Laments "Man's Life Is Error," Essay

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Any grieving father might hope the bitter wish that his departed "had not been" such a "cross" (XIII) could be excused under 'all life is error,' but then how to justify the self-indulgent catalog of lost attributes of his beloved two-year-old (III-XVIII)? How can the two, longing and blame, exist side by side if both are wrong? Without an answer, why the complicated speech?

This is precisely Kochanowski's Stoic-fundamentalist, "Heracletian" (I) reading, if the reader can penetrate the referentiality: In fact any father who lost a daughter might likely sympathize with and understand the author's inability to bring her back and confusion at his own range of diverse emotion. This is in fact one possible author's-motive, to share his realizations (XIV, "When you see others' lot / You accept your own") as he survives effectively an agricultural year of bereavement, until finally giving up on Reason as ineffective to explain what is not inherently rational but can only be accepted via the passage of time (VII) and a Stoic turning away from the false distractions of vain earthly attachment to a disciplined contemplation of Godhead (XIII). Lest the reader not have an elite classical education, the author brings his dead mother out to say this all again in plain language (XIX) a la Simonides (I); while Tren XIX and I-XVIII could stand alone as separate elegies that say nearly the same thing, the two sections are enhanced, the one by the clarity of the other, and the 19th by the erudition of the first 18.

This structure encourages such a possible reading in its presentation of, departure from and return to these key elements, and variation of audience from the invisible listener (soliloquy), to Orzsula herself, to intellectual constructs like Death or Virtue without rigid pattern but rather an overlapping, seasonal ebb and flow. The first two Treny largely identify and justify the occasion for such formality; the final poem (XIX) is a departure from the prior 18 because of its extraordinary length and change in voice.

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Therefore the first, more Classical group fall into two groups of 9 separated by Tren IX, which also speaks literally to Kochanowski's central truth, the difficulty but inevitability of the acceptance of mortal impermanence within universal balance. There is no summer without winter; life without death; understanding without limits to that understanding, which is the superhuman and thus not necessarily rational or logical will of God. But Kochanowski is not prepared to understand this pre-Stoic, Heraclitian core insight until he has achieved enough temporal distance, as the shade of his mother explains, from his daughter's death such that his address can fall into the measured, detached and formal Psalm-derived cadence of Laments XVI-XVIII. The final vernacular Tren, along with the initial choice of a young girl rather than a Tribune or Consul as subject, seals the author's innovation bringing an elite classical form into the realm of the common Polish father grieving over a daughter who to him is as important as any Cicero. Thus Laments becomes a symbol, especially for the Polish language and heritage, for the Humanist rejection and transcendence of the pre-Renaissance Scholastic intellectual elitism, and a return to vernacular Stoicism after ages of Sophistry.

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