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1 Letters to Delphina Pbtocka.
1 Letters to Delphina Pbtocka.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
It seemed to the youth that he had seen certain of their
faces somewhere of old on the surface of the earth: but the
lightnings veiled their faces, the roar of the melting metals
stifled their wails.
Then the beautiful women of the conqueror's race
surround him, tempting him by their charms.
For two long hours of that night I saw how, entangled,
bewildered, struggling, he ever and anon besought the heavenly
Father for strength and virtue, then again in despair rushed
through the festal halls and sought a weapon to drive into his
breast: but found it nowhere.
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? The Deviation
Gradually he yields. He consents to betroth himself
to a "maiden of the alien race. " He sits by her side at
the banquet. Only when he sees through the glitter of
the feast the urn containing the ashes of his "slain
Mother" all grows dark before him, and his hand,
holding the goblet, trembles.
Ever more terribly wrestled his wandering soul, struggling
to return to its old faiths and hopes: but all that surrounded
him darkened his understanding with a heavy veil.
"The lord of life and death smiled graciously," and
bade him swear service to him and renounce his old
name. He flings him a handful of diamond crosses.
Word byword, the youth, "not hearing his own voice,"
repeats after the herald his abjuration of his country.
Crying "Shame" upon his own head, he rises and
escapes, mocked by all, cursing himself, and falls sense-
less in the courtyard.
This episode is no mere fancy. Krasinski wrote it
as a direct admonition to young Poles. The Pole who
accepted honours and decorations from the Tsar's hand
could only do so at the price of his nationality. Through
the apparently artificial passage throbs the grief of
a Pole who had seen his own father decorated by the
conqueror of his country.
The wretched boy comes to himself and to a speech-
less despair. Beside him is his mentor, who tells him
that:
"in another time and another place thou mightest have shone
a hero: but under a heavy test thou knewest not how to remain
virtuous. The seen reality overpowered for thee the invisible
but eternal truth. Thou art lost. "
Krasinski further developed the scheme implied in
these words, and those that follow. The nation that had
defended Europe by constant war against the Turk and
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? 190 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Tartar was now called to a sterner conflict: that of
a conquered people battling for moral life.
"The time for outward war has not yet come," is
the mentor's reply to the youth's passionate entreaty for
his horse and old weapon, with which he will avenge the
wrongs of his country and his own shame.
"Long must last the days of silent sacrifice. Hearest thou?
The enemies are pursuing thee. If they capture thee, for the
rest of thy life thou wilt be the slave of their will, the partici-
pator in their crimes. . . One only, one only means of salvation
hath remained for thee": and he drew forth his dagger.
"Strike! " cried the youth. "I die in the name of my Mother,
slain six times. "
And the old man kills him.
It will be seen that both A Summer Night and The
Temptation end in an immoral situation. In A Summer
Night it is the murder of the wife in her bridal chamber
at the hand of the lover in whose embrace she dies.
This may in part be put down as a piece of the Byronism
of the day: but the fact remains. It is more apparent
in The Temptation, where the murderer thanks God for
the crime he has committed, and prays that the blood
he has shed may flow before the heavenly throne with
that of the martyrs. Count Tarnowski sees in such false
positions a proof of the spiritual confusion into which
Krasinski had drifted when he wrote these words1. At
this time the Anonymous Poet, the future apostle of
hope, met despair face to face. In both poems death is
the only end to the intolerable national conditions2.
Krasinski's father had done what the youth of the
poem had done, and what Krasinski himself had not
done. This incurable wound that Krasinski carried in
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Deviation
191
his heart all his days gives its peculiar point to the whole
tale of the temptation and the fall. His anguish for
once--and for this once only--breaks the bounds of his
self-imposed silence: and the epilogue of The Tempta-
tion is the son's heart-broken lamentation for his father.
Oh, Mother, slain six times,when thou shalt arise from sleep,
when once more thou shalt seat thyself upon the fields of corn,
amidst green woods from sea to sea, and in the moment of the
renewal of thy youth shalt remember the long nightmare of
death, the fearful spectres of thy martyrdom, weep not for those
who died in thy name on the battlefields of their country or
beyond seas. Though vultures and wolves have torn asunder
their remains, happy are they. Nor weep for those who died
among executioners in deep dungeons. Though a prison torch
was their only star, though the harsh word of oppression was
their last farewell on earth, happy are they. But cast a tear of
. pity for the lot of those whose minds thy murderers duped with
the glitter of falsehood, because they could not by the command
of violence tear their hearts from thee. They, Mother, they
suffered more than thy other sons. Their deluded hopes pierced
like daggers their bosoms. In the secret of their souls were
waged a thousand unknown wars, bloodier than the battles that
thunder in the face of the sun to the ring of steel and the roar
of cannon. The glittering eyes of thy foes led them over the
icy slopes to the depths of the eternal cold: and on each mound
they halted and wept for thee--till their hearts were withered
for yearning, till their feet and handswasted away in the bondage
of invisible chains: and they became as living corpses, alone
amidst a hated people, alone in their own homes, they only
alone on the wide earth. My Mother, over their fate, over a
sorrow of sorrows, do thou, do thou, utter a soft word of memory.
1
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? CHAPTER IX
BEFORE THE DAWN:
THE THREE THOUGHTS AND
THE TREATISE OF THE TRINITY
(1839-1842)
In the early part of 1839 Krasinski was in Naples.
