“There you are, where people crave for you”. The image of God in Zbigniew Jankowski’s poetry

Abstract

This essay constitutes an attempt to show the evolution of the image of God in Zbigniew Jankowski’s poetry. One can identify three stages in the metamorphosis of the Creator’s image: the rock-solid God phase (presented in poems in the 1959–1966 period), the almighty God of ups and downs phase (presented in poems in the 1970–2000 period) and the eternal God phase (presented in poems in the 2001–2014 period).

The initial section, The Rock-solid God, concentrates on poems from the first four poetry volumes, in which the God presents Himself to the lyrical I as a weak, ruthless demiurge, the creator of human suffering. The next part, The Almighty God of ups and downs, contains interpretations of selected poems created in the 1970–2000 period. In those poems the image of God has undergone a metamorphosis – the lyrical I perceives the Creator as a merciful father and an omnipresent personification of love. The last part, The Eternal God, based on the poems created in the 2001–2014 period, shows that the Sovereign has become synonymous with the eternity, which the lyrical I craves to be united with.

The whole study has been complemented with the comments on faith and God made by the author himself in his autobiographical texts, which adds the biographical context to the explication. The parallel of the evolution of God’s image in both Jankowski’s poetry and prose may lead one to a conclusion that the lyrical I and the narrator are integrated.