"Dzień skrzydlaty" Bolesława Leśmiana

Abstract

The interpretation of Bolesław Leśmian’s ballad, Dzień skrzydlaty (The winged day), presented in the article, takes into account the crucially important context of the Postacie (Characters) cycle, in which the oneiric character of the ballad becomes obvious. It is Leśmiatfs poetic language and the poem’s composition that become the subject of the Author’s analysis, i.e. all kinds of departures the standard form of the ballad which, while generating a zone of metaphysics, are, at the same time, a polemic against the myth of Christ and a sign of Lesmian’s epistemology. On that clash of human and divine love Leśmian bases his treatise on the direct, intuitive cognition of life’s mystery, whose sense consists in love and death. It should be added that love in The winged day is neither a consolation nor a salvation, it is rather life itself, a human deed and a tool of human cognition.