Each evening he was the guest of a Polish family.
In letters to Sottan he describes at length one of
the daughters, Delphina Potocka. She was separated
from a husband who had made her miserable, and
who had been the cause of the death of her five
young children. Beautiful, possessed of high mental
gifts, an exquisite singer, she had turned the heads of
Flahaut and of an Orleans prince. Chopin worshipped
her; and it was her voice that soothed his dying bed.
The first impression that she made upon Krasinski
was that of an "unbearable coquette1. "
"When," he wrote to Soitan, "I see human beings who
need no comforting it seems to me that they have no need of me.
Nothing attracts me to them. But it is exactly the reverse when
I see on anyone's brow the trace of mourning, stamped by the
vicissitudes of life. Then it is my dream that my words or my
friendship or a pressure of my hand may perchance wake new
life in that bosom. . . At first we quarrelled terribly, because
I would not bow my head before her externalyizjtow [the word
is in English]. We even quarrelled so much that she said
strangely disagreeable things to me and I to her. But when
1 Letters to Sottan. Naples, Jan. 1, 1839.
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? Before the Dawn 193
she changed her Parisian tone and began to speak sincerely,
I changed my tone too, and every evening sadly and mourn-
fully she describes her moral life to me, and I listen and some-
times cheer her1. "
Such was the opening passage of Krasinski's love
for the woman whom he has immortalized as his Beatrice.
Whether hers was in reality the nobility with which
Krasinski, who always idealized those he loved, invested
her is a question difficult to resolve where evidences
differ, and seems to us to matter little. The point re-
mains that under the influence either of what she really
was, or what Krasinski believed her to be, the Anony-
mous Poet reached the heights of poetical and national
inspiration of which Dawn was the first fruit. His love
for Delphina was of a far higher and more idealistic
nature than had been his for Mme Bobrowa. To the
latter he had never given his whole heart. He had, as
Count Tarnowski says, been in love rather with the
sentiment of love than with the woman herself2. But
for years, until after his marriage, he as he expressed it
lived in and for Delphina. With her he came to associate
his hopes for his country, his own resurrection from
death and despair.
"May God guard thee, love thee, bless thee," he wrote to
her from Rome in the end of the year when he had first learnt
to love her. "The power of prayer has again awakened in me for
thy sake. Each evening with my whole heart, my whole spirit,
I pray for thee8. "
"In your heart," he wrote the following day, "in your
intellect I felt myself once more, I gained life again; in the
desire to give you new strength, or to pour new thoughts into
your soul, I awoke a threefold power within myself. Through
1 Op. tit.
2 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Unknown Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Delphina Potocka,
published by R. S. Kaminski. Tygodnik lllustrowany. 1899 (Polish).
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? 194 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
you I became filled with strength and understanding. To-day
I am stupid and worth nothing. But love me for the reason
that a benefactress loves those on whom she bestows benefits,
that an angel guardian loves those he guards1. "
The series of Krasinski's love poems to Delphina
Potocka now begins. How different was the character
of his new love and his old may be gauged if merely from
the fact that it was only after Delphina's death, and long
after his own, that any eye but his and hers saw them2.
These exquisite lyrics are among the most beautiful of
Polish love songs. They carry the impress of two human
hearts that had suffered deeply in life. They crown a
human woman with the aureole of a patriot's devotion for
his country and with the light upon Poland's fate that
Krasinski always associated with Delphina Potocka.
Their note is that of a high idealism. Delphina is the
angel who shines upon the sadness of the poet's soul.
Through her he knows the lost spring once more. Through
her he learns again what happiness may be. She is the
sister, as Krasinski, who had yearned for a sister in his
lonely life, repeatedly calls her3; the sister saving a lost
brother. ''Descend into my hell and light my subter-
ranean darkness, even as an angel, with one ray of thine
eyes. Be my protection, be my hope and my salvation. "
Again I bid farewell to thee (Naples, 1840). "God
only," the poet sings in an early poem, "can count the
thorns in the garland of thy brow. I count them not,
1 op. tit.
2 Except that Krasinski enclosed two or three of the less intimate ones
in his letters to Gaszynski.
3 "I never had a sister, but I think there is no more beautiful relationship
on earth than that between brother and sister. " Letters to Adam Potocki.
Biblioteka Warszawska, May, 1905. And to Delphina: "Call me your
brother, for I feel myself to be the brother of your soul. " Tygodnik Illus-
trowany, 1898.
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? Before the Dawn
195
I only feel them, for I have taken all to the depths of
my soul, as though they were my own. " Scarce have
I known thee (Naples, 1839). He had bowed his head,
as he once told her, before the multitude of her suffer-
ings1: and again in one of his letters, when his love
for her was creating difficulties between herself and her
family, he tells her how his hope had been that in his
soul she would have found tranquility, in his love the
dream that all her pain had passed away, in his love the
land of the ideal where alone she could forget reality2.
Exaltation, tinged with the dignity of his and her long
sorrow, has also its place in the song inspired by his love.
One of the finest of these poems casts a challenge to
a/igels and spirits. They are in a happy eternity, but
he is better off than they. For they do not know, as he
knows, resurrection after the bitterness of death. They
do not know, as he knows, the high betrothal of two
hearts, threatened with the pain of separation. They
do not know, as he knows, what is sorrow shared.
