
favourite type of a national inspirer and prophet,
to give him of his strength, for he sinks beneath
his sorrow.
We shall see later with what deep psychological
significance this figure of Jeremias is invested in
Ujejski's eyes.
Up to the year of Ujejski's visit to Warsaw, his
name was scarcely known. Then, after his return
to Austrian Poland, as he was taking part one
evening in a literary gathering in a friend's house,
the boy of twenty-two read aloud a poem that he
had just finished writing, entitled Marathon. Such
was the patriotic power, the finished artistic
beauty, of these lines that the audience sat spell-
bound in silent wonder and admiration. From
that hour, UjejsH took his place among the great
poets of his nation.
His purpose in writing Marathon may be gath-
ered from the words of stinging reproach to his
countrymen which form the preface, and from
the quotation out of Byron which he chooses as his
motto:
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? 'THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 213
"The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might still be free,
For standing on the Persian's grave,
I could not deem myself a slave. "
"You ask a song," so Ujejski flings his poem
forth into the world, "of charm and sweetness
for your ears; but, my compatriots, my only
song for you is one that shall remind you of the
clanking of your chains. You ask a song as a flower
in a garland to give you honour at the banquet;
but I would fain steel your enervated souls in
a blush of fire like armour in the flame. "
Then he laments that to him, a youth, has
fallen the task of spreading this language of
sarcasm and upbraiding instead of that of love.
He has long sought for some means by which he
can infuse manhood into the hearts of men who
are growing weak in bondage; and now he will
raise the heroes of ancient history to point the
way.
And so he sings the story of Marathon; in
other words, of the victory of a few routing, by
the strength of one common bond of devotion to
their fatherland, the hosts of Persia. The poem
opens with the burning of Sardis.
"A slave ran out from the burning town, and
behind him ran in pursuit the wails of the dying
that rang in his ears. And he fled, veiled by the
darkness of night. Oft he cast backward his terrified
eyes, and behind him the wind breathed fire on
the heights, and carried clamour upon it. He stood
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? ai4 POLAND
and he listened. Perchance even now the enemies
butcher his brothers, give the aged mother to
drink of the blood of her son, and level the hut
with fire and with sword. But tarry he may not.
With the satrap's command, oh, runner, speed
on, for the way is still long. When thou returnest
thou shalt count the corpses in ashes. He fled
through the desert with the news he was bearing,
and swiftly he ran till the sun had arisen; and
when at the outposts he met with a runner,
* Sardis is in flames. To Susa! To Susa! ' he
cried, and he turned; and the other, like an
ostrich wide spreading its wings, flew, and van-
ished before the sun like a spectre of night. "
In a series of virile word-paintings, Ujejslri
tersely but vigorously depicts the march to war
of the Persian armies, the terror in Athens, the
victory.
"From the four ends of the world the legions
march. From the four ends of the world the
vultures flock; until a mighty wind springs up
from the fluttering of the flags, and a mighty
humming from the rattling of the bows. The
earth is blackened with the horses' hoofs. "
Meanwhile, in Athens we have the moral point
of the poem, that is, the speech of Miltiades,
bidding him who would prefer to be a slave begone
', to Darius and to fawn upon him, like a hungry
cur, for empty honours.
"But we others, let us remain, we who are
linked in misfortune. Either we will wipe out the
foe with this sword, or, by the holy gods, will we,
free, find refuge from slavery in death. "
Impressing upon the Athenian crowds that,
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSK1 215
united, they are all-powerful against the most
overwhelming odds, he reminds them that their
ancestors are summoning them to the like glorious
deeds as theirs.
Ujejski hardly describes the battle itself except
to insist again upon that dominant, and to the
Pole most significant, note of a handful confound-
ing a multitude. The action transfers itself to
Athens, to the women and old men awaiting
tidings till the night is broken by the sound of
hurrying feet, and the messenger, crying victory
through the streets, falls dead without a wound.
"On the battle-field after the murderous day-
long game is played, after the bloody toil, the
raging war, thousands of men sleep now in peace.
The Greek and Persian on one self-same bed lie
without anger in eternal brotherhood. Over them
ravens stalk and feast, and with hoarse voices bid
their brethren to the banquet come. "
Marathon was written in 1845. The following
year Poland was stricken by one of the most terrible
tragedies that she has ever known, the uprising
of the Galician peasantry against the Polish nobles.
