Toruńskie zagadki weselne: porównania – obrazowanie – obyczajność
Toruń Wedding Riddles: Comparisons – Imagery – Morality

Summary/Abstract: Wedding riddles printed in Toruń at the turn of 17th and 18th century written by the Polish patriciate as panegyrical art of words (regarded as a praise of newly married couple and joy of marriage bed) at least could equal with their literary culture level to those of nobility erotic riddles from Jakub Teodor Trembecki’s "Wirydarz poetycki" ("Garden of Poetry"). Burgher epitalamion writers did not reach for poetic metaphors but resorted to such descriptions in which significative function was committed mainly to comparisons viewed as elements leading the wedding audience to solve the riddle. In other words, the riddles expound non-metaphorical imagery shaped with periphrasis peculiar to the genre’s poetics. The riddle’s poetics settled that the difference between wedding occasional poems and pornographic poems as "Garden of Poetry" is tied not as much to various techniques of imagery as to what can be expressed most briefly as the vocabulary, always moral in Torunian pieces and often immoral in manuscript poems present in "Garden of Poetry".

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