The flower of the white thorn on this sad earth lasts against
rains and storms and hurricanes. From pain it grows, from
sadness fructified. Spirits and angels! Such a flower you do
not know within your skies of blue, for it blooms only in a fount
of tears, for in the depths it grows and never on the heights.
To the Spirits (1840).
On the other hand a little song which Krasinski wrote
to Delphina on the eve of a journey to join his father
shows a grace and lightness of touch that are entirely
uncharacteristic of the Anonymous Poet.
I am stifled with my tears. My whole soul I gave to thee,
and to-day I must depart. And I loved thee so. Ah, parting
is as death. Yea, as death is parting.
>>
1 Letters to Delphina Pbtocka. Rome, 1839. Tygodnik Illustrowany,
1898.
2 Ibid, (undated). Tygodnik Illustrowany, 1899.
13--2
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? 196 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Yesterday was still so joyous. Lo! To-day may not be borne.
Ever greater grows my sorrow. And I loved thee so. Ah,
parting is as death. Yea, as death is parting.
Where I go is dark and desert, for thou wilt not be with me,
thou my angel, watching o'er me. And I loved thee so. Ah,
parting is as death. Yea, as death is parting.
But, by God! I shall return. Days of grief my will shall
shorten. I will sing joy's song again, new inspired to ecstasy.
Parting is not death. Not as death is parting.
While Krasinski was thus pouring out his heart to
his love, he sent Sottan a short poem, dated August 9,
1840, which he described as "a sudden explosion of the
soul1. " After his death it was published, with some
changes and omissions that the author had made, from
a later MS. under the title To the Muscovites. It is
remarkable as being perhaps the only one of Krasinski's
poems that speaks the language of a boundless hatred,
and is the strongest comment upon the moral victory
of his Psalms of the Future. Its power, its superb
disdain of moral abasement before the enemy, causes
one of Krasinski's Polish biographers to rank it with
the greatest utterances of its kind in persecuted
Poland3.
I know--for me the hangman's halter, the prison chain3 are
ready, if before you I do not bow my brow, if humbly crieth
not my stubborn soul: "It is not God Who is my lord, but you. "
Leave me in peace. I can find anywhere six feet of earth.
There is my home, narrow, but full of freedom, and better than the
castles where you dwell. There shall I be without you for the
first time in this world. I choose the darkness of the coffin rather
than the sun shared with you. If I could strangle you in one
embrace, thrust you all down into one pit, I would fain remain
in your hell-given conquest, and live on earth--for my dear
Lady's sake.
1 Letters to Sottan. Karlsbad, Aug. 9, 1840.
2 St. Tarnowski, Zygntunt Krasinski.
3 In the Soitan MS. it is first Siberia and then the halter. I follow the
text of the later MS. as given in the Jubilee edition.
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? Before the Dawn
197
Then, his tone suddenly changing, he speaks with
a tenderness that in itself explains the passion and
bitterness of the preceding lines. He speaks of his Lady,
his dying and afflicted country.
And I count the minutes before my beloved shall die, and
I with her will go to seek somewhere God. For in life I loved
her with such passion, loved her infinitely, loved her ever, every-
where, that my spirit bears her stamp for ever, and where she
is there I must also be. . . Whither goes she there I go with her,
where she halteth there I will with her remain. If overthrown
beneath the stone of death she may not rise again, then may
I neither rise!
So think of me no more, mine enemies! Vain is your labour,
for I desire not shame, and fear I do not know. If you would
tempt me you must seek temptation--in my grave. And when
ye are able to tempt the bodies that are dead, and to degrade
hearts that lie beneath the graveyard cross, then, and then only,
in my subterranean hovel will ye see degradation on my
corpse's face. So I await you, yea, when my heart is broken,
not before; for I sucked in with my mother's milk that to hate
you is beautiful and holy: and in that hatred lieth all my weal.
I would only sell it for the Polish crown, and for nought else,
not even for the veil that hides the image of the unknown
God.
About the time that Krasinski first met Delphina
Potocka he renewed his friendship with a Pole with
whom he had played as a child in the nursery under
the same French governess---the famous philosopher,
August Cieszkowski. Cieszkowski's work, and especially
his treatise on the Our Father, published in part in 1848
and subsequently after his death, has had an immense
vogue among students of philosophy, and largely in-
fluenced Polish thought. His conception of the develop-
ment of the spirit of humanity and of the three epochs
of history was so instrumental in shaping the theories
in which Krasinski found life that the poet could write
to him:
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? 198 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Twice you appeared to me in my life. Once when I was
childish wax you impressed yourself upon me: and the second
time when I was melted and boiling gold you again impressed
yourself upon me and for ever1.
In 1839, and for three years longer, Krasinski had
not yet found his soul. He was still in doubt and
transition, though walking towards the light. In this
state of mind he wrote in 1839 the Three Thougkts of
Henryk Ligenza, that were published the following year.
Under this collective name are comprised the poem
called The Son of Darkness and two allegories in poeti-
cal prose, The Dream of Cesara and A Legend. The
theme of the first is the human soul, that of the second
the destiny of the Polish nation, and the third deals
with the future of the Church. These matters--the
history of individual and collective man--were so
closely connected with each other in the Krasinskian
scheme that the continuous thread may be discerned
in the three dissimilar works2. They are preceded by
a short sketch in prose. The imaginary writer and his
wife are travelling in Sicily: and the little incidents of
their Italian experiences are told with a lightness and
humour such as we find in no other of Krasinski's
writings.