Their ignorance exploited by secret agents,
driven on by the instigations of the Austrian
government, the peasants fell upon their land-
lords' houses and put the inhabitants to tortures,
butchering men, women, and children. Whole
families perished together at their hands. Terror
reigned over the land.
Belonging as he did to a noble house, Ujejski,
although he himself and his immediate family
escaped destruction, lived in the midst of these
scenes. The grief and horror of his soul are stamped
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POLAND
upon the poems that streamed forth from his pen
at this time. Passionately patriotic, devoted to
the purest of national ideals, he saw the nation that
he loved thrust down into a pit of abasement,
dragged from the path of glory. and salvation
which he and every poet of his race had looked
to see her tread, her fair fields become a shambles.
For once his heart seems to fail him, and he com-
plains that he can see God no longer. Nature,
that had inspired him with the hope of the wheat,
is now only cruel, parading her beauty, indifferent
to human anguish.
""" QkJEaxth* there is no heart nor love in thee.
As a coquette decking herself at evening, thou
dreamest only of ornaments, of splendour. Thou
art an egotist. Drowned in thy flowers, thou dost
forget thy suffering children. Gladly thou
catchest every different voice, except one only--
except the voice of pain.
"Many a time thy treacherous hand has woven
from the thorns thou bearest a crown of torment
for thy child. That guilty thorn, drunken with
innocent blood, blooms again as a white flower
in the spring, and the birds sing of it to the world:
'Oh, what a white and stainless flower! '
"And over our flaming homes, when the con-
flagrations fling wide their crimson flags, and the
mother, with her hair sparkling in the glare, casts
herself on the cradle of her child; then the cloud
floating in the dark night skies thus whispers to
itself : 'See the gay fires that flame upon the
earth. Oh, but they paint my bosom with their
beauty! '
"Oh, Earth, thou ever, ever art the same. A
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 217
demon of irony flies always over thee that makes
our pain thine ornament, thy splendour. They
say that amber is a bird's tear, turned to stone.
Oh, Earth, our blood is but a ruby to thee, our
cry of grief thy music, our whitened bones thy
easy couch.
"To-day I saw a string of cranes fly from across
the sea, lured by the spring. And they flew fast,
and with a joyful song they hailed the pond where
lilies float, and hailed the hills with pine-trees
crowned, and the silver rivers on the carpeted
meads. And, flying their free trail above this
earth, nought, nought they saw or heard--except
the spring. I wept, and in my heart I said: 'Oh,
Lord, why am I not a bird? ' Old wish! Age
after age repeats, better to be a bird than be a
man " (The Earth, 1846).
Under the burden of his own distress of mind \
and of his country's agony, Ujejski, like the other
Polish poets who had gone before him, poured
out his soul in poetical inspiration. The figure of
Jeremias, lamenting among the ruins of a fallen
city, had already, as we have seen, captivated his
imagination. In the midst of the fresh national
disaster, he now turned again in thought to another
oppressed race who had wept by the waters of
strange lands--to the Hebrews of old. The pecu-
liar part that their prophet-poets had played in
raising and inspiring them spoke straight to
Ujejski's heart. His nation was now the outcast
of peoples. He would sericTher a message of counsel
and of consolation under the impersonation of a
second Jeremias. Thus arose that famous cycle
of lyrics that are among the most mournful poems
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? POLAND
even- of Poland's tragic literature--Ujejski's Com-
plaints of Jeremias.
Jeremias, the type of a national guide, flies, an
angel of vengeance, over Poland. The land is one
lake of blood. The skies are red with the fires of
burning homes. The wails of the dying are
mingled with the hoarse cries of the murderers.
And Jeremias calls upon the nation to retaliate,
and avenge her wrongs by bloodshed on her side.
She has been patient long enough. Heaven will
not take pity on the weak, but gives the victory
to brute strength.
"' Oh, Lord, Thou, Who weighest in Thy hand
our fate, open Thy heavens to this song. And
when that day of ours shall come, that yearned-
f or day, bid Thy angels thunder on brazen trumpets
to the four quarters of the world this watchword
in that day: Revenge! Revenge! Revenge! '
"And the nation trembled and moved: but,
dragged down by her chain, she fell once more, for
she breathed not the spirit of God, and it was
not in God but revenge, that she woke from
6leep. "
Then Jeremias repents him of his evil bidding
till at last, after long penance, his tongue is loos-
ened to sing a higher strain of prayer and praise.
