I will not crush the world’s corolla of wonders

I will not crush the world’s corolla of wonders
and I will not kill
with reason
the mysteries I meet along my way
in flowers, eyes, lips, and graves.
The light of others
drowns the deep magic hidden
in the profound darkness.
I increase the world’s enigma
with my light
much as the moon with its white beams
does not diminish but increases
the shimmering mysteries of night —
I enrich the darkening horizon
with chills of the great secret.
All that is hard to know
becomes a greater riddle
under my very eyes
because I love alike
flowers, lips, eyes, and graves.

As a poet holding the sovereign power of creation—and both identifying and distinguishing himself from his fraternity of versifiers—Lucian Blaga begins his poem I do not crush the world’s corolla of wonders as a retort, a vindication of his poetic philosophy to those who consider poetry to be a literal and one-dimensional revelation of the inherent mysteries of life and death in idiomatic language created with the conventional resources of a poet’s oeuvre.

The poem, with its predominant metaphor of efflorescence (and its antithesis), seems to be part of an ongoing dialogue with surrounding urbanity in denying the inadvertent violence attributed to the presumption of poetic creation when a poem is seen as a destroyer rather than an enhancer of “the world’s corolla of wonders.”

The first few lines express a mode of violence—“crush,” “kill,” “strangle”—that poets ironically manifest in their works. It is a trait Blaga disowns without ceremony. His own poetic power in no way subverts nature’s.

He conceives his own role as augmenting the mysteries of the universe embodied in the phenomenal world, spanning life and death. He criticizes all poetic order that paradoxically executes a vision at the expense of empirical truth (“the light of others / strangles the spell of the hidden”). He is different in that, as a poet, he enhances rather than dilutes the “secret of the world,” just as the moonlight invests the night with deeper mystery.

His way of doing so suggests an unfathomable sensuality leading to a consummation of the transcendent kind: “I do myself enrich the dark horizon / with shivers, great shivers of sainted secret.” And as a poet he endorses the “incomprehensible” aspect of such an experience, not for the orgasmic epiphany, but because he loves the totality and paradox of creation in all its diversity and color—“flowers and eyes and lips and tombs.”

In this yearning for an absolute state of primal being, we see Blaga’s affiliation with his predecessor Mihai Eminescu. Blaga goes beyond the domain of scientific enquiry in the cause of understanding the world, a task made possible only through love. It is a love that a poet can execute without the presumption of creation.

Bibliography
Blaga, Lucian. Poems of Light. Translated and introduced by Don Eulert, preface by Constantin Ciopraga. Bucharest: Minerva, 1975.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature

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