The travellers stumble across the traces of a Pole,
dead of consumption in the island. There is a touch
of true pathos when the Polish visitors search for the
forgotten grave of a lonely compatriot, and raise a
tombstone to tell the passer-by that a Pole lies there.
To papers purporting to have been left by this Pole
Krasinski gives the title: Three Thoughts of Henryk
Ligenza.
1 Letters to August Cieszkowski. Munich, Feb. 25, 1842.
2 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? Before the Dawn 199
Pantheism, Hegelianism, metempsychosis have all -
influenced the difficult poem, The Son of Darkness.
Polish critics differ considerably as to its literary merits:
we will therefore leave that side of it alone. Upon
the value of its matter opinions are also at variance1.
The theme is highly complicated and obscure, so that
as the present study is not a philosophical work perhaps
the writer may be excused for dealing with it some-
what cursorily.
The poem sets forth the origin of the human spirit
and its journey back to its last end. Some "unknown
power" cast it forth from darkness to the earth. "Half
slumbering," it wanders and gropes to the dimly dis-
cerned light, struggling with Titanic tortures, till it
clothes itself "in the garments of humanity," and,
becoming man, recognizes its own consciousness. In
its beginning it knows God only as the " lord of wrath. "
It endures suffering, yearning after God, by which it
advances to a higher life. Its throes are crowned by
the union of the Word with flesh, of God with man,
by the victory over evil and the "clay of the heart,"
which is the triumph of love2. Again returns a period
of longing, doubt and torment: but "the evil is only a
transition, only the highway's dust"; and the son of
darkness ascends, the son of light, to the stars.
Step ever further then, oh, son of light! Step to the
boundaries of the undiscovered worlds! . . . What thou didst
grasp with thought thou shalt with thy hand attain. What
thou didst feel by inspiration with thine eyes shalt thou behold.
There is no death. Before the spirit stretches cycle
1 Compare St. Tarnowski, op. cit. , with J. Kleiner, History of the
Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski, and Prof. Zdziechowski's Vision oj
Krasinski. Cracow, 1912 (Polish).
2 M. Zdziechowski, op. cit. J. Kleiner, op. cit.
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? 200 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
after cycle of life: and it passes through successive
transmigrations till at last more or less pantheistically
it is fused in the All Spirit of the Divinity, and hence-
forth through eternity must "think, love, create a
heaven in heaven1. "
The Dream of Cesara is once more national,
though the distinction between what we call Krasinski's
national writings and those in which he occupies him-
self with universal spiritual problems is more apparent
than real. Krasinski was led to the great interests of
humanity by the desire that they might throw light on
, the problem of his country. One enigma was the
complement of the other.
Neither The Dream of Cesara nor the Legend is
comparable to Krasinski's greater works. They are
written in his most highly decorated manner. Related
in the style of apocalyptic vision, they convey to the
reader's mind a strange sense of things seen in the
confusion of a dream. And, in fact, we have the testi-
mony of Mickiewicz who knew it from a friend of
Krasinski--Gaszynski, Dr Kleiner conjectures2--that
The Dream and the Legend were the poet's actual
dreams3.
A voice [Delphina's] called me by my name, "Cesara!
Cesara! " And I went forth I know not where, but that voice
will I follow, if needs be even to the end of the world.
1 Dr Kleiner gives an interpretation of the poem as referring to the
history of humanity in general. The allusion to the spirit's conception of
God as the "lord of wrath" is explainable by the Judaism that preceded
the Incarnation of Christ. The fresh sufferings that befall the spirit of
humanity after the time of Christ depict Krasinski's own epoch which he
hoped was to be merely the transition to the third and last epoch of
humanity. The spirit in the poem ascends to the other world: and here i
ends the earthly development of the human race. J. Kleiner, op. cit.
2 J. Kleiner, op. cit. 3 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? Before the Dawn
201
The voice leads him to a mighty cathedral. Its
elaborate description is modelled on Krasinski's remem-
brances of Freiburg cathedral where he had wandered,
surrounded, it seemed to him, by invisible spirits of
those who had died for their faith, and asking himself
if they would rise again1. Against a mysterious back-
ground of moonlight and music Cesara sees the hosts
of the nations, and among them the last Poles left on
earth, advancing in chains and mourning garb to the
tomb.
And grief encompassed my heart, and tears flowed to my
eyes. And the voice cried to me as the wind: "Cesara, Cesara,
behold the people who are going from the earth, and will return
no more. ". . . I heard the voices of multitudes crying: "Live and
be our slaves. "
The Poles prefer death. The floor of the cathe-
dral yawns before them and, accompanied by the
figure of Christ, they go down to their grave amidst
sorrowful music. Over their tomb lies a great stone
marked by the inscription written in blood: The Nation.
No trace of them remains: but a beautiful mourning
woman rises before the poet's eyes, the sister, says the
voice, of those who have fallen. "Like a dream though
ever visible," she, who Count Tarnowski hazards may
be the memory of his country, or the love of her or
hope for her, floats before him through nights and days,
through the mists of his vision, whither he knows not:
but whither she goes I go, and where she pauses there will I
halt, and where she disappears there will I disappear with her.