"Oh, my people! " cries the poet, in conclu-
sion to this, his preliminary poem, The Word of
Jeremias: "These songs of mine are my life's
blood. Let this one word ring in your inspirations,
let it flow in your veins. Let it die not on your
lips before the jeering foe, and you shall need no
other pillory for the foe--sorest punishment for
Satan--than this word, Praised Jn. . God,"
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSK1 tig
The moral teaching of this poem is the more
striking, when we realise not only that it came
from the heart of a youth at an age when the blood
runs hottest at the sight of wrong, but that he
was not, as it were, merely writing on paper, far
removed from the passion of the conflict. What
he described was a matter that touched his own
life to the quick. The deep religious feeling and
high ideal with which these lines are impregnated
are the key-note of Ujej ski's life-work.
The succeeding poems of the series continue
on the like tone of faith, of pain, of prayer under
intolerable affliction. As the poet keeps vigil on a
Bummer's night, his soul revolts against the beauty
and tranquility of that night, where no trace
remains of the tears that have watered it, of the
blood with which it has streamed. The leaves
are motionless on the trees, and swans dream
where the lakes reflect the stars.
"The earth smells sweet, and the dawn flames.
My God! My God! " is his horror-stricken
refrain.
moment eternally great and holy sweetens, with a
breath of Paradise," his tears and sufferings
under the cross. "Blessed be he who remembereth,
somewhere in the years gone by, the sweet,
strange, pure, and winged life, his first beginning.
He who, in the torment of fleshly fetters, lifts his
hands to heaven daily, yearneth to his ghostly
memories. "
These "ghostly memories" of the "winged
life" on the steppes veil the whole poem with
an atmosphere of mystery that enhances at once
its romance and its charm. The mother of
the poet's fancy has gone. But, ere he descends
to the turmoil of life, he is caught up on his
wings to the skies, "God's tent of molten gold. "
He is among the choirs who sing Hosanna before
the throne. The angels are praying for him whose
trial on earth is about to begin. He spreads his
wings for the flight to the highest things; but,
for the first time, his thought knows bewilderment,
and he returns " sad, to the abyss " of earth.
Then succeeds the poetical description of
Bohdan's orphan boyhood and of his youth till the
cry resounds from afar: "Poland, thy country! "
With tears, he, who " with each breath draws in
the music of the steppe," says farewell to his
family and to those same steppes. He is swept by
the Rising into exile and into the tempest of the
world. Poverty, temptation, sadness surround
him. Toiling for his daily bread, he finds himself
following in the secret of his thoughts the flight
of the crane, living the life of the birds in the
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? 202 POLAND
free, untrammelled steppes. Ghosts of ages pass
dimly before him. He feels called to praise God
in a new song. An angelic voice summons him, as
with a blast of thunder, from on high : " Return,
oh, exile, to thy country. " He wakes, weeping.
To which country, that on earth or the one in
heaven? He returns to the land he loves; but
not in the flesh, only in a vision.
Once more, then, his is the " winged life. "
"Breath of God, eternal breathing,
Wind of steppes, blowing light and dry,
Spreadeth as a couch beneath me,
Blows the down about my shoulders,
Swaddles me in its warm bosom. "
It rocks him above the graves of those fallen in
the Ukraine, which was for centuries the scene of
border warfare in Polish history. He sees the
Black Sea, glittering as a counterfeit of the splen-
dours of dawn. " I see marvels, I hear marvels. "
In a burst of light and music, the wizard-singer,
Bojan, the patriarchal poet of the Slav peoples,
sings to his golden- stringed zither his country's
welcome. Its sounds ring high and low over the
steppes, and the buried ages wake, till the fire and
the song alike fade into mist.
Floating on the wind, the poet then has a series
of visions, unrolling themselves over the steppes,
of the nations that have risen and fallen since the
beginning of the world. He begins with Eden and
the fall of man, reaches the Crucifixion, the
mission of the apostles, the ruin of Israel.
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? THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 203
"Slept my spirit. I dreamed sweetly
In a light, blest spirit dream.
Shoreless time and time in space
Shineth by the word of God,
Singeth out the mighty epic.
