God in the World of Flesh and Blood. The Biblical Word in the Pious Songs of Wacław Potocki

Abstract

The paper presents the only collection of 51 works of Wacław Potocki. These are the Pious Songs of 1678. The author analyzes the presence of biblical inspiration in those lyrics which mostly refer by their titles to concrete parts of the Gospel, events and parables. The biblical word is mixed here with the everyday Sarmatian language, the saint figures are shown among the realities of the 17th century; the lyrical subject is endowed with a biographic experience of the poet himself and becomes a partner of the evangelical heroes. One of the dominating and obsessively recurrent motifs is the almost physically experience "kinship" between man and the incarnate God who had thus sanctified manhood and corporeity itself.