Cyprian Kamil Norwid

For Poles, the Valley of the Failed Princes,
was also the Wood of the Suicides.
Black blossom wells from the balances
where cool wind and the white rain decide.

Polonius is Prospero singing,
releasing people from the tender trees.
He is Emir Abdelkader bringing
Jihad to the Spring - Just War, to the breeze.

He was one of those exiles in Paris.
Their sons were a silver watch, their daughters’
hair kept in a drawer, their deaths an arras,
their wives, a funeral march that falters.

For all Purgatory’s black parodies,
his Poland fruits with the Hesperides.

Blackwell’s, Oxford - 26 February 2019

I do not want to get any of us into trouble with the Intelligence Services, or the Police, with this poem, so I had better explain that I am not advocating Jihad in poem. But Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821 - 1883) was one of Poland’s great poets, and a major figure of the Polish Resistance against Russia.

An exile in Paris, he was an admirer of the most able and magnaminous Algerian resistance leader and exile Emir Abdelkader ( 1808 - 83) to whom he dedicated a poem. How good is a poet ? How good can a poet be ? In Norwid’s case he resets the scale. He is the Polish Leopardi.

From his poem on Tenderness, I acknowledge some images, and the metaphor of black blossoms comes from Czerne Kwiaty, commemorating dead friends such as Chopin.

In the first decade of the 21st century, some Polish delegates at UNESCO tried to deny Dunedin in New Zealand, a Capital of Culture designaton, on the grounds that New Zealand has no literary distinction. As a matter of fact, I come from there, but if what they were looking at was Creative New Zealand’s output, I am not surprised. Following the clement examples of Norwid, and Abdelkader, I make this reply to them.

Pronounce Purgatory as much like Purgatorio in English as possible, and not like some county in Ireland. The Dante references are to his Purgatorio at Canto VII and Inferno XIII.