As will-o'-the-wisps, as
wavering
flamelets,
Now they sink, and now they rise.
Now they sink, and now they rise.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
'
"And the sun rose above the ruins of Rome.
And there was none whom I might tell where
were the traces of my Thought--but I know that
it lasts and lives. "
Irydion is the confession of one who knew the
onslaughts of despair and hatred, and who over-
came them, both for himself and his nation, by
holding fast to the principles of an unflinching
national morality. Criticising his drama from the
ethical standpoint, which was the only aspect
under which Krasinski ever spoke of his work in
his correspondence with his friends, the poet said:
"To prove its truth, the author might call
upon the shades of the dead and the tears of the
living. He might ask many a one: 'Didst thou
not feel this, didst thou not dream thus ? ' And
many a one would answer: 'It is so. ' Not many
a one, but a whole nation. "A
V III
The development of Krasinski's thought was
not, as might have been imagined, a triumphal
progress from Irydion onwards. After the com-
pletion of the latter, darkness and confusion
swept down upon the poet. From his own testi-
mony in the opening lines to Dawn, we know that
it was his grief for his country that shook both his
* Letters of Zygmunt Krasinsii. Vol. I. To Constantine
pasizynski, June 6, 1837.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 145
religious and national faith, always closely inter-
woven in Krasinski's soul. At this time he wrote
but little, and nothing that was worthy of his
genius, chiefly obscure allegories in poetic prose,
overladen with excessive imagery, tinged here
and there with pantheism, and indicative of the
spiritual perplexity in which he dwelt. Yet
through The Temptation, The Summer Night,
through the strange, nightmare visions of the
Three Thoughts, there runs the one thread that
nothing could ever destroy or weaken in Kras-
inski's life, which was at once his ruling passion
and the chief source of all his suffering: devotion
to Poland. They are the cry of one bewildered
with pain, unable to see with certainty his nation's
deliverance.
Curiously enough, Krasinski, the dreamer, the
poet, the mystic, was above all things a logician.
His national philosophy must be founded on a
rational system, it must convince his mind no less
than his heart, before it could satisfy him. Through
the years of mental suffering that stretched be-
tween the writing of Irydion and Dawn, he was
seeking a theory that would give the key to the
mystery of PolandVtragedy, provide her with a
hope, proclaim a vocation for her in the future.
Every philosophical development, every political
event, was significant in this connection alone. At
last, he found what his soul had asked. Dawn is
the hymn of his spiritual and patriotic victory.
His idea may be thus roughly summarized.
The signs of the times that immediately preceded
the birth of Christ--religious doubt, moral de-
cadence, strange faiths--are almost identical with
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? 146
POLAND
those of Krasinski's age. The conquests of Julius
Csesar paved the way for the coming of Christ by
obliterating the frontiers between nations. In
the nineteenth century we have the Napoleonic
conquests; and these, in their turn, prepared the
world for Christ's second and spiritual advent.
Not again in our flesh. But as He christianized
the individual, so now He will christianize govern-
ments, and harmonize the relations between them
and their subjects, between nation and nation.
As long as the dismemberment of Poland, that
crime against law and right, is permitted to be
an established fact, so long is Christ's intention
violated. Her restoration will be the herald of
the transfiguration of the political sphere into
the religious sphere, an earnest of the higher epoch
of the world's history.
Thus Krasinski in his prose introduction to
Dawn* And hence the mystic rapture with which
he can announce to his people that Poland's
death leads to her resurrection, her shame to the
glorious re-birth of the human race.
"Hodie scietis quia veniet Dominus et salvabit
nos et mane videbitis gloriam ejus. " These words
from the office of his Church for Christmas Eve,
Krasinski places at the head of the poem that is
one of the noblest expressions in literature of a
nation's suffering and a nation's hope.
As Dante's Divina Commedia is the spiritual
apotheosis of a woman, so Dawn is the idealization
of her whom Krasinski etherealized as his Beatrice,
and who likewise inspired Poland's greatest
See. Chapter II.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI i4>
musician--Delphina Potocka. F In the lines which*
open Dawn the poet sings how he was driven forth
from the land of his fathers to tread strange soil,
hearing from afar the triumphal cries of those who
had laid his country low. ?
"Like Dante, during life, I passed through hell.
"At first, I trusted that the pitying God, Who
is 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 that 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 grave of saints;
and ever more abased did this earth of ours be-
come. Then sank my soul into that chaos of doubt,
where all light is changed into eternal night:
and, from all the circle 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 a measureless despair. My death
would then have seemed to me but my second
death. Like Dante, during life, I passed through
hell. But, to aid me also, a lady hastened down,
before whose very look the evil spirits fear. Me,
too, an angel from the pit 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, to ascend to heaven--heavenly--to dwell
there without pain. Oh, beautiful as she, thou wast
more Christian far! For there, where sorrow
* Chopin dedicated a piano concerto to Delphina Potocka ; and
it was she who came and sang to him when he lay dying.
