130
PARTISAN REVIEW
childhood in
The lssa
f1liley
and
From the Risillg
C!f
the
51111,
"The World"
reveals its severe rules of form: reduce particulars; delete names; refuse the
first person; suppress the sectarian. Nowhere in this poem do we hear of
Milosz's aunts or grandparents, his church or its sacraments, his school or his
village. We know at most that we are in Poland, and that Warsaw is the near–
est city. The family owns books, pictures, and clocks, even a mounted boar's
head; and it is a Christian family, because the anonymous speaker groups as
a triad the three virtues, faith, hope, and love. The time is vaguely modern,
but before World War I: it seems as though house and wood, books and par–
ents, the sun and the virtues, have always existed and always will. When the
child is hungry, Mother gives him soup; when he is lost in the wood, Father
rescues him; if the night comes, yet the sun returns.
Why would a poet elsewhere so historically circumstantial write such
an anonymous poem? "Everything taken away. Crossed out. All our trea–
sures," says Milosz, and he writes "The World" for everyone whose past
was obliterated in the War. It is a poem into which any European of
Milosz's generation can insert the name of his own birthplace and the rit–
uals of living that he knew as a child, whether in France, in Germany, or
in Hungary. Even the virtues are secularized, detached from their doctrinal
definitions, so that "The World" aims to be a poem readable by Gentile or
Jew. It is in fact readable by anyone who has been a child, since "The
World" exerts a heartbreaking power even over those of us who never
knew the European world it presents. That power is poetic, historical.
Any person reading "The World," like any person reading Blake's
Songs
if
Innocence,
has already passed into the world of grim experience. If
it were only loss that we felt in encountering the texts of innocence, they
would not have such power over us; rather, they remind us that interiorly
we continue to feel the expectations and even demands of innocence. All
through life, we somehow believe that nourishment, truth,justice, and sus–
tenance should be our portion, and each violation of that belief comes as a
fresh shock. We are reminded by songs of innocence of our own persist–
ing inl1ocence, an apparently constitutive element of our being.
As human beings, we wish to share a common being with the world.
This, if anything, is the thought unifYing Milosz's seguence. "My poem
'The World ,'" Milosz has said, " .. .is an attempt to describe the world as it
should be, seen by children, as opposed to the world of horror I knew [dur–
ing the Nazi occupation]." Children, their senses and their minds still fresh ,
live in a world where visual realities interpenetrate with ethical ones, as the
world is humanized for them by their parents.
Though the child in the poem is aware that his world contains dark
forces-the mother's shadow struggles with the menacing shadow of the
wild boar, and a terrible beast with hot breath lurks in the forest-the threats
