Máj

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Máj is a romantic poem by Karel Hynek Mácha. It consists of four songs and two intermezzos. While it is considered one of the greatest works of Czech literature now, it was fiercely criticized when first published.

[edit] Characters

  • Vilém – a bandit, in love with Jarmila
  • Jarmila – in love with Vilém, has been dishonoured by Vilém's father
  • Hynek – narrator and poet himself
  • Nature – personification is used so many times that the nature can be considered a character - in fact, the nature buries Vilém

[edit] Poem

According to Karel Hynek Mácha, the poem is a homage to the beauty of the spring nature. The setting of Máj has been argued about many times and there have been certain scholars who made tremendous effort to prove that the landscape depicted in Máj simply cannot be Czech despite the fact author himself stated that the lake mentioned in the poem is in fact a lake formerly known as Velký rybník. Today, it is called Máchovo jezero (Mácha's lake).

The plot is rather simple one. It starts with a girl (Jarmila), beautiful and young, though fallen, waiting on the top of a reef by the lake. One of Vilém's associates comes to inform her of Vilém's imprisonment and death sentence for murdering Jarmila's seducer, Vilém's unknown father. Upon his departure, Jarmila commits suicide. In the next song, we are introduced to Vilém, fighting with sleep in his cell somewhere in a dungeon under an old tower located, surprisingly, by the lake. Thinking about the meaning of his life and the upcoming death, he finally falls asleep. Next morning, he, the dreadful lord of woods (a leader of a gang of bandits), is executed. Many years pass and so it happens that Hynek is traveling through the country. He asks a publican in a nearby town about Vilém's corpse. He is told the frightful story, but it has strange, perhaps unexpected impact on him. He returns to the place of Vilém's death, a hill sticking out from the shore to the lake, every now and then and sits on the grass, meditating.

There are also long lyric and descriptive passages, which is one of the reasons why many scholars believe that the plot itself is insignificant. Note that the foot of this poem is iambic, which was extremely unusual for the Czech poetry at that time. It has been suggested that this is because Mácha was inspired by English romanticism, particularly by George Gordon Byron.

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