Laments

Introductory note

Jan Kochanowski (1530–84) was the greatest poet of Poland during its existence as an independent kingdom. His Laments are his masterpiece, the choicest work of Polish lyric poetry before the time of Mickiewicz.

Kochanowski was a learned poet of the Renaissance, drawing his inspiration from the literatures of Greece and Rome. He was also a man of sincere piety, famous for his translation of the Psalms into his native language. In his Laments, written in memory of his little daughter Ursula, who died in 1579 at the age of thirty months, he expresses the deepest personal emotion through the medium of a literary style that had been developed by long years of study. The Laments, to be sure, are not based on any classic model and they contain few direct imitations of the classical poets, though it may be noted that the concluding couplet of Lament XV is translated from the Greek Anthology. On the other hand they are interspersed with continual references to classic story; and, more important, are filled with the atmosphere of the Stoic philosophy, derived from Cicero and Seneca. And along with this austere teaching there runs through them a warmer tone of Christian hope and trust; Lament XVIII is in spirit a psalm. To us of today, however, these poems appeal less by their formal perfection, by their learning, or by their religions tone, than by their exquisite humanity. Kochanowski’s sincerity of grief, his fatherly love for his baby girl, after more than three centuries have not lost their power to touch our hearts. In the Laments Kochanowski embodied a wholesome ideal of life such as animated the finest spirits of Poland in the years of its greatest glory, a spirit both humanistic and universally human.

G. R. Noyes

[Motto and dedication]

Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse

Juppiter auctiferas lustravit lumine terras¹.

To Ursula Kochanowski

A charming, merry, gifted child, who, after showing great promise of all maidenly virtues and talents, suddenly, prematurely, in her unripe years, to the great and unbearable grief of her parents, departed hence.

Written with tears for his beloved little girl by Jan Kochanowski, her hapless father.

Thou art no more, my Ursula.

Lament I

Come, Heraclitus² and Simonides³,

Come with your weeping and sad elegies:

Ye griefs and sorrows, come from all the lands

Wherein ye sigh and wail and wring your hands:

Gather ye here within my house today

And help me mourn my sweet, whom in her May

Ungodly Death hath ta’en to his estate,

Leaving me on a sudden desolate.

’Tis so a serpent glides on some shy nest

And, of the tiny nightingales possessed,

Doth glut its throat, though, frenzied with her fear,

The mother bird doth beat and twitter near

And strike the monster, till it turns and gapes

To swallow her, and she but just escapes.

«’Tis vain to weep,» my friends perchance will say.

Dear God, is aught in life not vain, then? Nay,

Seek to lie soft, yet thorns will prickly be:

The life of man is naught but vanity.

Ah, which were better, then — to seek relief

In tears, or sternly strive to conquer grief?

Lament II

If I had ever thought to write in praise

Of little children and their simple ways,

Far rather had I fashioned cradle verse

To rock to slumber, or the songs a nurse

Might croon above the baby on her breast,

Setting her charge’s short-lived woes at rest.

For much more useful are such trifling tasks

Than that which sad misfortune this day asks:

To weep o’er thy deaf grave, dear maiden mine,

And wail the harshness of grim Proserpine⁴.

But now I have no choice of subject: then

I shunned a theme scarce fitting riper men,

And now disaster drives me on by force

To songs unheeded by the great concourse

Of mortals. Verses that I would not sing

The living, to the dead I needs must bring.

Yet though I dry the marrow from my bones,

Weeping another’s death, my grief atones

No whit. All forms of human doom

Arouse but transient thoughts of joy or gloom.

O law unjust, O grimmest of all maids,

Inexorable princess of the shades!

For, Ursula, thou hadst but tasted time

And art departed long before thy prime.

Thou hardly knewest that the sun was bright

Ere thou didst vanish to the halls of night.

I would thou hadst not lived that little breath —

What didst thou know, but only birth, then death?

And all the joy a loving child should bring

Her parents, is become their bitterest sting.

Lament III

So, thou hast scorned me, my delight and heir;

Thy father’s halls, then, were not broad and fair

Enough for thee to dwell here longer, sweet.

True, there was nothing, nothing in them meet

For thy swift-budding reason, that foretold

Virtues the future years would yet unfold.

Thy words, thy archness, every turn and bow —

How sick at heart without them am I now!

Nay, little comfort, never more shall I

Behold thee and thy darling drollery.

What may I do but only follow on

Along the path where earlier thou hast gone.