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? 148 POLAND
groweth, there, where tears are born, there, thou
with thy brother didst remain upon this earth.
Together walked we, wearing the 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 to-
gether, oh, Beatrice of mine.
"And yet, and yet my groaning and thy sighs,
mingled with 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 by
thy look! So do clouds of darkness, full of tears
above, meet each other for a funeral in the skies.
Light is torn forth from their weeping by a blast
of thunder; and the mist becomes the golden
house of God. "
Dawn consists of a series of lyrics. Their sub-
jects are love, self-sacrifice, and suffering, considered
as a road of glory that leads to Poland's mystic
. . triumph. But though the application is to Poland,
Krasinski's nationalism, as I have already pointed o
. t out, touches so closely the mysticism of the
human soul that Dawn does not speak only to one
nation. Its message is universal.
Krasinski and his Beatrice are alone together
in a boat on an Italian lake. Above them are the
eternal snows of the Alps, the skies of Italy.
"There is one beauty and one God," cries the
poet, in joy that was rarely his. With harp in hand
and inspired eyes, Beatrice stands silvery, trans-
figured, as though rapt to heaven, in the light of
the moon rising over the snows.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 149
1
"Thou with. me and we alone.
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. "
If only a dream, let him dream on. Let him and
her be of good heart, for, before the miracle shall
descend that will save them, they will not allow
j their hearts to bleed for doubt, their brows to
grow heavy with fear. In the inspiration of their
common dreams, driven by the storm of pain in
the sorrows of this changing life, " within, beyond
them, we feel God. " v
"We are the children of a mother slain, 'we
who never have beheld how a mother's eyes shine
as an angel's on her child. " They look to heaven
as an orphan looks. Moon, stars, and sun, nature's
beauty which is about them, as the boat cleaves
its way through the water, all make up one great
harp. Only the name of Poland is wanting to the
harmony of the universe. But, as God is in heaven, -
"evea^o will He restore her once again.
"To-day or to-morrow Thou wilt grant it to
us, Lord! Oh, grant it for Thy justice sake;
because Thou owest it, not to us, but to Thyself. "
"When I spoke thus, thou wast 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.
* Poland.
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? POLAND
And, thus kneeling, thou wast sighing.
Pray, oh, sister, with thy sighing.
God knows well that in this day
Sighing is thy country's name. "
That country died a victim for the world's sin.
"Think you that who loves and dies can
perish? To your eyes,-to eyes of dust, but not
in sooth, nor to the universal life. Who died in the
hour of sacrifice has but passed into the lives of
others, and dwells in the hiding place of human
hearts; and with each day, each little moment,
living, shall grow within that tomb, giving to all
and giving self. " Invisible, she shall " burn with
fire the stones of hearts, soften with tears the
rocks of souls, and, by the sorrows and toils of the
grave, by the harmonious song of death, she shall,
though herself torn asunder, unite the nations in
one love. "
The body has been slain. But "know you not
that in the world of the spirit love and death are
one? Eternal is he who by his death gives birth
to life. But whoso by his life gives death he when
he dies shall rise no more. "
Then the apostle of the ideal, of spiritual forces,
pours forth his wrath upon the wielders of brute
might and those who seek to corrupt the soul.
And now begins the series of his visions. He had
been parted, as he once said to a friend, by the
sword of Damocles from the land of his youth;
and he asks of Beatrice:
"Knowest thou the love which eternally lures
the soul into the land of memory? Does the cry
of the angel of thy country call thee by night, and
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? ZTGMUNT KR4SINSKI 151
bid thee gaze into the living faces of those long
dead? " He leads her in fancy to the snow-
covered steppe where the bones of his ancestors
rest, above which shine the moon and one star
--the Polar star of the north.
"'Neath the earth is mournful ringing.
The burial place is trembling, living.
From the graves blow prayers and wailing.
Somewhere, swords are rattling hollow.
Clash of armour stern I hear,
As if our fathers, life remembering,
Turning on their sides, were dreaming
In death's sleep of Poland's sorrows. "
The tombs give up their occupants. Kings,
knights, senators arise. The poet falls upon his
face before them, weeping. What did they do
with their lives that they left to their descendants
neither power nor inheritance, only instead of a
country a dismembered body? A loud cry of
wrath goes up from the ghosts. The wraith of
Czarniecki, the great soldier of John Casimir's
days, answers that he grew, not from ease and
pleasure, but through pain. " To whom the Lord
gives torments He lays down His promises. " It
is not for the poet to seek the fault in his fathers.
They lived in their age as guests of other ages.
Fate was driving them to a higher calling: "To
the Poland which shall be. And from our blood
and from our sins, before this age shall pass away
shall rise the one people of the peoples. "
The steppe and the sky tremble and fade into
dreamland. The poet and Beatrice again float
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? 152
POLAND
upon the lake. The moon has sunk under a pall
of clouds. Surely that murmur they hear is no
sigh of the wind. A voice is weeping. The night
breeze carries to their ears a thousand wails. The
shores, the heights, become one prayer. The
spirits of the Polish dead are to appear to them
once more.
