The Collected Poems (37 page)

Julia Hartwig (1921): poet, married to Artur Międzyrzecki.

“I won't sing about Felek Stankiewicz now”: Reference to a well-known soldier's song.

“the marching song about the red poppies”: “Red Poppies on Monte Cassino,” a famous Polish war hymn, written by Feliks Konarski and Alfred Schütz, soldiers of the II Polish Army Corps.

Season

“Boreas”: Greek god of the north wind.

Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–1883): late Polish Romantic poet. His prose work
Black Flowers.
White Flowers
(1856) contains portraits of great contemporaries such as Adam Mickie-wicz and Frédéric Chopin not long before their deaths.

Bedlam

Jerzy Siwiec: psychiatrist and friend of Herbert's.

Portrait of the Fin de Siècle

Supernova: stellar explosion producing a bright object made of plasma, which declines to invisibility over weeks or months. A “dwarf nova” is a cataclysmic variable star system, containing a “white dwarf” and a companion star, from which it accretes matter.