No More Learning

In the beautiful lines of his soul's autobiography
that open Dawn, Krasinski tells us how he was driven
by his enemies from his country to wander on alien
soil, hearing from afar the satanic cries of those who
had forged the chains of Poland.
At first I trusted that the God of pitying love, proud to the
proud, to the faithful full of faith; at first I trusted after days
but few He would send avenging angels from above, and burst
that grave which stands before the world. But the days passed
by, and passed away the years. In vain dawn struggled with
the blinded strength of night. No sun arose above the sainted
tomb, and ever more abased did this earth of ours become.
Then sank my soul into that chaos of doubt where all light is
changed into eternal night, where the highest works of courage
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like mouldering corpses rot, where the victories of ages in
heaped up ruins lie. And from all the cycle of those lived out
days one inscription standeth: There is no hope here.
Ah, I dwelt, dwelt long in that abyss, driven by wild rage
and despair that knew no shore. And death to me would then
have been but my second death. Like Dante, during life, I
passed through hell. But to aid me also a lady hastened down,
at whose very look the evil spirits fear. Me too an angel from
the precipice redeemed; and I too had a Beatrice of my own.
Oh, beautiful as she, from this world of gloom thou didst
not wing thy way, leaving me alone, and ascend to heaven to
dwell there, heavenly, without pain. Oh, beautiful as she, thou
wert more Christian far! For there where sorrow groweth,
there where tears are birth, there thou with thy brother
remainedst on this earth. Together walked we wearing one
self-same crown of thorns. Blood from my hands with blood
empurpled thine. And the same empoisoned draught of one
hellish spring we did drink together, oh, Beatrice of mine!
And yet, and yet my groaning and thy sighs, mingled,
flowing in each other, they passed away to song. From two
sorrows linked in bridal of the soul, one only voice was raised
--and oh, that voice was joy. Ah, joyousness of faith, ah,
mighty strength of hope, that into my heart returned from thy
look! Thus when clouds of darkness in the heavens, filled
with tears, gather to each other for aerial obsequies, from
their weeping by a roll of thunder sudden light is riven:
and the mist becomes the golden house of God.
And so this song, oh, sister, I open with thy name. Oh,
be linked with me for ever by the ring of one memory and
one love. Here we shall die, but the song that dieth not shall
return some day, true to me and thee, like an angel guardian
to watch us sleeping in our graves. And perchance the
moment cometh when, in the time of all the souls, we shall
rise, but no more in fleshly prison, rise once more united by
the chain of its harmony, and in the memory of human hearts
shall live, as a soul redeemed with a soul redeemed, pure and
shining forth and sanctified.
The scene of the series of lyrics that make up
Dawn is the lake of Como, on whose shores Krasinski
had spent some time in 1840, and where he had
probably begun his poem.
Albeit Krasinski often rises to heights of impersonal
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? 232 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
rapture he seldom speaks the language of pure joy. He
had indeed small reason in his life to do so. But in the
first lyric of Dawn high hopes for his country, love for
a woman, the beauty that surrounded him, all make up
one harmony of rejoicing in God, nature, man. He
and his Beatrice are in a boat upon the lake. The
snow-tipped mountains rise, peak upon peak, into the
Italian skies. Vines and roses cling about their slopes.
"There is one beauty, there is one God," is the
poet's cry. A few stars tremble in the skies. The
moon is rising over the Alps. On the boat stands
Beatrice, her hands on her harp. Her face, inspired,
shines as an angel's. Against the translucency of the
waves and the blue background of the sky, her figure,
silver in a web of moonlight, seems rapt to heaven.
Thou with me and we alone.
On the path with light all laden
Ever onward floats my boat.
Oh, the angels cannot feel
What I feel now in this hour.
Sister mine, to me it seemeth
That our holy one ariseth
At this moment from the coffin.
Ever further we are guided
By the moon across the waters.
Let us float, float thus unending
To peace--to light--to blue--to distance.