As they pass on they reach a spirit in the guise of
an old man seated on a rock above the mists, playing
a harp on which there is only one string left. In this
1 Letters to Sattan. Freiburg, Sept. 20, 1839.
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faces somewhere of old on the surface of the earth: but the
lightnings veiled their faces, the roar of the melting metals
stifled their wails.
Then the beautiful women of the conqueror's race
surround him, tempting him by their charms.
For two long hours of that night I saw how, entangled,
bewildered, struggling, he ever and anon besought the heavenly
Father for strength and virtue, then again in despair rushed
through the festal halls and sought a weapon to drive into his
breast: but found it nowhere.
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? The Deviation
Gradually he yields. He consents to betroth himself
to a "maiden of the alien race. " He sits by her side at
the banquet. Only when he sees through the glitter of
the feast the urn containing the ashes of his "slain
Mother" all grows dark before him, and his hand,
holding the goblet, trembles.
Ever more terribly wrestled his wandering soul, struggling
to return to its old faiths and hopes: but all that surrounded
him darkened his understanding with a heavy veil.
"The lord of life and death smiled graciously," and
bade him swear service to him and renounce his old
name. He flings him a handful of diamond crosses.
Word byword, the youth, "not hearing his own voice,"
repeats after the herald his abjuration of his country.
Crying "Shame" upon his own head, he rises and
escapes, mocked by all, cursing himself, and falls sense-
less in the courtyard.
This episode is no mere fancy. Krasinski wrote it
as a direct admonition to young Poles. The Pole who
accepted honours and decorations from the Tsar's hand
could only do so at the price of his nationality. Through
the apparently artificial passage throbs the grief of
a Pole who had seen his own father decorated by the
conqueror of his country.
The wretched boy comes to himself and to a speech-
less despair. Beside him is his mentor, who tells him
that:
"in another time and another place thou mightest have shone
a hero: but under a heavy test thou knewest not how to remain
virtuous. The seen reality overpowered for thee the invisible
but eternal truth. Thou art lost. "
Krasinski further developed the scheme implied in
these words, and those that follow. The nation that had
defended Europe by constant war against the Turk and
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? 190 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Tartar was now called to a sterner conflict: that of
a conquered people battling for moral life.
"The time for outward war has not yet come," is
the mentor's reply to the youth's passionate entreaty for
his horse and old weapon, with which he will avenge the
wrongs of his country and his own shame.
"Long must last the days of silent sacrifice. Hearest thou?
The enemies are pursuing thee. If they capture thee, for the
rest of thy life thou wilt be the slave of their will, the partici-
pator in their crimes. . . One only, one only means of salvation
hath remained for thee": and he drew forth his dagger.
"Strike! " cried the youth. "I die in the name of my Mother,
slain six times. "
And the old man kills him.
It will be seen that both A Summer Night and The
Temptation end in an immoral situation. In A Summer
Night it is the murder of the wife in her bridal chamber
at the hand of the lover in whose embrace she dies.
This may in part be put down as a piece of the Byronism
of the day: but the fact remains. It is more apparent
in The Temptation, where the murderer thanks God for
the crime he has committed, and prays that the blood
he has shed may flow before the heavenly throne with
that of the martyrs. Count Tarnowski sees in such false
positions a proof of the spiritual confusion into which
Krasinski had drifted when he wrote these words1. At
this time the Anonymous Poet, the future apostle of
hope, met despair face to face. In both poems death is
the only end to the intolerable national conditions2.
Krasinski's father had done what the youth of the
poem had done, and what Krasinski himself had not
done. This incurable wound that Krasinski carried in
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Deviation
191
his heart all his days gives its peculiar point to the whole
tale of the temptation and the fall. His anguish for
once--and for this once only--breaks the bounds of his
self-imposed silence: and the epilogue of The Tempta-
tion is the son's heart-broken lamentation for his father.
Oh, Mother, slain six times,when thou shalt arise from sleep,
when once more thou shalt seat thyself upon the fields of corn,
amidst green woods from sea to sea, and in the moment of the
renewal of thy youth shalt remember the long nightmare of
death, the fearful spectres of thy martyrdom, weep not for those
who died in thy name on the battlefields of their country or
beyond seas. Though vultures and wolves have torn asunder
their remains, happy are they. Nor weep for those who died
among executioners in deep dungeons. Though a prison torch
was their only star, though the harsh word of oppression was
their last farewell on earth, happy are they. But cast a tear of
. pity for the lot of those whose minds thy murderers duped with
the glitter of falsehood, because they could not by the command
of violence tear their hearts from thee. They, Mother, they
suffered more than thy other sons. Their deluded hopes pierced
like daggers their bosoms. In the secret of their souls were
waged a thousand unknown wars, bloodier than the battles that
thunder in the face of the sun to the ring of steel and the roar
of cannon. The glittering eyes of thy foes led them over the
icy slopes to the depths of the eternal cold: and on each mound
they halted and wept for thee--till their hearts were withered
for yearning, till their feet and handswasted away in the bondage
of invisible chains: and they became as living corpses, alone
amidst a hated people, alone in their own homes, they only
alone on the wide earth. My Mother, over their fate, over a
sorrow of sorrows, do thou, do thou, utter a soft word of memory.
1
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? CHAPTER IX
BEFORE THE DAWN:
THE THREE THOUGHTS AND
THE TREATISE OF THE TRINITY
(1839-1842)
In the early part of 1839 Krasinski was in Naples.
Each evening he was the guest of a Polish family.
