Laments "Man's Life Is Error,"

Laments "Man's life is error," laments Jan Kochanowski at the end of Tren 1 of his elegy "Laments." Kochanowski then asks whether it is better to accept grief openly or keep attempting to impose the human will on nature (I). The rest of this 19-poem version of a classical form explores the depths of these two possible options -- submission or willfulness -- in a complex dynamic of form and symbolism.

In Kochanowski's Renaissance Poland, the typical reader would likely not have had the background to understand most of "Laments." Kochanowski therefore restates his message in plain language at the end, and thus brings a classical rhetorical form into the popular domain through deliberate choice of language and subject. If man's life is error, than so is his understanding of that life and its absence.

Kochanowski explores and ultimately rejects the artificially refined explanations of rhetoric and philosophy he once relied on, but rediscovers the essential truths those modes of understanding began from, the core pre-Stoic message of acceptance justified by our inability to understand the superhuman.

He then carries that kernel down from the Olympian clouds of elite discourse, in language the average Pole can actually use Is "Laments" about Stoicism? If "all man's life is error" (I), why spend so many lines discussing Classical mythology when the final Tren demonstrates Kochanowski has the ability to come out and say what he means in the vernacular? The "Laments" are so full of symbolism, erudite references and the minutiae of Classical mythology that even a generous audience analysis limits full understanding to the contemporary equivalent of college professors and elite critics.

The first 18 Treny are densely packed with symbolism from the repeated nightingale motif, traditionally (alongside Proserpine and Pluto) a reference to Eurydice who was killed by a snake; to trees, the olive cut down (V) but the Cypress, Greek tree of death, standing forever in the underworld (XIV); in a form usually reserved for the eulogy of a senior statesman. In fact Kochanowski points at the homespun origins of Stoicism from the very first line when he summons Heraclitus.

Heraclitus, the 'Weeping Philosopher,' when not overwhelmed with melancholia, argued that balance in the face of change was the essence of man's existence, because since time moved in one direction, impermanence was the only common element shared by all experiential phenomena like other people; geography; objects; feelings etc. This Zen-like acceptance was summed up in a term of diverse referent 'Logos,' ultimately meaning 'spirit,' 'essence,' 'reason' or the ability to sense and reflect, or 'know'; which later transformed into the Word, eventually the Word of God.

Heraclitus also argued that discourse and understanding available to the common person transcended the elite, artificially hidden insights of Sophistic philosophy (as does Kochanowski: "whosoever scorns the common way doesn't / deserve such belated medicine," Lament XIX). The virtuous and right-thinking person accepted that impermanence was essential and thus until some way around temporality was discovered, the essence of reason or wisdom was acceptance of this basic fact.

Ironically, Heraclitus was notoriously oblique in his own description of these home truths, and the body of Stoicism that grew upon his foundation mirrors the complexity that Kochanowski explores throughout the first 18 Treny.

These include pride and vanity, via extended reference to Niobe (IV, XV et al.), which also serves as a bridge to Kochanowski's own realization that forsaking life for living death in grief, or turning into a weeping stone mountaintop in the wilderness forever, is neither God's will (XVIII) nor the message of Stoicism; the realization that he, like Orpheus, cannot both enter the afterlife and look back at the same time (via Charon in X; XIV), and such complications of the core Heracletian message that acceptance of impermanence is the only path to the balance of true wisdom or Logos ("if Fate's to blame and Reason's folly," XV) and thus peace through the cycle of grief, transcendence and return to life through acceptance.

The fact that Kochanowski uttered this work at all supports such a possible reading.

If "all life is error" (I) and that includes this poem, why go to the trouble of convincing the reader of the futility of reading it? Why not just hang it all and write nursery rhymes indeed (II)? If error is the essence of understanding, then there is no point in even trying to understand; and thus no reason for all these elaborate images of changing seasons, the inherent agricultural cyclicality underlying life, death and rebirth via seed corn (XIII) or Proserpine (throughout); the pursuit of wealth and earthly success (Pluto); refuting the higher comforts of poetry and rhetorical inspiration via the lute (VI; XIV-XVI) and muse Erato (XV); the complicated refutation of the human construct of "Virtue" as a trifling flaunting of wit to "dazzle" the "simple" (XI), and all the rest.

Any grieving father might hope the bitter wish that his departed "had not been" such a "cross" (XIII) could be excused under 'all life is error,' but then how to justify the self-indulgent catalog of lost attributes of his beloved two-year-old (III-XVIII)? How can the two, longing and blame, exist side by side if both are wrong? Without an answer, why the complicated speech? This is precisely Kochanowski's Stoic-fundamentalist, "Heracletian" (I) reading, if the reader can penetrate the referentiality: In fact any father who lost a daughter might likely sympathize with and understand the author's inability to bring her back and confusion at his own range of diverse emotion.

This is in fact one possible author's-motive, to share his realizations (XIV, "When you see others' lot / You accept your own") as he survives effectively an agricultural year of bereavement, until finally giving up on Reason as ineffective to explain what is not inherently rational but can only be accepted via the passage of time (VII) and a Stoic turning away from the false distractions of vain earthly attachment to a disciplined contemplation of Godhead (XIII).

Lest the reader not have an elite classical education, the author brings his dead mother out to say this all again in plain language (XIX) a la Simonides (I); while Tren XIX and I-XVIII could stand alone as separate elegies that say nearly the same thing, the two sections are enhanced, the one by the clarity of the other, and the 19th by the erudition of the first 18. This structure encourages such a possible reading in its presentation of, departure from and return to these key elements,.