Waves are mirrors, mountains phantoms.
Heaven and earth are but one land.
What is real is slowly changing
To the world of the ideal,
To a dream of silver, crystal.
Let me dream, oh, let me dream.
But the shadow of sorrow soon steals back into
Krasinski's song. A son's bereavement of his mother
again breaks forth. He bids Beatrice be steadfast, for:
We raise our eyes on high, and when we see this nature,
1
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233
m it, beyond it we feel--God. In the changing sufferings of
this life, clasping each other by,the hand, in that suffering and
beyond it we feel--God.
We are the children of a mother slain,
We who never have beheld
How the light in mother's eyes
Shines as an angel's on her child.
Pray with me, oh, sister mine,
Pray, kneel in humility.
Gaze on high with piercing boldness
As the orphaned child may gaze.
Look upon that harp unending,
Where the moon, the stars, the suns,
Cling as keys all motionless.
From its depths and highest summits
Strings of light and strings of azure
Quiver, stretched to space unmeasured.
O'er those strings the spirit wanders,
On those strings the spirit playeth,
In that song alone it resteth:
That song--earth's harmony and peace.
One name is missing from this great harmony of
the universe, one ray absent from the symphony of
light. Beatrice must pray that God shall restore that j
lost name of Poland.
As God is in heaven so will He necessarily give us our
second body. For we have fulfilled the test of the grave. Our
right is resurrection. To-day or to-morrow Thou wilt give it,
Lord! Oh, Thou wilt give it for Thy justice' sake; not because
Thou owest it to us, but to Thyself.
When I spoke thus thou wert kneeling,
Wailing with thy harp's stringed wailing;
For thou leanedst thy snow-white forehead
On the strings the moon made shiver
All around in streams of gold.
And thus kneeling thou wert sighing.
Pray, oh, sister, with thy sighing.
God knows well that in this day
Sighing is thy country's name.
The poet then proceeds to his favourite theory, the
only one by which he could explain his nation's fate,
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? 234 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that Poland is the victim for the world's political
redemption, and that love and self-sacrifice are the
condition of life.
Think you then that she who loveth,
And that dieth she Shall perish?
To your eyes, to eyes dust laden,
Not to self, nor to all life.
Who dies in sacrificing self,
Floweth into lives of others,
Dwells in human hearts in secret:
With each day, each little moment,
Groweth living in that grave,
Even as God Who is in heaven,
Gives to all and gives herself,
Xet her strength is not diminished1.
Long invisible remaining,
Ever heard in depths of hearts,
She with fire must burn their stains,
Melt with tears the soul's hard boulders:
By the grave's toils, by its sorrows,
By the harmonious song of death,
She, although herself dismembered,
Shall join all peoples in one love.
Ah, in vain you dream your dream,
Mortals who would take away
Life from that which is immortal.
You have wounded but the body.
Know you not that love and death
In the spirit world are one?
He on earth is everlasting
i Who with death gives birth to life:
He who with his life gives death
When he dies shall rise no more.
Krasinski inherited the strong idealism of the Polish
race. He had no more mercy for the materialist and
the Pharisee than he had for the tyrant and executioner.
To these the above passage is addressed: and now he
1 This idea Krasinski had developed fully in The Treatise of the Trinity,
arguing from the fact that as God in giving out of Himself in His creation
of the finite detracts nothing from His all Being, so in our far off way what
we give of ourselves we rather gain than lose.
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? Dawn 235
v
pours upon them, standing as they do in the way of
humanity's moral progress, all the invectives of a
generous wrath. Again he turns to Beatrice. He bids
her no longer weep. Before the moon sets he will show
her a miracle that is "above oppression, above pain. "
And so begin the three visions of Dawn.
"Knowest thou"--he speaks to Beatrice--"the love which
eternally lures the soul to the land of memory? Does the cry
of the angel of home call thee by night, and bid thine eyes
gaze on the living faces of those long since dead?
