
Lithuanian Polish Nobel Prize Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)
5. Earth Again
They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.
The lure of waters. The lure of fruits.
Lure of two breasts and the long hair of a maiden.
In rouge, in vermillion, in that color of ponds
Found only in the Green Lakes near Wilno.
An ungraspable multitudes swarm, come together
In the crinkles of tree bark, in the telescope’s eye,
For an endless wedding,
For the kindling of eyes, for a sweet dance
In the elements of air, sea, earth, and subterranean caves,
So that for a short moment there is no death
And time does not unreel like a skein of yarn
Thrown into an abyss.
Czeslaw Milosz from The Garden of Earthly Delights in Unattainable Earth (1986) in New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), Ecco, 2003
To capture moments, dear particulars, out of the flux of time and in that attention does something mysterious, or more specifically something of the lasting, the eternal, enter in?
So that for a short moment there is no death
And time does not unreel like a skein of yarn
Thrown into an abyss.
I ask this especially after spending many hours reading the poems of the Lithuanian Polish Nobel prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. And here, a huge shout out to the U.S. Community of Writers and its director, Brett Hall Jones, for hosting a six week series of Milosz facilitated by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert (Bob) Hass. Third session, tomorrow! More than two hundred participants and some of them recognizable and noted Milosz translators and scholars.
This longing of Milosz above does not take away his rigorous attention to everyday life as you see so wonderfully in his poem Earth Again, above. To the sensuous particulars of life. What the Nobel Prize Committee celebrated him for. It seems this is his way of trying to honour and make sense of human life where we all vanish. Who will remember us? This becomes his job as a poet. The job of artists as he says in these lines from the long poem IV Natura, in his 1957 volume, A Treatise on Poetry: In sculptures and canvases our individuality/ Manages to survive. In Nature it perishes.
He seems to see two polarities in life and his struggle is to find a middle, I think. He defines these polarities in his remarkable long poem III The Spirit of History in his 1957 volume, A Treatise on Poetry.
In a dream the mind visits two sharp edges.
Woe to the unearthly, the radiant ones,
While storming heaven, they neglect the Earth
With its joy and warmth and animal strength.
Woe to the reasonable, the heavy-minded.
Their lies will extinguish the morning star
A gift more durable than Nature is, or death.
Milosz, a man who says he was torn between wanting to be lost in endless contemplation, a radiant one, perhaps, and the need, to be forced back into the movement of history, its beauty and its violence. A man who seems to seek consolation even among seemingly inconsolable moments of history. He won’t look away. Especially where he had a front seat in such moments during and after the Second World War in Poland. This need not simply to mourn as he writes in his poem In Warsaw written in 1945 where he asks:
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
Put simply, I think much of his poetry is a struggle between needing to celebrate an isness of beauty and life and what we can imagine could lie beyond it but also to acknowledge a becoming of history and time with its evil and violence. Milosz witnessed the horrors and atrocities there in Poland: the Warsaw uprising and the total destruction of the city by the Nazi regime. Those atrocities, that destruction forced him to become a poet of witness. Something he did not want to be. But he was compelled to be.
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