The paper is devoted to occasional laudatory verses which were written to honour princess Elżbieta Sapieżyna (née Branicka) and the members of her closest family – son Kazimierz Nestor Sapieha, General of the Lithuanian Artillery and brother Franciszek Ksawery Branicki, Great Crown Hetman. The begining of the article reminds of already known literary works containing complimentary images of the female aristocrat. The main object of author’s interest are pieces that have not been noticed by scholars of the eighteenth-century political writings. These are: anonymous ode written in 1784 in connection with arrival of Sapieżyna to Prienai (pol. Preny) in Lithuania and collection of four verses created by Wojciech Zacharkiewicz, who thereby added splendour to the Franciszek Ksawery Branicki’s coming to Warsaw for parliamentary sitting of the Great Sejm and to election of Kazimierz Nestor Sapieha for the Marshal of lithuanian confederation. The author discussed circumstances of the creation, main motifs of content and artistic composition of laudatory images of addressees. Furthermore he determined connections of these verses with then popular genres of occasional poetry and put Sapieżyna’s complimentary portraits in context of manners of creation women’s images in literary works of that time.
The ways of understanding the phenomenon of sodomy by Enlightenment love poetry authors is the subject for reflection in the article. The first part is concentrated on the frequency and comprehension of toponyms “Sodom” and “Gomorrah” in the studied texts, as well as the word “sodomy” and words derived. Due to the fact that in European culture this term often occurred as descriptive for homosexual behaviour, in the second part of the study all the allusions and presentations of a homoerotic character in reference to differences in the perception of the sphere of human sexuality in the 18th century and today have also been traced. This dissertation contains also a range of detailed rapprochements of analysed poems, including the famous "Oda Pirona do Priapa" by Stanisław Trembecki and not less obscene work, differently named by researchers — "Burdel", "Pochwała bordelu", "Pieśń weselna" by Stanisław Kostka Potocki. The analysis of selected texts brings closer the repertoire, imaging methods and aim of presenting sexual behaviour in the texts from the period in the context of reflection on some aspects of Enlightenment morality — the time of enormous mental transformation inspired by libertine tendencies, among others, which were also present in the native poetry.
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