"Knowest thou that dumb, winter steppe where in their
graves the spirits of our fathers sleep? "
It is lit by no stars, only by the ghost-like face of
the moon. There is nothing but the white, desolate
steppe, with the graves that alone stand out black from
the snow. They seem to wander--the poet and Beatrice
--in the endless night of a dream.
'Neath the steppe is mournful murmuring.
All the graveyard trembles, living.
From the graves blow prayers and wailings.
Somewhere swords are rattling hollow.
Clash of armour stern I hear,
As if our fathers, to this moment
Life remembering, craving glory,
Now within their tombs are turning,
On their sides, for they are dreaming
In death's sleep of Poland's sorrow.
Lo, each grave is opened widely,
Giving thee the dead again.
Pallid army of our fathers,
Kings of old, and lords of council,
Warriors and soldiers' leaders,
Gather closely all around thee.
The cemetery of ice and gravestones
To Diet, army, Poland changeth.
The "spark of the spirit," the old splendour of the
Polish senator, the courage and contempt of slavery of
an ancient race, still shine on those dead faces through
the corruption of the grave.
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? 236 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
I beheld them. I wept sorely
In that white land of my dreams.
I beheld them, and before them
Even as falls a corpse I fell.
At their feet I bowed my forehead,
And to them I stretched my hands.
There with tears, cries, my heart's passion,
Asked I them of Poland's death,
I, born after Poland's death.
Wherefore life in life's short moment
Did they squander with such pride,
That nothing to their sons remaineth
Nor of power nor of possession;
In the stead of mother country
But a torn dismembered corpse?
Scarce I spoke: and lo! their armour
Rattled with a hollow music.
From all breasts a cry was uttered,
All those eyes that once were dead
From beneath their helms as torches
Flamed upon me. All together
Their right hands were stretched on high,
Veiling with their cloud the moonlight.
'Here, before, behind, beside me,
Stand they in a mighty crowd.
Hear I on all sides their breathing,
And their scornful laughter hear,
Till they tore my heart asunder
With their scorn: even heart of steel
Must have broken.
He implores the spirits to take their anger from
him, to tell their son, as only they can, "the holy
truth. " He is answered by the poet's favourite national
hero, the Grand Hetman Czarniecki, the Polish cham-
pion who drove the Swedish conqueror out of Poland
in the seventeenth century, and who won equal renown
against the Russians and Cossacks. He tells the poet
that he grew not from ease or pleasure, but from pain.
"God lays down His promises to those whom He makes
suffer. God's grace drove us into these pathless ways.
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? Dawn
237
For to my country He gave rather to die than live
ignobly. " If Krasinski's ancestors had, following in
"the steps of the world," supported "that edifice which
stands about Poland," that is, the lust for annexation
and disregard of political morality on the part of
Poland's neighbours to which she owes her dismember-
ment, Poland would now be "not a nation but only a
shop. Eternally from all sides fate was driving us
across the open fields of history to a higher lot, to that
Poland which shall be. " Krasinski always italicizes this
phrase. "We walked thither in the ways of old. To-
day you are walking thither by the ways of youth.
From our blood and from our faults, before this age
shall pass away, shall rise the one people of the peoples.
Bless the faults then of your fathers. "
In this passage, perplexing to those who have not
followed the trend of Polish history, Krasinski is draw-
ing upon the historical mysticism which is also very
marked in the writings of Mickiewicz. The constitu-
tion of Poland, anarchical and subversive of order as
most English writers are fond of terming it, was founded
on spiritual political principles that were almost un-
recognized in the other European states. The duty of
every citizen to take his share in the government of his
nation was the origin of the necessary unanimity of
vote that led to the liberum veto with its disastrous
results. To the legislator of the hour it was incon-
ceivable that a citizen of the Polish Republic should
use his right of protest for any reason except the
benefit of his country. The cause of the internal dis-
orders of Poland, when not fomented by foreign
intriguers, is to seek in the love of liberty carried by
the Pole of the past to excess. In obedience to her
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? 238 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
high conception of the obligations of political morality,
to her faith in the good will of the states that sur-
rounded her, her disbelief in the possibility of such a
violation of moral law as the partition of a living
country, Poland neglected her military defences so that
when the hour of her end sounded she had practically
no armies to defend her against Russia, Austria and
Prussia combined1. Wars of conquest, assassination of
the sovereign, never entered into Poland's scheme.
