The Seven-Stringed Rainbow. Józef Bohdan Zaleski and Cyprian Norwid

Abstract

Cyprian Norwid knew the work of Józef Bohdan Zaleski before 1847, the year marking the start of an acquaintance that was later to grow into a friendship. Norwid held the much older poet in high esteem for his goodness and integrity; Zaleski for his part supported and helped Norwid. Some of Norwid’s early poems contain allusions to Zaleski’s works, but they demonstrate the independence of Norwid’s position as a poet. Norwid indirectly evaluated some features of Zaleski’s poetry as “little gems”. The romantic poet would often dream of himself as a bird; thus for instance Adam Mickiewicz compared himself to an eagle, but Zaleski saw himself rather as a small singing bird (he was popularly called the nightingale of Ukraine). The topos of the poet as a bird appears for example in Duch od stepu, a poorly executed epic poem where the narrator's whole life is apprehended in terms of a myth or fairy-tale. Zaleski’s dreamlike attitude led some critics to regard him as a mystic, but his was an ardent devotion of a traditional sort. He even tried prayers at a retreat in a Trappist monastery as a remedy for his want of poetic inspiration - and yet his religious poetry is pale and banal. All the same, Zaleski’s Catholicism brought him close to Norwid. The latter did not at first try to probe the foundations of Zalcski’s putative greatness. Indeed, he expected Zaleski to produce revelations and almost prophetic visions of Poland’s fates. The general opinion of Zaleski as a great poet had been sanctioned by Mickiewicz in his College de France lectures, where Zaleski had earned the name of the foremost poet of the Slavs. This accolade aroused the epic ambitions of the bard, which were further nourished by his Beatrice, Dionisia Poniatowska. Intoxicated by his own passing inspiration. Zaleski lacked self-criticism and churned out thousands of octosyllables before his wings drooped. Juliusz Słowacki mocked him in secret: but young Norwid was under the spell of Zaleski’s harmonious though rather puerile personality. Norwid paid tribute to the ‘'master’’ in two poems addressed to him (dated 1847 and 1851), which can be called variations on themes from Zaleski because they capture many characteristics of his work, such as colourfulness, musicality, artistry of verse and birdlike lightness. In a later lecture on Słowacki Norwid set forth his own hierarchy of the Polish romantic poets, putting Słowacki at the top and Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński and Zaleski as equals in second place. In Norwid’s opinion, the melodious Zaleski brough “feminine” qualities into Polish poetry, to match the “feminine song" of the southern Slavs, where “masculine'' poetry is heroic while "feminine" poetry is tender and intimate. Zaleski himself recognized the primacy of Mickiewicz and was impressed and somewhat disheartened by Slowacki’s art in the first five cantos of Beniowski (published in 1841). In the digressions of Beniowski he heard a note of pride and anger. It was only in the later epigrams that he recognized the great romantic trio: Mickiewicz, Krasiński and Słowacki. Norwid in another place wrote of “Bohdan’s harmonica of stars” but he paid less attention to the topos of bird, where some interesting associations can be found. A bird flies, but in Zaleski it “blows itself aloft” with its wings. Air, flight, song, the whistle of wind - these are the bird’s element and mode of being. The wind may bring smells of the steppe and visible clouds of fog. The song, too, “blows itself aloft”; angels “blow songs”. Zaleski's colours and images are thus devoid of epic concreteness; time is the sphere of music and changing lights. Zaleski’s composition is dominated by musical patterns: repetitions, recurrences, strophic refrains, symmetries of sound, syntax and intonation. The refrains gradually become more and more asemantic and turn into mere folderols. In glosses to his texts the poet sometimes justified them as being of folk origin; he drew on folklore by quoting and imitating folk songs. Still, Zaleski's readers liked him for the musical form and tender mood of his poems. It is possible, then, to look for discreet objections against this sugary and easy poetry in Norwid. What Norwid criticised the equally “feminine" Teofil Lenartowicz for can be applied to Zaleski. In Norwid’s mature and poetically innovatory volume Vade-mecum there is a poem called Cacka (“Little Gems") which attacks easy, mawkish, idyllic poetry that “never touched the ground”. Nor did Norwid approve of simple quotation of folklore. He could not bear rhythmic threshing sound or the tramp of dance in a poem. This may be regarded as an expression of dislike for the accentual-syllabic system then advocated by Ludwik Jenike in Warsaw. Yet Norwid never formulated his attack directly, and Zaleski's high standing on Parnassus became a tradition, mainly owing to his lyrical poems and the shorter epics. Decline began after Zaleski’s llcath. The editor of his Dzieła pośmiertne (“Posthumous Works"), Stanisław Tarnowski, no longer upheld Mickiewicz’s opinion, but he pointed out the high quality of Zaleski’s later lyrical poems devoted to the memory of his friends and fellow writers. Zaleski's system of values comprised, in Tarnowski’s words, the quint of: God, world (i.e. mankind), Slavic world, Poland and the Ukraine - the country of his childhood. That harmonious quint was marred by the dissonance of a sixth, Pan-Slavism promoted by tzarist Russia. This is cvidenced by a lampoon against the Pan-Slavic congress in Moscow in 1868. Similar points are to be found in Norwid. The discord in Zaleski’s quint spelt failure of his romantic dream of the brotherhood of the Slavic peoples and their historic mission. The positivist Piotr Chmielowski wrote of the defeat of Zaleski in another sense: his breach with Polish society. Zaleski’s failure as an artist was less widely recognized; it was mentioned by Marian Gawalewicz; his remarks bear witness to a change of attitude towards the dead poet, whose work had nothing to offer to the writers of Young Poland. In search of an alternative poetic tradition, some representatives of Young Poland turned instead to Norwid.