She comes as if she was from elsewhere. He is an ordinary man. This is a reversed situation from a well-known old French fairy tale. A mortal may become a beast under certain circumstances. These may take a form of victimization, planned and carefully oriented manipulation with an individual, mechanisms which institutional power uses in order to control thinking and behaviour of people. One of the intentions when crafting a poem was to avoid biased psychologism, which is represented by Foucault, culminates in the concept of collection of curiosities by the French philosophical symbolism and finds its literary expression through a Kafkaesque lens. Its popularity flourishes even more and represents the first step in conspiracy “theories”. To what extent the sociology of the quotidian has been taken into account successfully must be judged by the reader.
Is the couple so blinded by themselves that they cannot see reality? Conscience does not allow them to have recourse to God and this does not mean that they should love the world profusely, sacrifice themselves for it on the rack so as to show heroism or burn themselves to ashes so as to be able to rise from it. They value this world and yet refuse it. They cannot have any other but an ambivalent relationship with nature. Despite consolation arising from nature, they do not acknowledge it when it strives for self-preservation at any cost – in order to uphold understandable happiness and not at the expense of dignity.
Of course, such an interpretation that is brought by the collection Dreaming with a Beast, supported by illustrations by Martin Račko, is only one of the many. Poems cannot sometimes avoid meaning nuances about the “end” of the world. In all probability under the influence of what happens in society. Apocalyptic associations can be, however, perceived at a social level exclusively symbolically. In contrast to fools who have hallucinations a premonition of the fall does not need to play at prophecy, it may be a mirror to not only present social experiences. Poetry without their justification opens up wounds, without propensities of giving up grace.
By culture, the community builds up new myths on the ruins of the old ones and art, although often in vain, tries to build its own ones against their power.