"On the waters there before us,
Like light dreams, a fluttering throng,
On the rocks and crags they float.
As will-o'-the-wisps, as wavering flamelets,
Now they sink, and now they rise. "
The poet cries to Beatrice to strike upon her
harp; to tear from the strings with the sound of
thunder the song of the legions: Poland hath not
perished. The voice of the harp rushes over the
water, throbbing in Krasinski's verse with the
music and the word echoes of the Polish language,
that make the passage impossible for English
rendering. The vast army appears to the watchers'
eyes. There wave the insignia of Poland's warfare,
the horsetails, the white plumes, terrible in many
a Polish charge, shields, banners, and coats of
arms, with the cross towering above all. In the
midst, the face of the Mother of Christ:
"As a star upon the darkness,
On high, on high suspended, rises,
Waning, glimmering, quivering, flaming.
Lo! her veil of blue and crimson
Shines about her as a rainbow.
Set with pearls, and set with flowers,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 153
Flashes out her crown of diamonds.
Welcome, welcome! to the Queen,
Long a widow of her people,
To-day returning to her kingdom
Which, in Polish Czenstochowa,
Once our fathers gave to her.
And these fathers o'er the billows,
Lo, she leadeth. " * (
Let the harp cease. Its power sinks silenced
before that celestial rainbow. God's light has
touched the army of spirits. Dawn sparkles on
their helmets. The wings on their armour shine
as those of angels. In their glittering battle array --
they sweep, with swords upraised in her defence,
after their queen. She has descended to crush the
serpent's head for the second time. The hour of
mercy has struck. "Now, oh, now, and for all ages,
God will wipe our tears away. "
The heavenly hosts pass, and disappear into the
east, the dawn. They have gone, with their hope *
and the light as of a more splendid day that lit
the lake and mountains. All is now dark, as before.
But in the poet's heart they have left faith and
joy. "All is mine," cries he to Beatrice; "all is
fair. Mine the earth, the plains of heaven. I ring
forth the voice of life, for God's word is in my
heart. My Poland, Poland shall be! Praised be
1
* In gratitude for the repulse of the Swedes in 1655 at the walls
of Czenstochowa, which saved Poland, John Casimir proclaimed
the Blessed Virgin as Queen of Poland, and under that title she is
still addressed by the Polish nation. The ancient Byzantine
Madonna in the church of Czenstochowa has been for centuries
specially venerated by the Poles, and is described by Krasinski in
the above passage.
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? 154 POLAND
all and everything. Praised be through the ages
unto ages God, the spirits, man, and thou, and
praised the dead within their graves, and praised
be all who are alive, and praised the universal
world for ever, evermore! And to the skies
will I repeat: 1 Praise to Thee, Lord, I am
happy. '"
The third vision follows: neither on the waters
or mountains or clouds, but in some fathomless
region, where no man can say. We have here a
, piece of pure Messianism. Krasinski sees his
country, immortal, glorious, as the archangel of
humanity. The purple garland of dolorous
memories engirdles her brow; but her pain is
over, and the spirit of God flashes as lightning
from her countenance, and her fetters hang shat-
tered. Beyond her is the countless multitude of
the nations to which her sufferings shall give birth,
crowned with the verdure, not of the things that
are past, but of new hope and life, all doing homage
to Poland as their queen. God's voice proclaims
that she, who descended to the grave as a unit,
rises in the day of victory re-baptized by the name
of all humanity, with God's thought entrusted
to her, by which she shall lead the world to its
higher spirituality. As one god-like thought, the
poet beholds the universe flame, the all-present,
formless, endless glory of God, stars upon stars,
suns upon suns. Through worlds of light, where
one great hymn of praise thunders forth, lies the
path of the nations to their Creator: and the
poet looks upon his Poland leading the procession
on this road, till she is lost to sight in the im-
mensity of God.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSK1
"Whose eye
Can overtake her to those heights?
Who shall bow his earthly forehead
On the feet of the Creator?
Who shall soar with the archangel
Where humanity takes flesh?
Now my heart faints in my bosom.
The image 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.
"Throw off sadness, throw off terror.
Well I know what toil remaineth
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 that soil, that soil of ours,
Shall arise a race renewed,"
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? i56
POLAND
to work the will of God in the government of the
universe, to bring back brotherly love, to trans-
form the earth.
"Then that new world all rejoicing,
As a church shall flower to God.
The Polish land, the Polish Eden,
The desert of an agelong 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,
And our sorrows and our bondage. "
Poland cannot die, for she has risen above the
storms of this world to the land of the idea. They
who do not live by the idea shall perish without
hope. All that is visible to the eye alone must be
destroyed, "but the idea shall not pass away. "
Therefore, she who is the representative and the
torchbearer of the idea is to him no longer merely" a
country, a place, a home," but " faith and truth. "
So, at last, he has found that answer to which
he had journeyed through the fires of mental
travail and distress. God's ways are justified. The
sufferings of the nation that had wrung the hearts
of those who loved her are sanctified, and made
fruitful and glorious for herself and all mankind.
