“Rags on fire are floating around”. On the deprecated world of things in Norwid’s writing

Abstract

The article is an attempt at describing and defining the role and function of depreciated things in Norwid’s poetry. The author points out that their material imperfection is the stigma of the contemporary world. He also points out that the destroyed things-symbols bearing the hallmarks of allegory are the carriers of cultural memory that is an integral part of everyday life of Norwid’s heroes. The main concern of this analysis involves the examination of different types of memory in the poet’s works, their disturbance in the process of perception of things. The author refers, among others, to Heidegger’s views on the “failure” of things in their existence. In his reflections, he contextually evokes the works by Mickiewicz and Baudelaire.