Skalny Center for Polish and Central European StudiesUniversity of Rochester

“Double vision may be a metaphor for the poet’s vocation,” writes Milosz. It is often the necessary but vexing condition of poets to view things from more than a single point of view, and there is a double-mindedness that runs through his poems, his thinking and his temperament in clear and curious ways. I’d like to read a short poem by Milosz, one he liked to read, in which we can feel his ambivalence toward the immediate and the familiar, his not-at-homeness. His at-homeness, when he does feel it, elsewhere, often takes the form of amazement.

My-Ness




“My parents, my husband, my brother, my sister.”
I am listening in a cafeteria at breakfast.
The women’s voices rustle, fulfill themselves
In a ritual no doubt necessary.
I glance sidelong at their moving lips
And I delight in being here on earth
For one more moment, with them, here on earth,
To celebrate our tiny, tiny my-ness.

You can hear the astonishment in the way he repeats “here on earth;” yet we can feel how alien this is to him, how uncomfortable he actually is. They are women. They “fulfill themselves/ In a ritual no doubt necessary.” He is like an anthropologist from Mars. You can hear amid the celebration some condescension in that “our tiny, tiny my-ness.” He would stretch out that last work and look up when he finished reading it with a sly, impish smile on his face. I don’t think he really sided with “my-ness.”

His was the irony of deep, historical perspective. If he celebrated things out of time and history, things in the luminous present, he also saw the present as only the surface layer of former times, people and cities. In a letter from the early 40s to his good friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, later the author of Ashes and Diamonds and the subject of a chapter in Milosz’s The Captive Mind, “Alpha,” we can see the surprising and difficult work of distance: Milosz writes: “You summon me to assist in the struggle against armies of the most varied moral laws, armies equipped with swastikas, hammers and sickles, portable shrines, banners. Each of them insists that only its system of values is salutary, appropriate, useful. Each of them rushes around the world, exhorting people to join their ranks.” After a long consideration of evil and good and the “astonishing” “plasticity of human nature,” he rejects Andrzejewski’s plea.

Let me quote from Milosz’s Native Realm, where he offers another explanation for his “rejection of nationalism and right-wing politics”: “My roots were nurtured by a soil that was inhospitable to new plantings, a great many precepts advocating tolerance had penetrated me, and they were out of step with my century.” One of the underpinnings of Milosz’s rebellion is the world of Wilno, that multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multilingual crossroads of Europe. Another is Milosz’ disposition to historical memory, which pairs the burning of the heretic Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori with the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw in a powerful poem:


Campo Dei Fiori




In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.

On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors’ shoulders.

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle as a poet’s words.

Later, he will write another poem that addresses the century of revolution, though differently, with greater distance, from 1980 in Berkeley, thinking back to Paris and his time there in the thirties and with a change in tone that perhaps is due the distance of time:


Bypassing rue Descartes




I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler,
A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world.

We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno and Bucharest,
Saigon and Marrekesh,
Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,
About which nobody here should ever be told:
The clapping for servants, barefooted girls hurry in,
Dividing food with incantation,
Choral prayers recited by master and household together.

I had left the cloudy provinces behind,
I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.

Soon enough, many from Jassy and Koloshvar, or Saigon or Marrakesh
Would be killed because they wanted to abolish the customs of their homes.

Soon enough, their peers were seizing power
In order to kill in the name of the universal, beautiful ideas.

Meanwhile the city behaved in accordance with its nature,
Rustling with throaty laughter in the dark,
Baking long breads and pouring wine into clay pitchers,
Buying fish, lemons, and garlic at street markets,
Indifferent as it was to honor and shame and greatness and glory,
Because that had been done already and had transformed itself
Into monuments representing nobody knows whom,
into arias hardly audible and into turns of speech.

Again, I lean on the rough granite of the embankment,
As if I had returned from travels through the underworlds
And suddenly saw in the light the reeling wheel of the seasons
Where empires have fallen and those once living are now dead.

There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else,
And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame
And now I know that the time of human generations is not like
the time of the earth.

As to my heavy sins, I remember one most vividly:
How, one day, walking on a forest path along a stream,
I pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.

And what I have met with in life was the just punishment
Which reaches, sooner or later, the breaker of a taboo.

Here the portrait is of a type, of the student who comes from the corners of civilization, western and otherwise, to embrace the ideas of revolutionary change; whose great crime is “to abolish the customs of their homes,” in a word, to sweep away tradition, or we might say, facts of class and religion. Those who sweep away the past, represented by custom, are the committers of crime. The poet is among them, who has “pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.” He has broken a taboo. This is a Lithuanian and ancient Greek violation. The snake is the great chthonic being, a figure for the earth. Violate the earth and the customs that go with living on it, and punishment, 20th century European and world history, is the result. It is the result of single-minded vision, totalitarian, not plural. Milosz often has a vision of the breadth and richness of history; here he sees on a scale of the time of the earth, as though the punishments were being exacted by the earth.

The double vision I’ve been talking about is finally a moral vision of maintaining two perspectives simultaneously. This, of course, is the nature of irony itself; in Milosz’s case the ability to see and value the corporeal world and to see and value from the outside, wide-angle, pan-historically. Since the Nobel Prize and the end of communism, he has come to seem an iconic figure, quintessentially Polish; certainly his tireless promulgation of Polish poetry made Polish poetry the gold standard of poetry in the second half of the 20th century. But Milosz only acquired this status in Poland after he turned 70. Remarkably, he still had a productive career ahead of him. His selected poems in English range from 1931-2004, which is 73 years. We will be reading them for a longer time than that.

I’d like to end with one final, brief poem, which could serve as an epitaph:



The Fall




The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation
That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets,
And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas,
But now it will not relieve any besieged city,
It will not enter into any alliance,
Because its cities are empty, its population dispersed,
Its land once bringing harvest is overgrown with thistles,
Its mission forgotten, its language lost,
The dialect of a village high upon inaccessible mountains.