In letters to Sottan he describes at length one of
the daughters, Delphina Potocka. She was separated
from a husband who had made her miserable, and
who had been the cause of the death of her five
young children. Beautiful, possessed of high mental
gifts, an exquisite singer, she had turned the heads of
Flahaut and of an Orleans prince. Chopin worshipped
her; and it was her voice that soothed his dying bed.
The first impression that she made upon Krasinski
was that of an "unbearable coquette1. "
"When," he wrote to Soitan, "I see human beings who
need no comforting it seems to me that they have no need of me.
Nothing attracts me to them. But it is exactly the reverse when
I see on anyone's brow the trace of mourning, stamped by the
vicissitudes of life. Then it is my dream that my words or my
friendship or a pressure of my hand may perchance wake new
life in that bosom. . . At first we quarrelled terribly, because
I would not bow my head before her externalyizjtow [the word
is in English]. We even quarrelled so much that she said
strangely disagreeable things to me and I to her. But when
1 Letters to Sottan. Naples, Jan. 1, 1839.
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? Before the Dawn 193
she changed her Parisian tone and began to speak sincerely,
I changed my tone too, and every evening sadly and mourn-
fully she describes her moral life to me, and I listen and some-
times cheer her1. "
Such was the opening passage of Krasinski's love
for the woman whom he has immortalized as his Beatrice.
Whether hers was in reality the nobility with which
Krasinski, who always idealized those he loved, invested
her is a question difficult to resolve where evidences
differ, and seems to us to matter little. The point re-
mains that under the influence either of what she really
was, or what Krasinski believed her to be, the Anony-
mous Poet reached the heights of poetical and national
inspiration of which Dawn was the first fruit. His love
for Delphina was of a far higher and more idealistic
nature than had been his for Mme Bobrowa. To the
latter he had never given his whole heart. He had, as
Count Tarnowski says, been in love rather with the
sentiment of love than with the woman herself2. But
for years, until after his marriage, he as he expressed it
lived in and for Delphina. With her he came to associate
his hopes for his country, his own resurrection from
death and despair.
"May God guard thee, love thee, bless thee," he wrote to
her from Rome in the end of the year when he had first learnt
to love her. "The power of prayer has again awakened in me for
thy sake. Each evening with my whole heart, my whole spirit,
I pray for thee8. "
"In your heart," he wrote the following day, "in your
intellect I felt myself once more, I gained life again; in the
desire to give you new strength, or to pour new thoughts into
your soul, I awoke a threefold power within myself. Through
1 Op. tit.
2 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Unknown Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Delphina Potocka,
published by R. S. Kaminski. Tygodnik lllustrowany. 1899 (Polish).
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? 194 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
you I became filled with strength and understanding. To-day
I am stupid and worth nothing. But love me for the reason
that a benefactress loves those on whom she bestows benefits,
that an angel guardian loves those he guards1. "
The series of Krasinski's love poems to Delphina
Potocka now begins. How different was the character
of his new love and his old may be gauged if merely from
the fact that it was only after Delphina's death, and long
after his own, that any eye but his and hers saw them2.
These exquisite lyrics are among the most beautiful of
Polish love songs. They carry the impress of two human
hearts that had suffered deeply in life. They crown a
human woman with the aureole of a patriot's devotion for
his country and with the light upon Poland's fate that
Krasinski always associated with Delphina Potocka.
Their note is that of a high idealism. Delphina is the
angel who shines upon the sadness of the poet's soul.
Through her he knows the lost spring once more. Through
her he learns again what happiness may be. She is the
sister, as Krasinski, who had yearned for a sister in his
lonely life, repeatedly calls her3; the sister saving a lost
brother. ''Descend into my hell and light my subter-
ranean darkness, even as an angel, with one ray of thine
eyes. Be my protection, be my hope and my salvation. "
Again I bid farewell to thee (Naples, 1840). "God
only," the poet sings in an early poem, "can count the
thorns in the garland of thy brow. I count them not,
1 op. tit.
2 Except that Krasinski enclosed two or three of the less intimate ones
in his letters to Gaszynski.
3 "I never had a sister, but I think there is no more beautiful relationship
on earth than that between brother and sister. " Letters to Adam Potocki.
Biblioteka Warszawska, May, 1905. And to Delphina: "Call me your
brother, for I feel myself to be the brother of your soul. " Tygodnik Illus-
trowany, 1898.
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? Before the Dawn
195
I only feel them, for I have taken all to the depths of
my soul, as though they were my own. " Scarce have
I known thee (Naples, 1839). He had bowed his head,
as he once told her, before the multitude of her suffer-
ings1: and again in one of his letters, when his love
for her was creating difficulties between herself and her
family, he tells her how his hope had been that in his
soul she would have found tranquility, in his love the
dream that all her pain had passed away, in his love the
land of the ideal where alone she could forget reality2.
Exaltation, tinged with the dignity of his and her long
sorrow, has also its place in the song inspired by his love.
One of the finest of these poems casts a challenge to
a/igels and spirits. They are in a happy eternity, but
he is better off than they. For they do not know, as he
knows, resurrection after the bitterness of death. They
do not know, as he knows, the high betrothal of two
hearts, threatened with the pain of separation. They
do not know, as he knows, what is sorrow shared.
