Abstract
The article analyzes the symbols, motifs and images in Mieczysław Jastrun’s poetry
to reconstruct his vision of childhood within in a broad philosophical and anthropological
perspective, drawing in particular on Gaston Bachelard’s idea of “reveries toward childhood” and
Mircea Eliade’s discussion of sacred time and space. In many of Jastrun’s poems the evocation of
childhood is associated with a pastoral summer landscape; it is not, however, a specifi c summer,
an identifi able moment of his life, but an image representing the essence of childhood. It is an
evocation of happiness, security, a promise of future wellbeing, an experience of fullness of being
or a communion with nature and a transcendent reality. The interpretation of individual poems
clearly point to the conclusion that childhood remains for Jastrun a sacrum, an immanent sacred
site. It is, however, also a lost childhood, viewed from the perspective of an adult who has been
irrevocably expelled from that Arcadia and has to live in a transient world doomed to death. The
longing for the idyllic childhood can be found throughout Jastrun’s verse, nowhere as poignant as
in his last volume of poems, completed before his death.
Go to article