All this throws light on Krasinski's exaltation of his
country. And yet love never blinded his eyes to her
failings.
Had it done so he could not have been the
great national teacher that he was.
The Hetman has spoken and sinks back into the
tomb. The steppe shakes; the sky dissolves; all pass
into the unsounded abysses of the poet's soul. But the
voice of the dead with the message it uttered still
trembles in the listener's ear.
The two dreamers are again upon the lake. Mists
shroud the mountains. The moon has sunk within
them. But:
'Tis no wind that there is whispering.
Someone softly weepeth, sigheth.
O'er the shores a wail is spreading.
On the night wind through the heavens
Thousand wailings run towards us.
All the bank, the crags and mountains,
Are resounding, one deep prayer.
'' M ighty God! " cries the poet. '<<Can this be ? " for
he sees once more the spirits of his fathers.
1 See among others Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. E. Starczewski,
LEurope et la Pologne. Paris, 1913. In consideration of the profound
ignorance concerning Poland in our country it is necessary to point out
that modern Polish policy, while retaining its high ideals, has become the
most practical of activities.
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? Dawn
239
Beyond the waters, there before us, J2.
As light dreams, light multitudes
On the rocks and crags are floating.
As will-o'-the-wisps, as wavering flamelets,
Now they rise, and now they fall.
Strike, oh, sister, strike thy strings.
Let the song more surely lure them.
Play in all thy music's thunder,
Play them: Poland hath not perished \
With harp and voice, weep, pray, and madden!
The song our nation sings shall surely
Draw them here from far off distance.
Is it miracle or mirage?
Sparkles in thy hands the music.
All the harp is glimmering, burning.
Each note from the strings unwinding
Shakes the air in fiery flaming.
Above the waves the song is burning.
To the ghosts it runs, it driveth,
Flaming ever and ever ringing.
In the original this passage is written in short
nervous lines, imitating the voice of the harp, and
quivering with the beautiful shades of harmonies and
echoes to which the Polish language, with its peculiarly
rich onomatopoeia, lends itself in a manner that is im-
possible to reproduce in English. I have only been
able to attempt to render its sense, not its sounds.
It is interesting to notice the connection here of
light and music of which we have heard much in
these latter days. We meet it also in Mickiewicz's
Improvization in the Third Part of The Ancestors1.
He, we know, took it from Saint-Martin.
"To the flashing of those sounds" the phantoms
advance across the waves.
1 Poland hath not perished was the war-song of the Polish legions
fighting under Napoleon, and has ever since remained one of the most
beloved and soul-stirring of Polish national songs.
2 See my translation in Adam Mickiewicz, the National Poet of Poland.
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? 240 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
There the horsetails, there the standards,
Fluttering snow white plumes and crowns1,
There the Catholic cross uplifted,
Shields and coats of arms and ensigns,
And a host of swords and helms.
Seest thou that face angelic?
As a star upon the darkness
On high, on high, she floats, she rises,
Wanes, and glimmers, quivers, flames.
Lo! her veil of blue and crimson
Shines about her as a rainbow.
Set with pearls and set with flowers
Flashes forth her crown of diamonds.
Welcome, welcome! She, the Queen,
Long a widow of her people,
To-day returneth to her kingdom
Which in Polish Czenstochowa
Erst our fathers gave to her,
And those fathers o'er these billows
Lo, she leadeth2.
Play no longer.