"God Eternal of our fathers!
Thou, Who high and far away,
Ever clearer through the ages
Descendest to us, and, dawn-like, strewest
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 157
From the eternal gates Thy sparks
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' sufferings,
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. "
And the poet ends his poem in a paean of
ecstasy and joy, which is doubtlessly inspired not
only by a national hope, but by the deliverance
of his own soul from the shadow of death in which
he had dwelt. The might of Satan's rule is no
more. The weak are oppressed no longer. Earth
is one song of harmony and rejoicing. The dark
days behind us were only a dreadful dream.
"Long the power of that dream.
We believed it. We believed
In eternal pain and toil.
They were but the sanctuary's entrance;
But one step upon the stairway.
They were but the night of merit.
"Human heart, where now thy shame?
Look into thyself, oh, gaze!
Where of old was rage and weeping,
Groans and cries and lamentation,
Lo, to-day of heaven's high mercy
Is the second house of God. "
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? 158 POLAND
Forbidden by the censor, this poem yet found
its way into Poland, and was watered with the
tears of those who read. *
In Dawn Krasinski had found his standpoint
and never modified it. His subsequent teaching
was rather in the nature of crystallizing his warn-
ings to his people in special moments of national
necessity; of reducing his general principles to
practice. He had in his epilogue to Dawn said he
would sing no more, for the only prayer worthy
of the Creator knows no division between thought
and deed. "Never, never again will I string my
harp. Other are the roads that lie open before us.
Perish, my songs! Arise, my deeds! " But in
KrasinsH's relations with his nation his poetry
was his deed. He wrote not so much from a poet's
inspiration as from a patriot's. He had no vision
of literary fame. When the voice of Poland called,
he wrote for her sake. At other times he remained
silent.
The Psalms of the Future, which followed Dawn,
are# therefore, in a manner episodical. But Kras-
inski is never merely topical or individual. He
spoke seventy years ago. While these words are
being written during the most terrible convulsion
of modern times, the language and the tenets of
the Polish poet rise instinctively to the mind, as
almost strangely apposite to the needs and events
of the hour.
* S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 159
The first in order of date in the cycle of the
Psalms is the Psalm of Love. The Psalm of Faith
and the Psalm of Hope were written shortly after-
wards as a sort of introduction to the third Psalm.
We will therefore take them first. The occasion. of
all three Psalms, and most especially of the Psalm
of Love, was Krasinski's foreboding of the danger
that threatened his country from the democratic
propaganda that was then proceeding.
As the title implies, the Psalm of Faith (1845)
is Krasinski's confession of personal and national
faith, and of his belief in the relations of God
with the future of humanity.
The soul casts off the body and mind, worn out
by a thousand trials. Men call that moment
death; but it is her second birth. She does not
die. Taking to herself new and " unwearied wings,"
she soars into a higher region, leaving behind her
the waning tracts of the past, with before her the
endlessly stretching fields of measureless space,
till she reaches " Him Who is all and enfoldeth all,
the beginning and the end of Heaven and of
earth. "
"To Him I travel without pause. Thither
must I first go through the pains of hell, through
the toils of Purgatory, till I begin to put me on
body and soul more radiant, and ascend to the
other world. There, is eternal life and life un-
ceasing. " Hymning Paradise, as the desire of God,
"love without bounds, that is life without end,"
he turns to the contemplation of Him Who is
"Being, Thought, and Life, the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost. And we in His image must live im-
mortally, must live together with Him, born of
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? 160 POLAND
His bosom to live in His eternity. " As He created
us, we must create and draw from ourselves thai
which He has given to us to create. " Inasmuch
as we can, poor, in angelic lowliness, that which
Thou gavest us of Thy mercy, we must give back
to Thee, oh, God, and thus live eternally in Thee
by eternal love. "
This, then, leads up to Krasinski's national and
political mysticism. "The history of humanity
is the school of the soul. " Christ will. judge the
nations on the day of resurrection; for to each
of these nations has been given some deep thought
from the heart of the Creator, as their special
predestined work for the human race. " And some
are chosen before all others to combat for Thy
beauty on the earth; to carry the cross in a
bloodstained track; to give out the more love
and greater brotherhood in exchange against the
murderer's knife. "
"Such a one, oh, God, is Thy Polish nation.
Tho' the world gives her such pain that she could
even doubt of hope, may she hold out in this -
unheard of suffering. For she is surely anointed in
Thy spirit, for she is surely Thy high priest on
this earth, if she will understand that Thou lovest
without bounds those sons whom Thou dost
crown with thorns; for the thorn, steeped in
blood, is the everlasting'flower, and with it Thou
shalt renew the youth of all humanity. "
He concludes with a mystical analogy between
the history and the calling of the human race, and
the Divine pattern of Him Who came to save it.
[ " Christ ever dwelleth in thee, oh, humanity.
