The title poem in Seifert’s collection Morový sloup (1977, Cologne; 1981, Prague), composed as a free-verse narrative, uses a 300-year-old Prague monument as a symbol for Czech fate and history. Plague columns were erected in nearly every town throughout Europe in the 15th through 17th centuries as reminders of big plague epidemics.

Like many Seifert poems from the 1960s, The Plague Column shows the poet’s personal view and interpretation of history, culture, and human experience. It is notable for its balanced tone, mature poetic style and form, musical language, and presentation of an emotional and spiritual challenge to the reader.

Throughout the collection, the poet attempts to understand history as well as aging and death by eroticizing his relationship to his native land and stressing the importance of love. Love in Seifert’s treatment is always both physical and spiritual and, in this collection in particular, connected to time. In Morový sloup, love functions as the only shield for protecting oneself from the passing of time, historical injustice, and death. Its title poem crystallizes Seifert’s lifetime preoccupation with love, beauty, and the feminine.

The poem begins with a description of the plague column, with its four frowning statues that dominate the column, making the “four corners of the earth” subject to their penetrating gaze. The speaker then meditates on the nature of time, signified by the shadow of the column.

Seifert masterfully arranges the levels of the present and the past so that the reader is not able to tell one from the other easily. The visible present manifests itself in the column’s presence in the speaker’s description, while the present “plagued” by the limits on people’s freedom is implied: the present-day plague is invisible and silent.

The past emerges from the interweaving of the history of the plague, the speaker’s personal history, and more recent tragedies of public history, such as the fascist and communist oppression experienced by Czechs throughout Seifert’s lifetime:
“Our lives run / like fingers over sandpaper, / days, weeks, years, centuries. / . . . I still walk around the column / where so often I waited, / . . . always astonished at the water’s flirtatiousness / as it splintered on the basin’s surface / until the Column’s shadow fell across your face.”

Seifert quickly introduces the eternal motif of erotic love, which has resisted death since ancient times. After describing the plague chapel of Saint Roch and the thousands of bodies that were laid around the chapel in the time of plague, the speaker says:
“For a long time I would visit / these mournful places, / but did not forsake the sweetness of life.”

The sweetness of life manifests itself for the speaker in “the perfume of women’s hair” or, taking a walk near the chapel, in the image of “girls / undressing at night.”

In contrast to a plague column, a monument erected to memorialize bad times and tragic death, Seifert’s poem attempts to erect an everlasting monument to love—perhaps an ordinary experience, but nevertheless life-giving and protecting against ancient as well as more recent “plagues.”

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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