To the waves of such a rainbow
Harp of ours can sound no more,
Cannot lure the spirits here.
'Tis God's light that now has touched them.
Gold the lake around them shimmers,
Flasheth dawn upon their helmets.
In war array of ancient Poland,
Now all golden, all divine,
Sweep they into far off spaces,
As again to battle hastening.
With drawn swords and eyes upraised to their star-
crowned queen they follow her into unknown regions.
1 The horsetails were the insignia in ancient Poland of the Grand
Hetman. The Polish hussars wore white plumes attached to their shoulders
that were an efficacious means of terrifying the enemy's horse in a charge.
2 After Czenstochowa in 1655 had been the scene of an almost miracu-
lous repulse of the Swedish invaders of Poland John Casimir solemnly
placed Poland under the protection of the Blessed Virgin, proclaiming
her as Queen of Poland, which title the Poles retain in their prayers and
hymns to the present hour. The imagery of Krasinski's vision is taken
from the ancient painting of the Madonna at Czenstochowa, whither for
centuries Polish pilgrims have resorted.
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In ecstasy the poet cries aloud that she who once crushed
the serpent's head is descending to vanquish him for
the second time, as the herald of the new day when
the reign of justice shall begin in the world, and the
Polish nation conquer. His hymn is now turned to the
heavenly Queen of Poland.
Lo! the hour of mercy striketh!
With thee, by thee, the eternal
Thought that liveth in the heavens
Now begins to live on earth.
Float thou, float thou, God's own lily,
Over lan,ds and over oceans,
Over caverns deep of hell.
The old enemy shall cower at her feet, and her
Polish soldiers transfix him with their swords.
Then, oh, then and for all ages
God shall wipe away our tears.
The celestial army hastens ever further over the
water, to the east, the dawn. The snows redden in the
rays of morning. The spirits are seen no more. "They
have gone with the light--and with hope. "
The night has passed, but from its shadows
Faith remaineth in our bosoms,
And that faith fate cannot alter;
Ours, oh, ours is all the future.
Therefore: "all is mine and all is fair," cries he
whose hope was drawn only from inward vision, when
every outward circumstance pointed against its fulfil-
ment.
Mine the earth, the plains of heaven.
With the voice of life shall I
Make these rocks to ring again;
For God's word is in my heart.
Miracles are here and marvels.
Lo, my Poland--Poland shall be!
g. 16
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? 242 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
And he breaks into a song of thanksgiving, praising
"God, the spirits, man and thee," praising the living
and the dead, praising the universal world.
The third and culminating vision follows. Thought
I has left earth and is where the poet knows not nor can
( repeat: neither below nor on high, neither in the waters
! nor in the clouds, but in some depthless space, in the
translucence of eternal light, in an ocean beyond time.
There the exiles behold their Poland in the triumph
which she has won by her suffering. Krasinski never
goes further in the mystic exaltation of his country than
in this scene. She is as a mighty archangel, whose look
is lightning. She carries the purple garland of memory,
but all her sorrows are now past. "Beyond her, high
and far, in time and space, on backgrounds of flaming
light, on backgrounds of shadow, rise as mists in flame,
in the vapours of rainbows, the god-like phantoms of
i that world which shall be"--again Krasinski emphasizes
the words that were his hope. The verdure of new-
born life, the roses of spring, are round their brows.
They cast their crowns with a hymn of joy, while below
them "trembles in space a sea of sapphire light," at the
feet of her whom they hail as queen. Each wreath
bursts forth into rainbow hues. The rain of falling
flowers is one great flashing dawn, and the figure of
Poland is caught in a cloud of light and glory. The
voice of the Eternal Father speaks from heaven: "As
I gave My Son to the world so now I give to it thee,
oh, Poland": the idea being the theory we have seen
in The Treatise of the Trinity, and which was Kra-
sinski's firmly held tenet, that as Christ redeemed man-
kind by His death, so He appointed that one victim
nation should save the political universe also by death.
