THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE LYRICAL POEMS AND THE EPIC IN STRUCTURE OF MIKLÓS ZRÍNYI’S "SYRENA"-VOLUME

Abstract

In Miklós Zrínyi’s volume under the title of The Siren of the Adriatic Sea: count Miklós Zrini (Adriai tengernek Syreneaia: groff Zrini Miklos), which was published in Vienna in 1651, bucolic poems precede the epic, imitating and encompassing it. The collection closes with royal and he- roic epigrams, as well as the hymn entitled To the Crucifix (Feszületre) and Epilogue to the Zrinyiad (Peroratio). The issues concerning the structure of the volume came into the limelight during the previous decade. According to László Szörényi, the organizing principle of the Hungar- ian Siren volume is the struggle of bucolic, erotic and elegiac poetic worlds on the one hand with the heroic one on the other. Szörényi is of the opinion that the hymn decides the competition of the poetic genres in favour of the heroic one, whereas the heroic voice is regarded worthless in comparison with the heroic death. Sándor Bene reconstructs the narrative of a soul in the Syrena- volume, concluding that the moral history of purification evolving from the short poems becomes more important than the epic. All the critics who have tried to explain the poem place the turning point of the volume on the part containing the Orpheus poems, the epigrams and the hymn. The Orpheuspoems lament the death of Miklós Zrínyi’s first wife, Mária Eusébia Draskovics. Accord- ing to the author of the essay, the lyrical subject of these poems does not become estranged from passion, quite the contrary, it identifies with excessive passion. Due to the sheer fact of death, in the Orpheus-poems, love is not enough to justify the human identity. The speaker of the hymn addressing the crucified Christ recognises God’s redeeming gesture, the deed serving as a model to the human existence. The paper ends with the conclusion that the function of the lyrical poems in the volume is to present the paradigm of identity offered by the epic as authentic.