The flower of the white thorn on this sad earth lasts against
rains and storms and hurricanes. From pain it grows, from
sadness fructified. Spirits and angels! Such a flower you do
not know within your skies of blue, for it blooms only in a fount
of tears, for in the depths it grows and never on the heights.
To the Spirits (1840).
On the other hand a little song which Krasinski wrote
to Delphina on the eve of a journey to join his father
shows a grace and lightness of touch that are entirely
uncharacteristic of the Anonymous Poet.
I am stifled with my tears. My whole soul I gave to thee,
and to-day I must depart. And I loved thee so. Ah, parting
is as death. Yea, as death is parting.
>>
1 Letters to Delphina Pbtocka. Rome, 1839. Tygodnik Illustrowany,
1898.
2 Ibid, (undated). Tygodnik Illustrowany, 1899.
13--2
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? 196 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Yesterday was still so joyous. Lo! To-day may not be borne.
Ever greater grows my sorrow. And I loved thee so. Ah,
parting is as death. Yea, as death is parting.
Where I go is dark and desert, for thou wilt not be with me,
thou my angel, watching o'er me. And I loved thee so. Ah,
parting is as death. Yea, as death is parting.
But, by God! I shall return. Days of grief my will shall
shorten. I will sing joy's song again, new inspired to ecstasy.
Parting is not death. Not as death is parting.
While Krasinski was thus pouring out his heart to
his love, he sent Sottan a short poem, dated August 9,
1840, which he described as "a sudden explosion of the
soul1. " After his death it was published, with some
changes and omissions that the author had made, from
a later MS. under the title To the Muscovites. It is
remarkable as being perhaps the only one of Krasinski's
poems that speaks the language of a boundless hatred,
and is the strongest comment upon the moral victory
of his Psalms of the Future. Its power, its superb
disdain of moral abasement before the enemy, causes
one of Krasinski's Polish biographers to rank it with
the greatest utterances of its kind in persecuted
Poland3.
I know--for me the hangman's halter, the prison chain3 are
ready, if before you I do not bow my brow, if humbly crieth
not my stubborn soul: "It is not God Who is my lord, but you. "
Leave me in peace. I can find anywhere six feet of earth.
There is my home, narrow, but full of freedom, and better than the
castles where you dwell. There shall I be without you for the
first time in this world. I choose the darkness of the coffin rather
than the sun shared with you. If I could strangle you in one
embrace, thrust you all down into one pit, I would fain remain
in your hell-given conquest, and live on earth--for my dear
Lady's sake.
1 Letters to Sottan. Karlsbad, Aug. 9, 1840.
2 St. Tarnowski, Zygntunt Krasinski.
3 In the Soitan MS. it is first Siberia and then the halter. I follow the
text of the later MS. as given in the Jubilee edition.
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? Before the Dawn
197
Then, his tone suddenly changing, he speaks with
a tenderness that in itself explains the passion and
bitterness of the preceding lines. He speaks of his Lady,
his dying and afflicted country.
And I count the minutes before my beloved shall die, and
I with her will go to seek somewhere God. For in life I loved
her with such passion, loved her infinitely, loved her ever, every-
where, that my spirit bears her stamp for ever, and where she
is there I must also be. . . Whither goes she there I go with her,
where she halteth there I will with her remain. If overthrown
beneath the stone of death she may not rise again, then may
I neither rise!
So think of me no more, mine enemies! Vain is your labour,
for I desire not shame, and fear I do not know. If you would
tempt me you must seek temptation--in my grave. And when
ye are able to tempt the bodies that are dead, and to degrade
hearts that lie beneath the graveyard cross, then, and then only,
in my subterranean hovel will ye see degradation on my
corpse's face. So I await you, yea, when my heart is broken,
not before; for I sucked in with my mother's milk that to hate
you is beautiful and holy: and in that hatred lieth all my weal.
I would only sell it for the Polish crown, and for nought else,
not even for the veil that hides the image of the unknown
God.
About the time that Krasinski first met Delphina
Potocka he renewed his friendship with a Pole with
whom he had played as a child in the nursery under
the same French governess---the famous philosopher,
August Cieszkowski. Cieszkowski's work, and especially
his treatise on the Our Father, published in part in 1848
and subsequently after his death, has had an immense
vogue among students of philosophy, and largely in-
fluenced Polish thought. His conception of the develop-
ment of the spirit of humanity and of the three epochs
of history was so instrumental in shaping the theories
in which Krasinski found life that the poet could write
to him:
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? 198 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Twice you appeared to me in my life. Once when I was
childish wax you impressed yourself upon me: and the second
time when I was melted and boiling gold you again impressed
yourself upon me and for ever1.
In 1839, and for three years longer, Krasinski had
not yet found his soul. He was still in doubt and
transition, though walking towards the light. In this
state of mind he wrote in 1839 the Three Thougkts of
Henryk Ligenza, that were published the following year.
Under this collective name are comprised the poem
called The Son of Darkness and two allegories in poeti-
cal prose, The Dream of Cesara and A Legend. The
theme of the first is the human soul, that of the second
the destiny of the Polish nation, and the third deals
with the future of the Church. These matters--the
history of individual and collective man--were so
closely connected with each other in the Krasinskian
scheme that the continuous thread may be discerned
in the three dissimilar works2. They are preceded by
a short sketch in prose. The imaginary writer and his
wife are travelling in Sicily: and the little incidents of
their Italian experiences are told with a lightness and
humour such as we find in no other of Krasinski's
writings.
