| dc.description.abstract | Poetry might be understood as a series of language operations that negate primary qualities of language units (no matter if they are classified as either natural or conventional) and impose meanings on the sets of those units. "The poet does not annihilate language: he uses it so as to make it speak against its own structure. If the poetic sign has a symbolic dimension, it is so due to a specific valorization of its signifiers rather than to symbolic marking of individual elements. One cannot avoid quoting here a general definition of the symbol. Symbol is an object-sign having two meanings, and its material, sensory properties imply intellectual matter superimposed on the former. What is of interest in the symbol is the fact that the relation between the concrete and the intellectual is motivated. 'The poetic text seems to be based on this principle. Its elements that, on the one hand, constitute units of a language system become independent of it. Sounds function not only as phonemes, but they are also autonomous elements; syllables act as morphemes and factors of parallelism; stresses as intonational determiners and musical tones. 'T'he poet treats words as things [19]: he scatters them and puts them together constructing an utterance whose meaning escapes dictionary definitions. The meaning in question emerges from behind material properties (such as the distribution of sounds, verses or stresses) and dominates—like the scent of roses—over the context. This specific evocation of meaning, determined by the shape of an utterance, is just thę motivation of the poetic sign. In Norwid's poems cited here the motivated relation comprises anapaest, fate, rhythm, defiance, repetitiveness of "L and *Ł” sounds as weli as the movement of waves. Perceptible material manipulations with-words-objects imply attitudes and phenomena manifest in the afore-mentioned poems. A sound contains a shade of meaning whereas the meaning seems, in turn, to echo the sound. Discussing the symbolic marking of poetry the author questions its autotelic (poetic) function. Emphasis on the message and its construction does not stand for a headonistic pleasure derived from sounds and their combinations. These combinations involve semantic consequences; they convey a message arising. from the utterance and co-determining its relation to the world. | pl_PL |
