Poems with a Date. Cyprian Norwid's Do Tytusa M. [`To Tytus M.']

Abstract

The poem Do Tytusa M. has not enjoyed much popularity with Norwid's commentators. One reason why it is not regarded as important is that it was written to mark a particular, private occasion. The view that the poem was meant for momentary use is supported by where it was first made public: in the album of its addressee, the Polish pastellist Tytus Maleszewski, and then in the Warsaw feuilleton Gwiazdka. The present writer suggests that the poem should be interpreted within the context in which it first appeared, i.e. as an element of the public dispute of the years 1857-1860 concerning Polish art, relations between the Emigration and home, commercialization of culture, etc. If we consider the first placements of the poem bearing in mind the articles published in the Paris „Wiadomości Polskie” in 1857, the momentary quality associated with the album and the feuilleton reveals itself to have been rather a permanent disposition of the Warsaw intellectual circles, palpably felt since the defeat of the 1831 uprising. Owing to its theme (an intended portrait) and its album form, the poem occupies a place, not on the margins, but in the very midst of the heated discussion conducted in the home and emigration press.

The present author's interest in the public dimension of the poem is not to be taken to mean that she chooses to lose from view Norwid's poetic diction. The complexities of Norwid's idiom are signalled in the poem by the motif of the stone pine with its semantic associations, which must have been important to the translator of parts of the Divine Comedy and the Odyssey. In connection with that motif, the author considers the distinction between what might be called an „artistic” attitude and a condition thoroughly determined by biological, social and historical circumstances.