UNDERSTANDING "THE WOIUI)"
133
sequence is drawn in part, it is true, from the realm of children's books; but
there are enough
Ii
terary and philosophical words sprinkled through "The
World" that we are always catching a glimpse out of the corner of our eye
of the adult writing the sequence. The simple quatrains of most of the
poems, we notice, change in the virtue-poems into stanzas more elaborate
and irregular, as if to say, "Here, the adul t speaks, even if in simple words."
The child's imagination and the poet's imagination fuse in the more
fanciful moments of the poem. The child, already a proto-naturalist, imag–
ines that since he has a home, so have all other beings, down to the insects
in the peonies. And other things, within his world, may themselves be
worlds. Perhaps there is a whole world inside a poppy, complete with a
house, a moon, and a chorus of dogs. This vertiginous imagining suggests
by extension that somewhere, too, there may be a world much bigger than
ours.Just as the dogs inside the poppy-blossom cannot imagine our world,
so perhaps we cannot imagine the world two steps up fi'olll ours. The birds,
one step above us , fly in a "world that is bright, beautiful, warm and free"
and have their homes f.1r above our "lake of darkness."
The limitations of our perception, Milosz suggests, coexist with the
boundlessness of our imagination. The interpenetrations of different scales,
spaces, and times in the poetry become especially strong when the child looks
at his picture book, seeing Hector (nameless to the child) dragged around the
walls of Troy, while at the same time the child kills a real moth, which "flut–
ters and dies on the hero's body," just as it had flitted over "a chariot." For
the child, the world of epic is on the same plane as the moth, and as he turns
the page that buries the moth, a new picture makes him re-enter the epic
world: "here the sky gets cloudy," as the Greek ships make for home in sight
of a naked ploughman on the Trojan shore. And just as the epic moment and
the modern moment coexist in the child's percetion, so too do the invisible
and the visible: a sunset in the forest appears to the child as an occasion for
wizardry, when "an airborne coach carries gifts"-whether for invisible
monarchs or the forest bears, it scarcely matters. The lowland lagoon of the
Baltic Sea becomes for the child "the golden lowland of the earth" bathing
in the sea like "a half-sunken tulip." The boar's head takes on life and its
"snout roams the ceiling." We live in the child's world, half-monstrous in its
confusion of realms, half-supernatural in its speculations.
"The World" could have been
The lMzsfe
La/ld.
Both spring from the
devastation of a world war; but where Eliot shows what is, Milosz shows
what-ought-to-be as an "is." And yet Milosz's
"OIlj!hf-fO-VC
seen as
is"
does
not inhabit the Absolute. To the contrary: it inhabits the actual. This is the
import of the unforgettable close of the sequence. After the child's night–
terror in the wood, his father brings rescue and the sun: "Here it is still
dark.... / But the dawn on bright stilts wades in from the shore / And the