Million lights and million shadows,
Worlds in flowers--the world's history--
Blow in incense to the Lord. "
He thus prefaces each stage of the chronicle
of the world that he passes in review. Hoofs
thunder in the steppes across which the hordes
sweep to the destruction of Rome. The wind
whispers mysterious messages to the forefathers
of his race. Rome falls, and the Rome of the
Papacy rises in her stead. The poet gives a rapid
summary of the centuries that follow, coloured
by his deep religious sense. Men sin repeatedly,
and the penalty ever descends afresh upon human-
ity. Then his spirit sleeps, and in his dream struggles
to escape as though to home. The voice of an
angel sighs in his ear: "The time of thy trial is
fulfilled. Behold this country, thine own land";
and with the eyes, not of the body:
"I see, I see a lovely land,
Spaces stretching of broad meads,
Mountains, forests, and two seas;
And a loved and mighty race,
Sad and yearning, gaze through tears. "
"Their great mother is in mourning. The
Poland of the Piasts, of the Jagiellos, once mistress
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POLAND
of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Silesia, has now no corner
of her soil free. "
"Silent everywhere our language,
Language in our hearts beloved.
As the instrument of angels,
? Even so fair its melodies.
Must it then be whispered only?
Hear, oh, Lord, our little children
Wailing from a hiding place.
Saddest fate! they learn to fear
Their foe before they fear their God.
1 And our women, weak and fainting,
For long years weep in the dust.
Their sons, their brothers, lie in graves,
Or wander at the world's far ends. "
And the prophet-poets cry aloud with all their
strength the Polish songs: their voices are as
the wailing of the orphaned.
The singer is carried again on the wings of the
wind of the steppe, and swept to the Tatry--the
Carpathians--into the vision up to which the
whole poem has been leading. He sees on the summit
C i of the Polish mountains his mother Poland, but
| I a figure far removed from that under which
Mickiewicz and Krasinski delighted to symbolize
her. Here she is the beautiful repentant sinner.
"She has loved and she has wandered. She has
knelt for years in ashes. " Her hair streams in
grief and penitence, dishevelled, to the wind.
Her cheek has faded for mourning. Beside her sit
her sisters who have shared her fate: Lithuania,
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? THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 205
taking refuge in her bosom, the Ukraine, "beauti-
ful, incarnate song," who weeps, and through her
tears looks upon "me, her son. " The procession
of Poland's dead heroes gathers about her: and
her sisters, kneeling, cry to heaven the word so
beloved by Zaleski:
"Great her sins, but surely, Lord,
Greater still Thy mercy is. "
Rainbows flash from heaven, and ever louder
is the song of the angels and of the apostles of
Slavonia: "Honour and glory to the Magdalen.
We carry the absolution of the Lord. Raise the
penitent's head. The Lord is arming the arch-
angel. The time of the Holy Ghost draws nigh.
The world shall gather strength in the grace of
the cross. From the seed of repentant Poland the
future generations shall flower in fruit to the
Lord. The archangel himself at their head shall
lead them to the last battle with evil. " Amidst
the hosannas of numberless multitudes of the
saints, the poet beholds his nation arise from the
dust of her repentance, her youth given back to
her. "I see marvels, I hear marvels. " In this
supreme moment he returns to the mystic note of
the Ukraine. The same light and music that
flashed around the steppe when he returned there
in spirit from his exile, now beat from the heavenly
fires. Once more the voice of the wizard and the
sound of his zither peal over the Ukraine. "Glory,
honour! She shall rise! " is the song of Bojan.
He stretches his instrument over all the countries
of Slavonia; and the sweet melody streams
forth.
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POLAND
"The flock, the snow-white flock, is floating,
The wizard-singer's swan-like song
Sounds one long prophetic word
To the future, hope in song.
Still that word rings in my ear,
Ever dwells within my heart,
In my heart for ever fondled.
14 Let our Poland rise for ever!
At the day of the great banquet,
In the choir I will, Slavonia,
Repeat to you the song of Bojan.
Suffering in one flash shall pass. "
Again, on the " wind of the steppe, the breath
of God, his aerial couch," he is carried in the mists
that are gathering about him. Through the
whistle of the winds, he hears a sad, wild melody.
The third cock crows. Voices of the dead un-
baptized children who, in the Ukrainian legends,
wander through the snow and storm, crying for
baptism and Paradise, wail in the tempest. Like
them the poet, a son of earth, hungers too early
for the " angelic bread" he may not touch yet.