And at its end do thou, with all thy charms,

Cast round thy father’s neck thy tender arms.

Lament IV

Thou hast constrained mine eyes, unholy Death,

To watch my dear child breathe her dying breath:

To watch thee shake the fruit unripe and clinging

While fear and grief her parents’ hearts were wringing.

Ah, never, never could my well-loved child

Have died and left her father reconciled:

Never but with a heart like heavy lead

Could I have watched her go, abandonèd.

And yet at no time could her death have brought

More cruel ache than now, nor bitterer thought;

For had God granted to her ample days

I might have walked with her down flowered ways

And left this life at last, content, descending

To realms of dark Persephone⁵, the all-ending,

Without such grievous sorrow in my heart,

Of which earth holdeth not the counterpart.

I marvel not that Niobe⁶, alone

Amid her dear, dead children, turned to stone.

Lament V

Just as a little olive offshoot grows

Beneath its orchard elders’ shady rows,

No budding leaf as yet, no branching limb,

Only a rod uprising, virgin-slim —

Then if the busy gardener, weeding out

Sharp thorns and nettles, cuts the little sprout,

It fades and, losing all its living hue,

Drops by the mother from whose roots it grew:

So was it with my Ursula, my dear;

A little space she grew beside us here,

Then Death came, breathing pestilence, and she

Fell, stricken lifeless, by her parent tree.

Persephone⁷, Persephone, this flow

Of barren tears! How couldst thou will it so?

Lament VI

Dear little Slavic Sappho⁸, we had thought,

Hearing thy songs so sweetly, deftly wrought,

That thou shouldst have an heritage one day

Beyond thy father’s lands: his lute to play.

For not an hour of daylight’s joyous round

But thou didst fill it full of lovely sound,

Just as the nightingale doth scatter pleasure

Upon the dark, in glad unstinted measure.

Then Death came stalking near thee, timid thing,

And thou in sudden terror tookest wing.

Ah, that delight, it was not overlong

And I pay dear with sorrow for brief song.

Thou still wert singing when thou cam’st to die;

Kissing thy mother, thus thou saidst good-bye:

«My mother, I shall serve thee now no more

Nor sit about thy table’s charming store;

I must lay down my keys to go from here,

To leave the mansion of my parents dear.»

This and what sorrow now will let me tell

No longer, were my darling’s last farewell.

Ah, strong her mother’s heart, to feel the pain

Of those last words and not to burst in twain.

Lament VII

Sad trinkets of my little daughter, dresses

That touched her like caresses,

Why do you draw my mournful eyes? To borrow

A newer weight of sorrow?

No longer will you clothe her form, to fold her

Around, and wrap her, hold her.

A hard, unwaking sleep has overpowered

Her limbs, and now the flowered

Cool muslin and the ribbon snoods are bootless,

The gilded girdles fruitless.

My little girl, ’twas to a bed far other

That one day thy poor mother

Had thought to lead thee, and this simple dower

Suits not the bridal hour;

A tiny shroud and gown of her own sewing

She gives thee at thy going.

Thy father brings a clod of earth, a somber

Pillow for thy last slumber.

And so a single casket, scant of measure,

Locks thee and all thy treasure.

Lament VIII

Thou hast made all the house an empty thing,

Dear Ursula, by this thy vanishing.

Though we are here, ’tis yet a vacant place,

One little soul had filled so great a space.

For thou didst sing thy joyousness to all,

Running through every nook of house and hall.

Thou wouldst not have thy mother grieve, nor let

Thy father with too solemn thinking fret

His head, but thou must kiss them, daughter mine,

And all with that entrancing laugh of thine!

Now on the house has fallen a dumb blight:

Thou wilt not come with archness and delight,

But every corner lodges lurking grief

And all in vain the heart would seek relief.

Lament IX

Thou shouldst be purchased, Wisdom, for much gold

If all they say of thee is truly told:

That thou canst root out from the mind the host

Of longings and canst change a man almost

Into an angel whom no grief can sap,

Who is not prone to fear nor evil hap.

Thou seest all things human as they are —

Trifles. Thou bearest in thy breast a star

Fixèd and tranquil, and dost contemplate

Death unafraid, still calm, inviolate.

Of riches, one thing thou dost hold the measure:

Proportion to man’s needs — not gold nor treasure;

Thy searching eyes have power to behold

The beggar housed beneath the roof of gold,

Nor dost thou grudge the poor man fame as blest

If he but hearken him to thy behest.

