368
PARTISAN REVIEW
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise, your world will perish.
The critic sees in this "the quest for nonconformity in the name of
aesthetic contemplation, in the name of the beauty of reality." I ask him:
J.
Does not every inhabitant of Warsaw experience a feeling of
protest against the ruins? Isn't the sight of the destroyed capital some–
thing that disturbs the inner peace of every inhabitant of Warsaw?
2.
Is it not monstrous that virtually every generation of Polish poets
must fulfill the function of ritual mourners, and would not a calm
acceptance of this situation be the same as sanctioning all our national
manias, which always yield the same results?
3. Is the thought of conditions in Poland which would allow poets to
be singers of happiness abnormal and immoral?
4. Does the critic not detect the artistic irony in this contradiction: the
poet does not want to become a ritual mourner, but he is a ritual
mourner?
The poem "Morning" is programmatic according to Wyka. Let us
agree, willingly or not, that it is. What does it contain? In the first place,
a description of morning in a Polish village during the German occupa–
tion. Second, the assertion that song breaks off when people's despair
weighs it down. Third, a yearning to keep the song. Fourth, a vision of
a happy Poland, which is symbolized by art, by mass art: theater and
music. Fifth, a condemnation of complaining. I do not know where
there is any dream of happy islands here. Or perhaps this is it:
In vain do you remember Italian vineyards
The green of England and the oceans' gleams.
Exactly, in vain.
If
people had been well off during the German occu–
pation, they would not have complained.
If
they had not complained,
they would not have had to be of two minds, to suppress their com–
plaints while comforting themselves with a vision of the more beautiful
world of the future. Then such verses would certainly not have come
into being.