Like them, he is unable to enter heaven, for he is
fettered by the vesture of flesh. He returns to his
own place in a hard world. He sees no more the
vision, the memory of which wakes eternal sad-
ness in his soul.
"Where that flight, that far, wide flight?
Where heard I that mighty epic?
Worlds in flowers, the world's history?
- Where that golden-stringed singer f"
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? THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 207
He has gazed on the miracles of the universe,
and they cannot perish from his eyes or heart.
Man may call what the poet saw a dream. "Are
the tears of my life a dream? Poland, the
Ukraine, a dream ? " he asks, with the mingled
passion of the patriot and the mystic who, in the
body or out of the body, had beheld things unseen
by mortal eyes. "Blessed be he who remembereth
somewhere in the years gone by, the sweet, strange,
pure, and winged life, his first beginning. He
who, in the torment of fleshly fetters, lifts his
hands to heaven daily, yearneth to his ghostly
memories. "
"According to Zaleski," said Mickiewicz in
the College de France, "it is not the desire to
sing the exploits of some celebrated chief, it is
not the love of popularity, it is not the love of art
that can form a poet. You must have been pre-
destined, you must have been attached by myster-
ious bonds to the country that you are to sing
one day: and to sing is nothing else than to reveal
the thought of God, which rests on that country
and on the people to which the poet belongs. "*
* Adam Mickiewicz, Lts Slaves,
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? CHAPTER VII
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI
BY the year i860, the great triad of Polish
poets, Mickiewicz, KrasinsH, and Slowacki,
had passed from the world. But, in a
certain measure, their mantle may be said to have
fallen upon a poet of the succeeding generation,
whose poetry has appealed so strongly to the
hearts of his countrymen that his famous Chorale
has passed into the treasury of Polish national
songs. Kornel Ujejski--born in 1823, dead in
1897--can scarcely, in point of birth, be considered
as belonging to a younger generation than Zygmunt
Krasinski, who was only eleven years his senior;
but he survived him by nearly forty years, wrote
under different conditions, and had been,
moreover, a mere child during those disasters of
the thirties that changed the lives of Mickiewicz,
; Krasinski, and Slowacki. Thus his work, from a
literary and moral standpoint, reads as that of
one who came later.
He was the son of a noble house in Austrian
Poland. The poet's private life, with the exception
of the year of massacre in 1846, was outwardly
prosperous, and experienced none of the afflictions
which fell to the lot of Mickiewicz and Krasinski.
And yet over the greater part of his poetry, and
especially over its finest portion, hangs a not less,
perhaps even deeper, sadness than that stamped
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 209
on the writings of his predecessors. So terrible
was the ordeal through which every devout son
of Poland passed in the early years of her mourn-
ing, the thirties of the nineteenth century, that
an inheritance of profound melancholy was the
inevitable birthright even of those Polish poets
who were only children at the time. The Polish
child was of necessity not only brought up on a
chronicle of sorrow, but those sorrows were living,
were present to him. Dismembered Poland was
harassed by oppression. Ujejski said of himself
that from his early childhood an atmosphere of
tragedy enveloped him; that his first impres-
sions of the world were such as to banish from his
heart all childish joy, and to make his poetry a
song of grief. * "Bitter is the condition of the Pole
in every part of the wide earth," wrote Krasinski.
This of itself alone would suffice to explain the
general tone of Ujejski's work; and when we
remember that, after he had reached manhood, he
beheld the calamities of 1846 and of the sixties
overwhelm his nation, it is little wonder that his 1
poems are among the saddest in Polish literature.
Like the other great poets of his race, Ujejski's
poetical ideal, early conceived and put into
practice equally early, was that of a moral and
national teacher. We have seen how Poland looked
to her poets for help and guidance. Ujejski, then,
chose his calling, and remained faithful to it all
his life. His prayer was, so he sings in his poem on
the death of Mickiewicz, to follow in the latter's
footsteps, and speak to his people of the same
national faith that Mickiewicz taught^ albeit he
* A. Mazanowski, Kornel Ujtjtki (Polish). '
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? 2IO
POLAND
confesses he cannot do so with a power like to
that of the greater poet; to use the Polish lyre,
however heavy the burden to himself, as an
instrument of blessing, and never of evil, to his
nation.