His blood is thine. His body is thy body. With
?
"And the sun rose above the ruins of Rome.
And there was none whom I might tell where
were the traces of my Thought--but I know that
it lasts and lives. "
Irydion is the confession of one who knew the
onslaughts of despair and hatred, and who over-
came them, both for himself and his nation, by
holding fast to the principles of an unflinching
national morality. Criticising his drama from the
ethical standpoint, which was the only aspect
under which Krasinski ever spoke of his work in
his correspondence with his friends, the poet said:
"To prove its truth, the author might call
upon the shades of the dead and the tears of the
living. He might ask many a one: 'Didst thou
not feel this, didst thou not dream thus ? ' And
many a one would answer: 'It is so. ' Not many
a one, but a whole nation. "A
V III
The development of Krasinski's thought was
not, as might have been imagined, a triumphal
progress from Irydion onwards. After the com-
pletion of the latter, darkness and confusion
swept down upon the poet. From his own testi-
mony in the opening lines to Dawn, we know that
it was his grief for his country that shook both his
* Letters of Zygmunt Krasinsii. Vol. I. To Constantine
pasizynski, June 6, 1837.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 145
religious and national faith, always closely inter-
woven in Krasinski's soul. At this time he wrote
but little, and nothing that was worthy of his
genius, chiefly obscure allegories in poetic prose,
overladen with excessive imagery, tinged here
and there with pantheism, and indicative of the
spiritual perplexity in which he dwelt. Yet
through The Temptation, The Summer Night,
through the strange, nightmare visions of the
Three Thoughts, there runs the one thread that
nothing could ever destroy or weaken in Kras-
inski's life, which was at once his ruling passion
and the chief source of all his suffering: devotion
to Poland. They are the cry of one bewildered
with pain, unable to see with certainty his nation's
deliverance.
Curiously enough, Krasinski, the dreamer, the
poet, the mystic, was above all things a logician.
His national philosophy must be founded on a
rational system, it must convince his mind no less
than his heart, before it could satisfy him. Through
the years of mental suffering that stretched be-
tween the writing of Irydion and Dawn, he was
seeking a theory that would give the key to the
mystery of PolandVtragedy, provide her with a
hope, proclaim a vocation for her in the future.
Every philosophical development, every political
event, was significant in this connection alone. At
last, he found what his soul had asked. Dawn is
the hymn of his spiritual and patriotic victory.
His idea may be thus roughly summarized.
The signs of the times that immediately preceded
the birth of Christ--religious doubt, moral de-
cadence, strange faiths--are almost identical with
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? 146
POLAND
those of Krasinski's age. The conquests of Julius
Csesar paved the way for the coming of Christ by
obliterating the frontiers between nations. In
the nineteenth century we have the Napoleonic
conquests; and these, in their turn, prepared the
world for Christ's second and spiritual advent.
Not again in our flesh. But as He christianized
the individual, so now He will christianize govern-
ments, and harmonize the relations between them
and their subjects, between nation and nation.
As long as the dismemberment of Poland, that
crime against law and right, is permitted to be
an established fact, so long is Christ's intention
violated. Her restoration will be the herald of
the transfiguration of the political sphere into
the religious sphere, an earnest of the higher epoch
of the world's history.
Thus Krasinski in his prose introduction to
Dawn* And hence the mystic rapture with which
he can announce to his people that Poland's
death leads to her resurrection, her shame to the
glorious re-birth of the human race.
"Hodie scietis quia veniet Dominus et salvabit
nos et mane videbitis gloriam ejus. " These words
from the office of his Church for Christmas Eve,
Krasinski places at the head of the poem that is
one of the noblest expressions in literature of a
nation's suffering and a nation's hope.
As Dante's Divina Commedia is the spiritual
apotheosis of a woman, so Dawn is the idealization
of her whom Krasinski etherealized as his Beatrice,
and who likewise inspired Poland's greatest
See. Chapter II.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI i4>
musician--Delphina Potocka. F In the lines which*
open Dawn the poet sings how he was driven forth
from the land of his fathers to tread strange soil,
hearing from afar the triumphal cries of those who
had laid his country low. ?
"Like Dante, during life, I passed through hell.
"At first, I trusted that the pitying God, Who
is 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 that 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 grave of saints;
and ever more abased did this earth of ours be-
come. Then sank my soul into that chaos of doubt,
where all light is changed into eternal night:
and, from all the circle 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 a measureless despair. My death
would then have seemed to me but my second
death. Like Dante, during life, I passed through
hell. But, to aid me also, a lady hastened down,
before whose very look the evil spirits fear. Me,
too, an angel from the pit 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, to ascend to heaven--heavenly--to dwell
there without pain. Oh, beautiful as she, thou wast
more Christian far! For there, where sorrow
* Chopin dedicated a piano concerto to Delphina Potocka ; and
it was she who came and sang to him when he lay dying.
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? 148 POLAND
groweth, there, where tears are born, there, thou
with thy brother didst remain upon this earth.
