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12) and interpret the epithet jaskółcza as one evoking the swallows which habitually migrate to Poland in the Spring.⁶¹

(c) The third possibility is a combination of the two possibilities already discussed.

Each of these ‘choices’ or ‘paths’ is accompanied by a mood of gaiety and light-heartedness.

The most conspicuous ‘contour’ of the ‘represented world’ of Piąta pora roku—like that of Malczewskfs paintings—is its everyday and autobiographical aspect, madę up by the protagonisfs personal experiences and objects and events reminiscent of those known to the reader in everyday life. There are, however, several dimensions to this ‘everyday’ aspect of the poem’s Tepresented world’. The protagonist-poet’s life and his links with people and with his native Carpathian landscape are shown through the following ‘prisms’:

1.    The ‘prism’ of an archetypal premonition of inevitable death, accompanied by the hope of attaining a complete vision of truth—cf. Stanza 15:

Teraz tu słyszę, czego nikt nie słyszy,

1 widzę rzeczy na skroś i spod spodu I pełny jestem śmierci jak ciszy I pełny wieczności jak chłodu.

2.    The ‘prism’ of mythological and Biblical motifs.

3.    The ‘prism’ of Polish folklore.

4.    The ‘prism' of Romantic poetry.

VII

The most ambiguous motif of Piąta pora roku is that of the bird—an element of the poem’s ‘naturę’ background; a symbol of the eternal recurrence of phenomena; the envoy of eternity and death; a symbol of inspiration; a ‘relation’ of the Muses, the Parcae and the guardian Angel-Spirit; a symbol of nostalgia (homesickness); a symbol of the unity of heaven and earth. The motif of the bird is the poem’s main semantic and thematic link (naturę—eternity—imagination—art).

It can therefore be no accident that in the opening section of Piąta pora roku the bird is linked with song and blood—the words ptak, śpiew and krew being the only one-stress verse endings in the entire poem. This association of the bird with song and blood leads us to yet another meaning of the symbol. Like the bird in Part III of Yeats’s The Tower, the bird in Piąta pora roku would seem to symbolize ‘living truth’—

⁶¹ Cf. “Legenda wieczności” (in:) M. Dłuska, Studia i rozprawy, ed. cit., vol. III, p. I56.

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