Oh, hapless, hapless man am I, who sought

If I might gain thy thresholds by much thought,

Cast down from thy last steps after so long,

But one amid the countless, hopeless throng!

Lament X

My dear delight, my Ursula, and where

Art thou departed, to what land, what sphere?

High o’er the heavens wert thou borne, to stand

One little cherub midst the cherub band?

Or dost thou laugh in Paradise, or now

Upon the Islands of the Blest art thou?

Or in his ferry o’er the gloomy water

Does Charon⁹ bear thee onward, little daughter?

And having drunken of forgetfulness

Art thou unwitting of my sore distress?

Or, casting off thy human, maiden veil,

Art thou enfeathered in some nightingale?

Or in grim Purgatory must thou stay

Until some tiniest stain be washed away?

Or hast returned again to where thou wert

Ere thou wast born to bring me heavy hurt?

Where’er thou art, ah! pity, comfort me;

And if not in thine own entirety,

Yet come before mine eyes a moment’s space

In some sweet dream that shadoweth thy grace.

Lament XI

«Virtue is but a trifle!» Brutus¹⁰ said

In his defeat; nor was he cozenèd.

What man did his own goodness e’er advance

Or piety preserve from evil chance?

Some unknown foe confuses men’s affairs;

For good and bad alike it nothing cares.

Where blows its breath, no man can flee away;

Both false and righteous it hath power to stay.

Yet still we vaunt us of our mighty mind

In idle arrogance among our kind;

And still we gaze on heaven and think we see

The Lord and his all-holy mystery.

Nay, human eyes are all too dull; light dreams

Amuse and cheat us with what only seems.

Ah, dost thou rob me, Grief, my safeguards spurning,

Of both my darling and my trust in learning?

Lament XII

I think no father under any sky

More fondly loved a daughter than did I,

And scarcely ever has a child been born

Whose loss her parents could more justly mourn.

Unspoiled and neat, obedient at all times,

She seemed already versed in songs and rhymes,

And with a highborn courtesy and art,

Though but a babe, she played a maiden’s part.

Discreet and modest, sociable and free

From jealous habits, docile, mannerly,

She never thought to taste her morning fare

Until she should have said her morning prayer;

She never went to sleep at night until

She had prayed God to save us all from ill.

She used to run to meet her father when

He came from any journey home again;

She loved to work and to anticipate

The servants of the house ere they could wait

Upon her parents. This she had begun

When thirty months their little course had run.

So many virtues and such active zeal

Her youth could not sustain; she fell from weal

Ere harvest. Little ear of wheat, thy prime

Was distant; ’tis before thy proper time

I sow thee once again in the sad earth,

Knowing I bury with thee hope and mirth.

For thou wilt not spring up when blossoms quicken

But leave mine eyes forever sorrow-stricken.

Lament XIII

Ursula, winsome child, I would that I

Had never had thee if thou wert to die

So early. For with lasting grief I pay,

Now thou hast left me, for thy sweet, brief stay.

Thou didst delude me like a dream by night

That shines in golden fullness on the sight,

Then vanishes, and to the man awake

Leaves only of its treasures much heartbreak.

So hast thou done to me, belovèd cheat:

Thou madest with high hope my heart to beat

And then didst hurry off and bear with thee

All of the gladness thou once gavest me.

’Tis half my heart I lack through this thy taking

And what is left is good for naught but aching.

Stonecutters, set me up a carven stone

And let this sad inscription run thereon:

Ursula Kochanowski lieth here,

Her father’s sorrow and her father’s dear;

For heedless Death hath acted here crisscross:

She should have mourned my death, not I her loss.

Lament XIV

Where are those gates through which so long ago

Orpheus¹¹ descended to the realms below

To seek his lost one? Little daughter, I

Would find that path and pass that ford whereby

The grim-faced boatman ferries pallid shades

And drives them forth to joyless cypress glades.

But do thou not desert me, lovely lute!

Be thou the furtherance of my mournful suit

Before dread Pluto¹², till he shall give ear

To our complaints and render up my dear.

To his dim dwelling all men must repair,

And so must she, her father’s joy and heir;

But let him grant the fruit now scarce in flower

To fill and ripen till the harvest hour!

Yet if that god doth bear a heart within

So hard that one in grief can nothing win,

What can I but renounce this upper air

And lose my soul, but also lose my care.