The travellers stumble across the traces of a Pole,
dead of consumption in the island. There is a touch
of true pathos when the Polish visitors search for the
forgotten grave of a lonely compatriot, and raise a
tombstone to tell the passer-by that a Pole lies there.
To papers purporting to have been left by this Pole
Krasinski gives the title: Three Thoughts of Henryk
Ligenza.
1 Letters to August Cieszkowski. Munich, Feb. 25, 1842.
2 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? Before the Dawn 199
Pantheism, Hegelianism, metempsychosis have all -
influenced the difficult poem, The Son of Darkness.
Polish critics differ considerably as to its literary merits:
we will therefore leave that side of it alone. Upon
the value of its matter opinions are also at variance1.
The theme is highly complicated and obscure, so that
as the present study is not a philosophical work perhaps
the writer may be excused for dealing with it some-
what cursorily.
The poem sets forth the origin of the human spirit
and its journey back to its last end. Some "unknown
power" cast it forth from darkness to the earth. "Half
slumbering," it wanders and gropes to the dimly dis-
cerned light, struggling with Titanic tortures, till it
clothes itself "in the garments of humanity," and,
becoming man, recognizes its own consciousness. In
its beginning it knows God only as the " lord of wrath. "
It endures suffering, yearning after God, by which it
advances to a higher life. Its throes are crowned by
the union of the Word with flesh, of God with man,
by the victory over evil and the "clay of the heart,"
which is the triumph of love2. Again returns a period
of longing, doubt and torment: but "the evil is only a
transition, only the highway's dust"; and the son of
darkness ascends, the son of light, to the stars.
Step ever further then, oh, son of light! Step to the
boundaries of the undiscovered worlds! . . . What thou didst
grasp with thought thou shalt with thy hand attain. What
thou didst feel by inspiration with thine eyes shalt thou behold.
There is no death. Before the spirit stretches cycle
1 Compare St. Tarnowski, op. cit. , with J. Kleiner, History of the
Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski, and Prof. Zdziechowski's Vision oj
Krasinski. Cracow, 1912 (Polish).
2 M. Zdziechowski, op. cit. J. Kleiner, op. cit.
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? 200 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
after cycle of life: and it passes through successive
transmigrations till at last more or less pantheistically
it is fused in the All Spirit of the Divinity, and hence-
forth through eternity must "think, love, create a
heaven in heaven1. "
The Dream of Cesara is once more national,
though the distinction between what we call Krasinski's
national writings and those in which he occupies him-
self with universal spiritual problems is more apparent
than real. Krasinski was led to the great interests of
humanity by the desire that they might throw light on
, the problem of his country. One enigma was the
complement of the other.
Neither The Dream of Cesara nor the Legend is
comparable to Krasinski's greater works. They are
written in his most highly decorated manner. Related
in the style of apocalyptic vision, they convey to the
reader's mind a strange sense of things seen in the
confusion of a dream. And, in fact, we have the testi-
mony of Mickiewicz who knew it from a friend of
Krasinski--Gaszynski, Dr Kleiner conjectures2--that
The Dream and the Legend were the poet's actual
dreams3.
A voice [Delphina's] called me by my name, "Cesara!
Cesara! " And I went forth I know not where, but that voice
will I follow, if needs be even to the end of the world.
1 Dr Kleiner gives an interpretation of the poem as referring to the
history of humanity in general. The allusion to the spirit's conception of
God as the "lord of wrath" is explainable by the Judaism that preceded
the Incarnation of Christ. The fresh sufferings that befall the spirit of
humanity after the time of Christ depict Krasinski's own epoch which he
hoped was to be merely the transition to the third and last epoch of
humanity. The spirit in the poem ascends to the other world: and here i
ends the earthly development of the human race. J. Kleiner, op. cit.
2 J. Kleiner, op. cit. 3 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? Before the Dawn
201
The voice leads him to a mighty cathedral. Its
elaborate description is modelled on Krasinski's remem-
brances of Freiburg cathedral where he had wandered,
surrounded, it seemed to him, by invisible spirits of
those who had died for their faith, and asking himself
if they would rise again1. Against a mysterious back-
ground of moonlight and music Cesara sees the hosts
of the nations, and among them the last Poles left on
earth, advancing in chains and mourning garb to the
tomb.
And grief encompassed my heart, and tears flowed to my
eyes. And the voice cried to me as the wind: "Cesara, Cesara,
behold the people who are going from the earth, and will return
no more. ". . . I heard the voices of multitudes crying: "Live and
be our slaves. "
The Poles prefer death. The floor of the cathe-
dral yawns before them and, accompanied by the
figure of Christ, they go down to their grave amidst
sorrowful music. Over their tomb lies a great stone
marked by the inscription written in blood: The Nation.
No trace of them remains: but a beautiful mourning
woman rises before the poet's eyes, the sister, says the
voice, of those who have fallen. "Like a dream though
ever visible," she, who Count Tarnowski hazards may
be the memory of his country, or the love of her or
hope for her, floats before him through nights and days,
through the mists of his vision, whither he knows not:
but whither she goes I go, and where she pauses there will I
halt, and where she disappears there will I disappear with her.
As they pass on they reach a spirit in the guise of
an old man seated on a rock above the mists, playing
a harp on which there is only one string left. In this
1 Letters to Sattan. Freiburg, Sept. 20, 1839.
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