Rymowanie starości – starość jako argument. Na marginesie kilku dziewiętnastowiecznych tekstów nieznanych

The subject of the article is a volume of poetry Kwiatki polne (1884), written by Maciej Józef Brodowicz, a renowned Krakovian physician, who at the age of ninety-four published autobiographical poems. The main theme in most of them is old age understood as existential experience and a biographical circumstance, justifying the attempts to synthesize the author’s life in the form of verse. Two reviews of the volume by Lucjan Siemieński and Stanisław Tarnowski constitute the context for reading his poems. The reviews also bring up the question of old age as an essential component of the language of the critique itself, allowing to fill the gap originating from the lack of more precise and appropriate criteria for the analysis of conventional poems.