Notre Dame

Abstract

Notre Dame Julian Przyboś (bio) From a million fingers folded in prayer, the space ascends!The Interior pried me from the spire’s hook—in terror.Mocked and spat upon by gargoyles spewing rain,I know my worth: I, animate, so near the pillars.These walls, sheared-off cliffs, like heads above meresurrect from the sarcophagus. Who roused this darkness, formedand comprehended it? I know. Crosses, burdened with Jesuses,one must hone into the rails of builders’ ladders;and one’s will—made equal to unfathomed azure—and one’s death,from the Gothic archstrike(there at the vault’s keystonetrembles the notched flight of arrows);and endure the roar of hewn stones lifted ever higher,till they, unending, by a sudden vertigoare toppled, as twin towers, from a height—inverted depths. Who imagined this abyss and flung it upwards!? [End Page 48] Julian Przyboś Julian Przyboś (1901–1970) is credited with the initiation in 1922 of the first Vanguard movement in Kraków (Awangarda Krakowska) that promoted the idea of a poetry characterized by concision, autobiographical restraint, and expression through images, and is understood to be a significant theoretician in the history of Polish poetry. During World War II his poems were circulated clandestinely. After the war he served for some years as a diplomat for the Polish People’s Republic in Switzerland, but broke with the party after 1956. He died in Kraków. Copyright © 2019 Middlebury College Publications