“You Were There, Oh Soul”: Color Manifestation of the Sacred and Metaphysical Treatment of Flora in the Poetry by Sigitas Geda, Leonardas Gutauskas, and Jonas Juškaitis in the 1970–1980s
“You Were There, Oh Soul”: Color Manifestation of the Sacred and Metaphysical Treatment of Flora in the Poetry by Sigitas Geda, Leonardas Gutauskas, and Jonas Juškaitis in the 1970–1980s

Summary/Abstract: During the period of Stagnation the works by Sigitas Geda, Leonardas Gutauskas, and Jonas Juškaitis, with their inclination towards the poetics of visions and a theocentric worldview, notably differed from the prevailing themes in Lithuanian poetry. Due to this shared apperception, plants in their poetry were treated as having an essential characteristic of Being, which grounds metaphysically the related notions of the place and the transcendentality. An address taken from Geda’s poem, “Buvai, o siela” (“You Were There, Oh Soul”), reveals an approach (common to all three poets) that sees the landscape of the homeland as a repository of past and future lives. Concluding my earlier research, this article aims to analyze how a) a spiritualized manifestation of Being, seen in plants and perceived as sacredness expressed by certain colors, b) an apprehension of the world as a perpetual metamorphosis, and, c) the images of harmonious existence, which draw their specific character from the archetypes of ancient Baltic culture, reveal the specific experiences of divinity and sacredness of the native landscape in the poetry of Geda, Gutauskas, and Juškaitis in the 1970–1980s, as well as to disclose the philosophical and theosophical ideas that influenced their thought.

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