Together walked we, wearing the 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 to-
gether, oh, Beatrice of mine.
"And yet, and yet my groaning and thy sighs,
mingled with 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 by
thy look! So do clouds of darkness, full of tears
above, meet each other for a funeral in the skies.
Light is torn forth from their weeping by a blast
of thunder; and the mist becomes the golden
house of God. "
Dawn consists of a series of lyrics. Their sub-
jects are love, self-sacrifice, and suffering, considered
as a road of glory that leads to Poland's mystic
. . triumph. But though the application is to Poland,
Krasinski's nationalism, as I have already pointed o
. t out, touches so closely the mysticism of the
human soul that Dawn does not speak only to one
nation. Its message is universal.
Krasinski and his Beatrice are alone together
in a boat on an Italian lake. Above them are the
eternal snows of the Alps, the skies of Italy.
"There is one beauty and one God," cries the
poet, in joy that was rarely his. With harp in hand
and inspired eyes, Beatrice stands silvery, trans-
figured, as though rapt to heaven, in the light of
the moon rising over the snows.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 149
1
"Thou with. me and we alone.
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. "
If only a dream, let him dream on. Let him and
her be of good heart, for, before the miracle shall
descend that will save them, they will not allow
j their hearts to bleed for doubt, their brows to
grow heavy with fear. In the inspiration of their
common dreams, driven by the storm of pain in
the sorrows of this changing life, " within, beyond
them, we feel God. " v
"We are the children of a mother slain, 'we
who never have beheld how a mother's eyes shine
as an angel's on her child. " They look to heaven
as an orphan looks. Moon, stars, and sun, nature's
beauty which is about them, as the boat cleaves
its way through the water, all make up one great
harp. Only the name of Poland is wanting to the
harmony of the universe. But, as God is in heaven, -
"evea^o will He restore her once again.
"To-day or to-morrow Thou wilt grant it to
us, Lord! Oh, grant it for Thy justice sake;
because Thou owest it, not to us, but to Thyself. "
"When I spoke thus, thou wast 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.
* Poland.
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? POLAND
And, thus kneeling, thou wast sighing.
Pray, oh, sister, with thy sighing.
God knows well that in this day
Sighing is thy country's name. "
That country died a victim for the world's sin.
"Think you that who loves and dies can
perish? To your eyes,-to eyes of dust, but not
in sooth, nor to the universal life. Who died in the
hour of sacrifice has but passed into the lives of
others, and dwells in the hiding place of human
hearts; and with each day, each little moment,
living, shall grow within that tomb, giving to all
and giving self. " Invisible, she shall " burn with
fire the stones of hearts, soften with tears the
rocks of souls, and, by the sorrows and toils of the
grave, by the harmonious song of death, she shall,
though herself torn asunder, unite the nations in
one love. "
The body has been slain. But "know you not
that in the world of the spirit love and death are
one? Eternal is he who by his death gives birth
to life. But whoso by his life gives death he when
he dies shall rise no more. "
Then the apostle of the ideal, of spiritual forces,
pours forth his wrath upon the wielders of brute
might and those who seek to corrupt the soul.
And now begins the series of his visions. He had
been parted, as he once said to a friend, by the
sword of Damocles from the land of his youth;
and he asks of Beatrice:
"Knowest thou the love which eternally lures
the soul into the land of memory? Does the cry
of the angel of thy country call thee by night, and
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? ZTGMUNT KR4SINSKI 151
bid thee gaze into the living faces of those long
dead? " He leads her in fancy to the snow-
covered steppe where the bones of his ancestors
rest, above which shine the moon and one star
--the Polar star of the north.
"'Neath the earth is mournful ringing.
The burial place is trembling, living.
From the graves blow prayers and wailing.
Somewhere, swords are rattling hollow.
Clash of armour stern I hear,
As if our fathers, life remembering,
Turning on their sides, were dreaming
In death's sleep of Poland's sorrows. "
The tombs give up their occupants. Kings,
knights, senators arise. The poet falls upon his
face before them, weeping. What did they do
with their lives that they left to their descendants
neither power nor inheritance, only instead of a
country a dismembered body? A loud cry of
wrath goes up from the ghosts. The wraith of
Czarniecki, the great soldier of John Casimir's
days, answers that he grew, not from ease and
pleasure, but through pain. " To whom the Lord
gives torments He lays down His promises. " It
is not for the poet to seek the fault in his fathers.
They lived in their age as guests of other ages.
Fate was driving them to a higher calling: "To
the Poland which shall be. And from our blood
and from our sins, before this age shall pass away
shall rise the one people of the peoples. "
The steppe and the sky tremble and fade into
dreamland. The poet and Beatrice again float
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? 152
POLAND
upon the lake. The moon has sunk under a pall
of clouds. Surely that murmur they hear is no
sigh of the wind. A voice is weeping. The night
breeze carries to their ears a thousand wails. The
shores, the heights, become one prayer. The
spirits of the Polish dead are to appear to them
once more.
