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PARTISAN REVIEW
translation" is like an essay. It's a reading; and indeed, as we know from the
great scholars of the Middle Ages, translation is a high form of reading.
I'll present my idea about the poem "The World" to you by citing
another of the very few works of twentieth-century poetry in any language
that survive comparison with "The World." Yeats writes:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of ilmoccnce is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(I am aware that you might joke
to
yourself; yes, it is fimny to think of the
phrase as meaning literary criticism, "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world.") "The ceremony of innocence" seems to me one way to approach the
subject of
this
work. It's about the relationship between ceremony, which is
presented in the poem partly by the pedagogical ceremony of teaching chil–
dren to read and teaching them precepts in rhyme--rhyme is itself a kind of
ceremony-and innocence. The relationship between ceremony and inno–
cence seems to me a deep part of this poem. I associate it with an image I
always use as a key to understanding Czeslaw's work. It's the image in
Native
Rea/III
of the great train station at a time of war, full of angry, dislocated, dis–
organized, unhappy, threatened, avaricious humanity, and in the middle of the
station a family whose mother has prepared tea is sitting on the
f100r.
And with
all the courteous, domestic gestures of ceremony, the family is having tea.
What is ceremony? It is not ritual. In this context I think that ceremony is a
means of relating a
microcosm
and a macrocosm. In my
Ii
ttle world, someone
has died. Or two people are getting married, or a child is born, or someone is
retiring. Something has happened in the little world, and to relate it to the larg–
er world I make a speech or sing a song or produce certain objects. The pathos
of an entire continent or perhaps the entire world is related, as Helen and Bob
have described, in the microcosm of the family as perceived by the children.
!Jmocence deprived of ceremony degenerates into brutali ty. Wi thout
ceremony, innocence becomes brutal. Ceremony without innocence
becomes cynical, desperate, and despairing: that is the narrative of the
poem. I'll just account for that narrative in three poems: one from near
the beginning of the work, "Pictures," one from the midd le, and the end
