Literary Excerpt: Gundulić (Baroque)

Ivan Gundulić (1589–1638) is the towering figure of the Dubrovnik Baroque, and the Himna slobodi ("Hymn to Freedom") that crowns his pastoral play Dubravka (1628) — sung by the chorus through its closing scene — contains the single most quoted lines in all of Croatian literature — words inscribed on monuments and still recited from memory. Gundulić died in 1638, so the text is in the public domain, and the lines below are a genuine quotation with attribution. He wrote in the ijekavian Štokavian of seventeenth-century Dubrovnik, in an older orthography full of circumflexes and variant vowels; the spelling here is normalised to modern Croatian Latin script so the grammar reads clearly, but the forms — the chained vocatives, the inverted Baroque syntax, the archaic datives — are Gundulić's own.

The text

The chained vocative: slobodo, uzroče, uresu

The hymn is one long apostrophe — a direct address to Freedom personified — and so it lives in the vocative case. The first line piles three adjectives onto a single vocative noun: o lijepa, o draga, o slatka slobodo ("o fair, o dear, o sweet liberty"). slobodo is the vocative of the feminine sloboda ("freedom"), formed with the regular feminine vocative ending -o (replacing nominative -a). The adjectives stay in their plain feminine form (lijepa, draga, slatka) because feminine adjectives do not take a separate vocative ending. Then the address keeps going: uzroče is the vocative of masculine uzrok ("cause"), with the -e ending and the k → č palatalisation; uresu is the vocative of ures ("adornment"), with the -u variant that some masculine nouns take. Four vocatives in four lines — the grammar of pure invocation.

Older Dubrovnik-Štokavian and ijekavian forms

Gundulić's language is ijekavian Štokavian, the same broad base as the modern standard, which is why these lines feel closer to today's Croatian than Marulić's ikavian Čakavian does. lijepa ("fair, beautiful") shows the ijekavian ije reflex of jat — exactly the standard form — where a Dalmatian ikavian poet would have written lipa. But the diction and some forms are archaic. višnji ("the highest, the most high") is an elevated, now (literary)/(archaic) epithet for God; everyday Croatian uses najviši or svevišnji. ures ("adornment, ornament") is a high, old word; modern speech prefers ukras. The genitive od naše sve slave ("of all our glory") uses od + genitive where modern Croatian would normally use the bare possessive genitive naše sve slave — od here is an older, Romance-influenced Dubrovnik construction.

Older orthography: liepa, kôm, lipoti

In Gundulić's actual seventeenth-century text the spelling looks foreign to a modern eye. He wrote liepa (not lijepa), kôm with a circumflex marking a long contracted vowel (modern kojem / kom), dô for dao ("gave"), and even lipoti ("to beauty," modern ljepoti) with an ikavian-looking i — a reminder that Dubrovnik orthography was not yet fixed and mixed reflexes freely. The circumflex (◌̂) in kôm, dô, tvôj marked vowel length or contraction, a function modern Croatian orthography simply drops. Normalising to modern spelling — lijepa, kom, dao, ljepoti — is what lets a learner read the grammar; but it is worth knowing that the page Gundulić printed did not look like the one above.

Elevated diction and inverted Baroque syntax

The grandeur is built by word order as much as by vocabulary. Baroque verse routinely inverts the natural order for rhythm, rhyme and emphasis, and Gundulić does it constantly. In dar u kom sva blaga višnji nam Bog je dao, the natural prose order would be dar u kojem nam je višnji Bog dao sva blaga ("the gift in which the most high God gave us all treasures"); Gundulić throws the object sva blaga ("all treasures") forward and strands the verb dao at the line's end on the rhyme. The clitic cluster nam … je ("us … [auxiliary]") is split and reordered to fit the metre. And uresu jedini ("o sole adornment") postposes the adjective jedini behind its noun — a high, lyrical order. None of this is how anyone spoke; it is the deliberately heightened syntax of the sacred-political hymn.

Vocabulary gloss

Register notes. The whole passage is (literary) at its most elevated — Baroque hymnody. višnji and ures are specifically (archaic)/(literary): a modern speaker would understand them only in poetry or set phrases and would say svevišnji and ukras in life. The repeated o + vocative is a (literary) rhetorical pattern; everyday address simply uses the vocative without the o (Ivane!, not o Ivane!). Dubrava ("oak-grove") is Gundulić's poetic cipher for Dubrovnik itself.

How the grammar serves the passage

The hymn has survived four centuries because its grammar is pure exaltation. The chained vocatives — slobodo, uzroče, uresu, each preceded by o — turn the whole passage into one sustained act of address, the speaker reaching upward to Freedom as to a deity. The ijekavian forms tie it to the standard language that would later be built on this very Dubrovnik base, so it still sounds Croatian to the modern ear. The archaic diction (višnji, ures) and the inverted, verb-final syntax lift it clear of ordinary speech into the register of the sacred and the civic at once. To read these four lines with the vocative endings and the inversions in focus is to hear why a small republic made a hymn to freedom its anthem — the grammar itself is reaching for something higher.

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