"On the waters there before us,
Like light dreams, a fluttering throng,
On the rocks and crags they float.
As will-o'-the-wisps, as wavering flamelets,
Now they sink, and now they rise. "
The poet cries to Beatrice to strike upon her
harp; to tear from the strings with the sound of
thunder the song of the legions: Poland hath not
perished. The voice of the harp rushes over the
water, throbbing in Krasinski's verse with the
music and the word echoes of the Polish language,
that make the passage impossible for English
rendering. The vast army appears to the watchers'
eyes. There wave the insignia of Poland's warfare,
the horsetails, the white plumes, terrible in many
a Polish charge, shields, banners, and coats of
arms, with the cross towering above all. In the
midst, the face of the Mother of Christ:
"As a star upon the darkness,
On high, on high suspended, rises,
Waning, glimmering, quivering, flaming.
Lo! her veil of blue and crimson
Shines about her as a rainbow.
Set with pearls, and set with flowers,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 153
Flashes out her crown of diamonds.
Welcome, welcome! to the Queen,
Long a widow of her people,
To-day returning to her kingdom
Which, in Polish Czenstochowa,
Once our fathers gave to her.
And these fathers o'er the billows,
Lo, she leadeth. " * (
Let the harp cease. Its power sinks silenced
before that celestial rainbow. God's light has
touched the army of spirits. Dawn sparkles on
their helmets. The wings on their armour shine
as those of angels. In their glittering battle array --
they sweep, with swords upraised in her defence,
after their queen. She has descended to crush the
serpent's head for the second time. The hour of
mercy has struck. "Now, oh, now, and for all ages,
God will wipe our tears away. "
The heavenly hosts pass, and disappear into the
east, the dawn. They have gone, with their hope *
and the light as of a more splendid day that lit
the lake and mountains. All is now dark, as before.
But in the poet's heart they have left faith and
joy. "All is mine," cries he to Beatrice; "all is
fair. Mine the earth, the plains of heaven. I ring
forth the voice of life, for God's word is in my
heart. My Poland, Poland shall be! Praised be
1
* In gratitude for the repulse of the Swedes in 1655 at the walls
of Czenstochowa, which saved Poland, John Casimir proclaimed
the Blessed Virgin as Queen of Poland, and under that title she is
still addressed by the Polish nation. The ancient Byzantine
Madonna in the church of Czenstochowa has been for centuries
specially venerated by the Poles, and is described by Krasinski in
the above passage.
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? 154 POLAND
all and everything. Praised be through the ages
unto ages God, the spirits, man, and thou, and
praised the dead within their graves, and praised
be all who are alive, and praised the universal
world for ever, evermore! And to the skies
will I repeat: 1 Praise to Thee, Lord, I am
happy. '"
The third vision follows: neither on the waters
or mountains or clouds, but in some fathomless
region, where no man can say. We have here a
, piece of pure Messianism. Krasinski sees his
country, immortal, glorious, as the archangel of
humanity. The purple garland of dolorous
memories engirdles her brow; but her pain is
over, and the spirit of God flashes as lightning
from her countenance, and her fetters hang shat-
tered. Beyond her is the countless multitude of
the nations to which her sufferings shall give birth,
crowned with the verdure, not of the things that
are past, but of new hope and life, all doing homage
to Poland as their queen. God's voice proclaims
that she, who descended to the grave as a unit,
rises in the day of victory re-baptized by the name
of all humanity, with God's thought entrusted
to her, by which she shall lead the world to its
higher spirituality. As one god-like thought, the
poet beholds the universe flame, the all-present,
formless, endless glory of God, stars upon stars,
suns upon suns. Through worlds of light, where
one great hymn of praise thunders forth, lies the
path of the nations to their Creator: and the
poet looks upon his Poland leading the procession
on this road, till she is lost to sight in the im-
mensity of God.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSK1
"Whose eye
Can overtake her to those heights?
Who shall bow his earthly forehead
On the feet of the Creator?
Who shall soar with the archangel
Where humanity takes flesh?
Now my heart faints in my bosom.
The image 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.
"Throw off sadness, throw off terror.
Well I know what toil remaineth
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 that soil, that soil of ours,
Shall arise a race renewed,"
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? i56
POLAND
to work the will of God in the government of the
universe, to bring back brotherly love, to trans-
form the earth.
"Then that new world all rejoicing,
As a church shall flower to God.
The Polish land, the Polish Eden,
The desert of an agelong 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,
And our sorrows and our bondage. "
Poland cannot die, for she has risen above the
storms of this world to the land of the idea. They
who do not live by the idea shall perish without
hope. All that is visible to the eye alone must be
destroyed, "but the idea shall not pass away. "
Therefore, she who is the representative and the
torchbearer of the idea is to him no longer merely" a
country, a place, a home," but " faith and truth. "
So, at last, he has found that answer to which
he had journeyed through the fires of mental
travail and distress. God's ways are justified. The
sufferings of the nation that had wrung the hearts
of those who loved her are sanctified, and made
fruitful and glorious for herself and all mankind.