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? Dawn
243
And I saw the all universe
As one thought that is in flame.
Oh! I saw the all present form
Of God's glory without end,
Winds of comets, rings of planets,
Streams of stars o'er streams of stars,
Still more suns above the suns.
And across the seas of light
Flowed one harmony of life,
Song all thundering, all united,
Of the heavens, of the Son,
To the heavenly God the Father.
Athwart the all world unto God
Went the road of earthly nations:
And my Poland as their leader
Thither soared!
Whose eye
Can overtake her to those heights?
Who shall touch with earthly forehead
Even the feet of the Creator?
Who shall soar with the archangel
Where humanity takes flesh?
Now my heart faints in my bosom.
Vision fades, my thought is failing.
Oh, so madly I entreated,
Oh, so long I prayed to God
For that one, that only moment--
And I saw!
In that hour
Oh, remember that we were
On the highest height of souls--
There whence flows the source of life.
At the source of life we drank.
With our very eyes we grasped
What is still without a name.
Sister mine, we in that moment
Lived in our eternity.
They return to reality, but a changed reality : one
that is still labour and sadness, but to which a high
calling has given dignity, hope, purpose.
Throw off sadness, throw off terror.
Well I know what toil remaineth
16--2
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? The Anonymous Poet of Poland
On the road; what pain, what sorrow.
Trust thee to the poet's vision.
The dawn of victory now shines.
In our native land immortal,
On that soil so dearly loved,
On our soil, that soil of ours,
Shall arise a race renewed,
Never yet by man beheld.
And that new world all rejoicing
As a church shall flower to God.
The Polish land, the Polish Eden,
The desert of an age-long sadness,
Is desolate no more nor mourning.
Nor behind me nor before me
Is there darkness any more.
All is light and all is justice.
Clear is now our hallowed past,
Clear our purgatorial anguish.
Never shall thy spirit perish,
Poland mine, who art transfigured.
O'er earth's whirlwinds thou hast entered
To the land of the idea.
What the eye alone beholdeth
It shall pass into the ocean,
It shall fade away in chaos:
But the idea shall never die.
And so Krasinski's country, standing to him for
that deathless ideal:
Art to me no more mere country;
Thou art now my faith, my law.
Who betrays thee, who thee wrongeth,
Lieth he against his God:
because Poland is the depositary of God's thought, and
her resurrection the pledge of the future epoch of
humanity.
God Eternal of our fathers!
Thou, Who high and far away,
Ever clearer through the ages
Descendest to us, and, dawn-like, strewest
From the eternal gates Thy sparks
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? Dawn
245
O'er time's waves until time flameth!
Now, again, Thy dawn is dawning
Which Thou in Thy love dost grant us.
In the graves the bones shall tremble,
Sighing in a hymn to Thee.
For our souls' and bodies' suffering,
For our hundred years of torment,
We do give Thee thanks, oh, Lord!
We are poor, and weak and feeble,
But from this martyrdom of ours
Has begun Thy reign on earth.
All warring elements shall be united in love. No
longer is the earth's cry of pain the sound that runs
through space, but in its stead a song of melody and
joy. The powerful shall oppress the weak never again.
Christ shall rule the world as He rules over heaven.
And so this song of a nation's resurrection closes in a
rapture of rejoicing that we cannot but believe hymns
likewise the deliverance of the poet's own soul from the
dark and desolate places in which he had long
wandered. The terrible past is but a dream.
Long the power of that dream.
We believed it. We believed
In eternal pain and toil.
It was but the sanctuary's entrance;
But one step upon the stairway.
It was but the night of merit.
Human heart, where now thy shame?
Look into thyself, oh, gaze!
Where of old was bitter weeping,
Rage and cries and lamentation,
Lo, to-day of heaven's high mercy
Is the second house of God.
"Thus," sings the poet in the epilogue, "two exiles dreamed
in the dawning of a better dawn.