His love for his country soon found its way
into verse. In one of his first poems--The Song of
the Grain (1843)--the never-dying hopes of
nature can teach him and his nation, for all their
weary hearts, the moral of a new life to be born
again. The sun sets, and with it the symbol of
liberty. But the stars rising remind him that there
are other stars, the stars, that is, of the faith and
homely virtue of the peasants tilling the fields,
that shall be as guiding fifes to all Poland.
"And our grief grows lighter, our hearts ache
less, knowing that the flame trembles in every
little spark," and that great luminaries may be
fashioned in time out of united stars.
Then, going out into the meadows at daybreak
to sow the grain, when " all the air is singing like
a lark," he learns the lesson of the wheat. The
reader will remember how in Frank Norris' noble
novel The Octopus: The Epic of the Wheat, after
long anguish Vanamee, wandering through the
night, sees the dawn flaming over ranchos once
bare, now white with wheat, and reads therein
that life springs from death, immortality from
corruption, joy from pain, even as the seed
fructifies out of dark places. To the young Pole,
writing half a century earlier, the wheat speaks in
like manner and, as he watches the peasants
sowing the grain, he consoles himself in his heavy
sorrow by the thought that the sons will reap
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSK1 zn
where the fathers sowed. The sower will pass to
the grave with the words on his lips:
"41 die, but the seed will not die. ' Oh, it
were sweet to dream thus in the hour preceding
death! "
And another will take his place who can sow in
his turn, and who will not spare his toil. Storms
may beat upon the furrows; but Mother Earth
shields the seed in her bosom, and slowly the spirit
breathes and gives it life. And at last the poet
beholds the fields golden with the harvest while
the reapers load the waggons, singing songs of
joy and freedom.
A year after he had written this poem, Ujejski
saw Warsaw for the first time. This visit to the
capital of his country, then groaning beneath the
heel of Nicholas I. , had a far reaching influence
on the young poet's subsequent life as a writer.
Not only did it lay the foundations of the poem
Marathon by which he made his name, but it was
in Warsaw, with the spectacle of the nation's
suffering before him, that he was inspired with
the clear comprehension of his particular vocation.
He tells us in the poem The Lyre of Jeremias,
which he wrote in Warsaw, that now he casts his
old lyre underfoot:
"For I can sing no longer for myself. I stretch
my hand to Jeremias' lyre to string it to the wail-
ing of my brothers. I renounce myself. I cast all
my own sorrows to the bottom of my heart; let
them perish without echo. My whole nation is my
family. Mine are the tears from her eyes, mine
the blood from her wounds. Suffering her pain,
I will sing. Ah, I suffer! "
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? 212
POLAND
He sits sorrowing and alone, with a city in
mourning about him. His friends are gone, slain,
or in the living graves of Siberia; and, as he
watches at night,
"I hear the subterranean hollow drag of chains.
I hear far off the beating of the hammer. It is my
brothers toiling in the mines. "
He sees his people in the snowy deserts, perish-
ing of hunger and cold, dying with no memory
left of them. And, likening the tears of Poland
to those of Jerusalem, the poet, falling on his face
for grief, cries upon the spirit of Jeremias, his
favourite type of a national inspirer and prophet,
to give him of his strength, for he sinks beneath
his sorrow.
We shall see later with what deep psychological
significance this figure of Jeremias is invested in
Ujejski's eyes.
Up to the year of Ujejski's visit to Warsaw, his
name was scarcely known. Then, after his return
to Austrian Poland, as he was taking part one
evening in a literary gathering in a friend's house,
the boy of twenty-two read aloud a poem that he
had just finished writing, entitled Marathon. Such
was the patriotic power, the finished artistic
beauty, of these lines that the audience sat spell-
bound in silent wonder and admiration. From
that hour, UjejsH took his place among the great
poets of his nation.
His purpose in writing Marathon may be gath-
ered from the words of stinging reproach to his
countrymen which form the preface, and from
the quotation out of Byron which he chooses as his
motto:
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? 'THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 213
"The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might still be free,
For standing on the Persian's grave,
I could not deem myself a slave. "
"You ask a song," so Ujejski flings his poem
forth into the world, "of charm and sweetness
for your ears; but, my compatriots, my only
song for you is one that shall remind you of the
clanking of your chains. You ask a song as a flower
in a garland to give you honour at the banquet;
but I would fain steel your enervated souls in
a blush of fire like armour in the flame. "
Then he laments that to him, a youth, has
fallen the task of spreading this language of
sarcasm and upbraiding instead of that of love.
