“Bear humanly the human lot”: Jan Kochanowski and seeking catharsis alone in early modern Poland

This chapter analyses a seminal work of Polish Renaissance poetry, Laments [Treny] (1580) by Jan Kochanowski, focusing on its portrayal of grief and trauma as solitary experiences. Laments, a sequence of nineteen poems written after the untimely death of Kochanowski’s young daughter Urszula, illustrates the various changes in the poet’s perceived state of being alone. Whereas previously Laments was represented in Kochanowski’s oeuvre as a product of the “glorious solitude” of the humanist author, separated from the base crowd by his talent and craft, Laments is here presented as a consequence of his painful loneliness, a state of being separate not only from other people but also his own moral and intellectual framework. This chapter proceeds by investigating the ways in which Kochanowski uses and adapts the genre of epicedium to express his torment, interrogating two modes of being alone to rediscover his vulnerability and humanity, and representing the sensory experience of being separated from his beloved child. Kochanowski’s exploration of the tension between the voluntary solitude of craft and the involuntary loneliness of trauma ultimately helps to broaden readings of early modern literature to the affects, experiences, and subjects previously sequestered from the world of strict genre conventions.