"God Eternal of our fathers!
Thou, Who high and far away,
Ever clearer through the ages
Descendest to us, and, dawn-like, strewest
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 157
From the eternal gates Thy sparks
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' sufferings,
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. "
And the poet ends his poem in a paean of
ecstasy and joy, which is doubtlessly inspired not
only by a national hope, but by the deliverance
of his own soul from the shadow of death in which
he had dwelt. The might of Satan's rule is no
more. The weak are oppressed no longer. Earth
is one song of harmony and rejoicing. The dark
days behind us were only a dreadful dream.
"Long the power of that dream.
We believed it. We believed
In eternal pain and toil.
They were but the sanctuary's entrance;
But one step upon the stairway.
They were but the night of merit.
"Human heart, where now thy shame?
Look into thyself, oh, gaze!
Where of old was rage and weeping,
Groans and cries and lamentation,
Lo, to-day of heaven's high mercy
Is the second house of God. "
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? 158 POLAND
Forbidden by the censor, this poem yet found
its way into Poland, and was watered with the
tears of those who read. *
In Dawn Krasinski had found his standpoint
and never modified it. His subsequent teaching
was rather in the nature of crystallizing his warn-
ings to his people in special moments of national
necessity; of reducing his general principles to
practice. He had in his epilogue to Dawn said he
would sing no more, for the only prayer worthy
of the Creator knows no division between thought
and deed. "Never, never again will I string my
harp. Other are the roads that lie open before us.
Perish, my songs! Arise, my deeds! " But in
KrasinsH's relations with his nation his poetry
was his deed. He wrote not so much from a poet's
inspiration as from a patriot's. He had no vision
of literary fame. When the voice of Poland called,
he wrote for her sake. At other times he remained
silent.
The Psalms of the Future, which followed Dawn,
are# therefore, in a manner episodical. But Kras-
inski is never merely topical or individual. He
spoke seventy years ago. While these words are
being written during the most terrible convulsion
of modern times, the language and the tenets of
the Polish poet rise instinctively to the mind, as
almost strangely apposite to the needs and events
of the hour.
* S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 159
The first in order of date in the cycle of the
Psalms is the Psalm of Love. The Psalm of Faith
and the Psalm of Hope were written shortly after-
wards as a sort of introduction to the third Psalm.
We will therefore take them first. The occasion. of
all three Psalms, and most especially of the Psalm
of Love, was Krasinski's foreboding of the danger
that threatened his country from the democratic
propaganda that was then proceeding.
As the title implies, the Psalm of Faith (1845)
is Krasinski's confession of personal and national
faith, and of his belief in the relations of God
with the future of humanity.
The soul casts off the body and mind, worn out
by a thousand trials. Men call that moment
death; but it is her second birth. She does not
die. Taking to herself new and " unwearied wings,"
she soars into a higher region, leaving behind her
the waning tracts of the past, with before her the
endlessly stretching fields of measureless space,
till she reaches " Him Who is all and enfoldeth all,
the beginning and the end of Heaven and of
earth. "
"To Him I travel without pause. Thither
must I first go through the pains of hell, through
the toils of Purgatory, till I begin to put me on
body and soul more radiant, and ascend to the
other world. There, is eternal life and life un-
ceasing. " Hymning Paradise, as the desire of God,
"love without bounds, that is life without end,"
he turns to the contemplation of Him Who is
"Being, Thought, and Life, the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost. And we in His image must live im-
mortally, must live together with Him, born of
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? 160 POLAND
His bosom to live in His eternity. " As He created
us, we must create and draw from ourselves thai
which He has given to us to create. " Inasmuch
as we can, poor, in angelic lowliness, that which
Thou gavest us of Thy mercy, we must give back
to Thee, oh, God, and thus live eternally in Thee
by eternal love. "
This, then, leads up to Krasinski's national and
political mysticism. "The history of humanity
is the school of the soul. " Christ will. judge the
nations on the day of resurrection; for to each
of these nations has been given some deep thought
from the heart of the Creator, as their special
predestined work for the human race. " And some
are chosen before all others to combat for Thy
beauty on the earth; to carry the cross in a
bloodstained track; to give out the more love
and greater brotherhood in exchange against the
murderer's knife. "
"Such a one, oh, God, is Thy Polish nation.
Tho' the world gives her such pain that she could
even doubt of hope, may she hold out in this -
unheard of suffering. For she is surely anointed in
Thy spirit, for she is surely Thy high priest on
this earth, if she will understand that Thou lovest
without bounds those sons whom Thou dost
crown with thorns; for the thorn, steeped in
blood, is the everlasting'flower, and with it Thou
shalt renew the youth of all humanity. "
He concludes with a mystical analogy between
the history and the calling of the human race, and
the Divine pattern of Him Who came to save it.
[ " Christ ever dwelleth in thee, oh, humanity.
His blood is thine. His body is thy body. With
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