He has long sought for some means by which he
can infuse manhood into the hearts of men who
are growing weak in bondage; and now he will
raise the heroes of ancient history to point the
way.
And so he sings the story of Marathon; in
other words, of the victory of a few routing, by
the strength of one common bond of devotion to
their fatherland, the hosts of Persia. The poem
opens with the burning of Sardis.
"A slave ran out from the burning town, and
behind him ran in pursuit the wails of the dying
that rang in his ears. And he fled, veiled by the
darkness of night. Oft he cast backward his terrified
eyes, and behind him the wind breathed fire on
the heights, and carried clamour upon it. He stood
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? ai4 POLAND
and he listened. Perchance even now the enemies
butcher his brothers, give the aged mother to
drink of the blood of her son, and level the hut
with fire and with sword. But tarry he may not.
With the satrap's command, oh, runner, speed
on, for the way is still long. When thou returnest
thou shalt count the corpses in ashes. He fled
through the desert with the news he was bearing,
and swiftly he ran till the sun had arisen; and
when at the outposts he met with a runner,
* Sardis is in flames. To Susa! To Susa! ' he
cried, and he turned; and the other, like an
ostrich wide spreading its wings, flew, and van-
ished before the sun like a spectre of night. "
In a series of virile word-paintings, Ujejslri
tersely but vigorously depicts the march to war
of the Persian armies, the terror in Athens, the
victory.
"From the four ends of the world the legions
march. From the four ends of the world the
vultures flock; until a mighty wind springs up
from the fluttering of the flags, and a mighty
humming from the rattling of the bows. The
earth is blackened with the horses' hoofs. "
Meanwhile, in Athens we have the moral point
of the poem, that is, the speech of Miltiades,
bidding him who would prefer to be a slave begone
', to Darius and to fawn upon him, like a hungry
cur, for empty honours.
"But we others, let us remain, we who are
linked in misfortune. Either we will wipe out the
foe with this sword, or, by the holy gods, will we,
free, find refuge from slavery in death. "
Impressing upon the Athenian crowds that,
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSK1 215
united, they are all-powerful against the most
overwhelming odds, he reminds them that their
ancestors are summoning them to the like glorious
deeds as theirs.
Ujejski hardly describes the battle itself except
to insist again upon that dominant, and to the
Pole most significant, note of a handful confound-
ing a multitude. The action transfers itself to
Athens, to the women and old men awaiting
tidings till the night is broken by the sound of
hurrying feet, and the messenger, crying victory
through the streets, falls dead without a wound.
"On the battle-field after the murderous day-
long game is played, after the bloody toil, the
raging war, thousands of men sleep now in peace.
The Greek and Persian on one self-same bed lie
without anger in eternal brotherhood. Over them
ravens stalk and feast, and with hoarse voices bid
their brethren to the banquet come. "
Marathon was written in 1845. The following
year Poland was stricken by one of the most terrible
tragedies that she has ever known, the uprising
of the Galician peasantry against the Polish nobles.
Their ignorance exploited by secret agents,
driven on by the instigations of the Austrian
government, the peasants fell upon their land-
lords' houses and put the inhabitants to tortures,
butchering men, women, and children. Whole
families perished together at their hands. Terror
reigned over the land.
Belonging as he did to a noble house, Ujejski,
although he himself and his immediate family
escaped destruction, lived in the midst of these
scenes. The grief and horror of his soul are stamped
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? 2l6
POLAND
upon the poems that streamed forth from his pen
at this time. Passionately patriotic, devoted to
the purest of national ideals, he saw the nation that
he loved thrust down into a pit of abasement,
dragged from the path of glory. and salvation
which he and every poet of his race had looked
to see her tread, her fair fields become a shambles.
For once his heart seems to fail him, and he com-
plains that he can see God no longer. Nature,
that had inspired him with the hope of the wheat,
is now only cruel, parading her beauty, indifferent
to human anguish.
""" QkJEaxth* there is no heart nor love in thee.
As a coquette decking herself at evening, thou
dreamest only of ornaments, of splendour. Thou
art an egotist. Drowned in thy flowers, thou dost
forget thy suffering children. Gladly thou
catchest every different voice, except one only--
except the voice of pain.
