Polish/Lithuanian Poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) Photo Credit: AKG Images / East News
Joy. The other taste in sorrow’s cup
Guy Gavriel Kay from The Last Light of the Sun, Penguin Canada, 2004
Motto*
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht(1898-1956): Poems 1913-1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, Eyre Methuen, 1976
*Brecht titled a number of his poems Motto. This poem, Motto, comes at the end of his Later Svendborg Poems and Satires 1936-1938
The idea behind this series of blog posts was to highlight poems that inspire a sense of contentment or hope in dark times. A singing about the dark times, yes but also with a taste of what is good in the world. That’s why I choose as an epigraph for the blog post, the line from Guy Gavriel Kay: Joy. The other taste in sorrow’s cup. A good reminder. As is this poem from the great Nobel Prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) who lived through those dark times described by Bertolt Brecht:
Gift
A day so happy
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers
There was nothing on earth I wanted to posses.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
Berkeley, 1971
Czeslaw Milosz from Selected and Last Poems (1931-2001), Ecco Press, 2011
Now, that’s a great state of heart, state of mind! What a relief: Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. I know for me this is an important poem. A poem to balance the necessary singing about the dark times. Maybe it will be important for you,too, dear reader.
Speaking about singing about the dark times, I come back to Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and poet who, fearing persecution because of his political views, fled Germany in early 1933 after Hitler came to power. After living in various countries including Denmark, Finland and Sweden he moved to the U.S. in 1941 and moved back to Germany after the war in 1946. Although better known for his plays his poetry is highly regarded. W.H. Auden said he was one of ten poets from whom I learned most.
I was surprised to find a poem of Brecht’s written in the late 1930’s that seemed so resonant with a growing focus by many of us on the dark things of this world. Particularly the dark political climate in the U.S. A certain political discourse with a growing intolerant and cruel tone. What I appreciated from this poem was the reminder to not overlook the good, the beautiful, the things that delight us! To keep a place in the heart to write a poem like Milosz’s Gift.
German poet Bertolt Brecht (1989-1956)
Bad Time for Poetry
Yes, I know: only the happy man
Is liked. His voice
Is good to hear. His face is handsome.
The crippled tree in the yard
Shows that the soil is poor, yet
The passers-by abuse it for being crippled
And rightly so.
The green boats and the dancing sails on the Sound
Go unseen. Of it all
I see only the torn nets of the fishermen.
Why do I only record
That a village woman aged forty walks with a stoop?
The girls’ breasts
Are as warm as ever.
In my poetry a rhyme
Would seem to me almost insolent.
Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter’s speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my desk.
Bertolt Brecht, ibid
Such acute obersvations. Why do we focus on the bad and ugly so much?
The green boats and the dancing sails on the Sound
Go unseen. Of it all
I see only the torn nets of the fisherman.
The last stanza, in particular has an eerie resonance for me, burdened as I am by, not the house painter’s [Hitler’s]speeches, but by the speeches of an American reality TV star billionaire. Yes, I know the U.S. is not Nazi Germany but I do stand in horror at cruelty and falsehoods in the billionaire’s speeches. And that these would be greeted, by some, with standing ovations. My horror and sadness at that.
Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter’s speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my desk.
Wham! What an arrow in the gut. I, too, faced with the opposition between beauty and ugliness find myself being driven to my desk by the ugliness. I pledge today to write a poem that contends with beauty. The joy in sorrow’s cup. And no better time than now. On the spot. This poem:
Gift After Gift
This light, a better colour than yellow or white.
The morning’s gray releases it back
to me. Through a window I see it
bloom
on the bare thorn apple tree.
The thorns, I know are there,
too far away to see.
The sound of a car in the driveway. My sweetheart
returns from town. Before she left
we held each other,
and kissed. I envy
no one.
Richard Osler, 2017, Unpublished