THE THEME OF A STAR IN POETRY BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
The article analyzes one of the common poetry motives in the works by Zbigniew Herbert, a Polish poet of the 20 <sup>th</sup> century – “a poet of culture” who could play up originally and masterfully episodes from the international literature, painting, etc., in the aspect of poetic language. In the article, the phenomenon of polysemanticity, based on the ambivalent semantics of a star is disclosed. The author deciphers the polar semantics of a star, mechanisms of “meaning build-up” associated with “points of view”, hidden and related in a poetic imagery. The author discloses how the conceptualization of a star, absorbing a whole paradigm of meaning, gives rise to subjective semantics (an unseen star, a distant star, etc.) associated with poetry writing.