"Many a time thy treacherous hand has woven
from the thorns thou bearest a crown of torment
for thy child. That guilty thorn, drunken with
innocent blood, blooms again as a white flower
in the spring, and the birds sing of it to the world:
'Oh, what a white and stainless flower! '
"And over our flaming homes, when the con-
flagrations fling wide their crimson flags, and the
mother, with her hair sparkling in the glare, casts
herself on the cradle of her child; then the cloud
floating in the dark night skies thus whispers to
itself : 'See the gay fires that flame upon the
earth. Oh, but they paint my bosom with their
beauty! '
"Oh, Earth, thou ever, ever art the same. A
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 217
demon of irony flies always over thee that makes
our pain thine ornament, thy splendour. They
say that amber is a bird's tear, turned to stone.
Oh, Earth, our blood is but a ruby to thee, our
cry of grief thy music, our whitened bones thy
easy couch.
"To-day I saw a string of cranes fly from across
the sea, lured by the spring. And they flew fast,
and with a joyful song they hailed the pond where
lilies float, and hailed the hills with pine-trees
crowned, and the silver rivers on the carpeted
meads. And, flying their free trail above this
earth, nought, nought they saw or heard--except
the spring. I wept, and in my heart I said: 'Oh,
Lord, why am I not a bird? ' Old wish! Age
after age repeats, better to be a bird than be a
man " (The Earth, 1846).
Under the burden of his own distress of mind \
and of his country's agony, Ujejski, like the other
Polish poets who had gone before him, poured
out his soul in poetical inspiration. The figure of
Jeremias, lamenting among the ruins of a fallen
city, had already, as we have seen, captivated his
imagination. In the midst of the fresh national
disaster, he now turned again in thought to another
oppressed race who had wept by the waters of
strange lands--to the Hebrews of old. The pecu-
liar part that their prophet-poets had played in
raising and inspiring them spoke straight to
Ujejski's heart. His nation was now the outcast
of peoples. He would sericTher a message of counsel
and of consolation under the impersonation of a
second Jeremias. Thus arose that famous cycle
of lyrics that are among the most mournful poems
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? POLAND
even- of Poland's tragic literature--Ujejski's Com-
plaints of Jeremias.
Jeremias, the type of a national guide, flies, an
angel of vengeance, over Poland. The land is one
lake of blood. The skies are red with the fires of
burning homes. The wails of the dying are
mingled with the hoarse cries of the murderers.
And Jeremias calls upon the nation to retaliate,
and avenge her wrongs by bloodshed on her side.
She has been patient long enough. Heaven will
not take pity on the weak, but gives the victory
to brute strength.
"' Oh, Lord, Thou, Who weighest in Thy hand
our fate, open Thy heavens to this song. And
when that day of ours shall come, that yearned-
f or day, bid Thy angels thunder on brazen trumpets
to the four quarters of the world this watchword
in that day: Revenge! Revenge! Revenge! '
"And the nation trembled and moved: but,
dragged down by her chain, she fell once more, for
she breathed not the spirit of God, and it was
not in God but revenge, that she woke from
6leep. "
Then Jeremias repents him of his evil bidding
till at last, after long penance, his tongue is loos-
ened to sing a higher strain of prayer and praise.
"Oh, my people! " cries the poet, in conclu-
sion to this, his preliminary poem, The Word of
Jeremias: "These songs of mine are my life's
blood. Let this one word ring in your inspirations,
let it flow in your veins. Let it die not on your
lips before the jeering foe, and you shall need no
other pillory for the foe--sorest punishment for
Satan--than this word, Praised Jn. . God,"
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? THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSK1 tig
The moral teaching of this poem is the more
striking, when we realise not only that it came
from the heart of a youth at an age when the blood
runs hottest at the sight of wrong, but that he
was not, as it were, merely writing on paper, far
removed from the passion of the conflict. What
he described was a matter that touched his own
life to the quick. The deep religious feeling and
high ideal with which these lines are impregnated
are the key-note of Ujej ski's life-work.
The succeeding poems of the series continue
on the like tone of faith, of pain, of prayer under
intolerable affliction. As the poet keeps vigil on a
Bummer's night, his soul revolts against the beauty
and tranquility of that night, where no trace
remains of the tears that have watered it, of the
blood with which it has streamed. The leaves
are motionless on the trees, and swans dream
where the lakes reflect the stars.
"The earth smells sweet, and the dawn flames.
My God! My God! " is his horror-stricken
refrain.
