MILOSZ AND WORLD POETRY
21
in
and around the location, holding a waterweed in her right hand and in her
left a pitcher from whjch a river flows and flows and flows unstoppably.
Suddenly, it was as if the Irish Catholic child of the 1940s recognized that
from the start he had been in possession of a Romano-Celtic soul; standing
on that orillnary ground, I was happy to know myself as the anthropological
son of the goddess Coventina and the Christian missionary Patricius. A part
of me that had been out of it felt for a moment totally included.
It
was as if
I had been taken up to a high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the
world and saw at the center of them a far-seeing child in the puddly corner
of a field. I saw that I belonged in and beyond myself, that inside me and out–
side me there was world enough and time.
Meanwhile, at the very moment when that child was standing big-eyed
and dumbfounded in the grey weather of rural Ulster in 1942 or 1943, the
world was coming back quiet and clear and far and wide to a poet in Nazi–
occupied Warsaw, a poet who would soon be claiming with justifiable
confidence that "One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole
wagon of elaborate prose." His confidence in the pivotal importance of the
clear stanza could well have sprung from a poem called "The World"
which he was then writing, a poem he would call "Naive" because of its
visionary radiance, its Ptolemaic harmony and beauty. One section of it
was called "From the Window" and went like this:
Beyond a field , a wood and a second field,
The expanse of water, a whi te mirror, gli tters.
And the golden lowland of the earth
Bathes in the sea, a half-sunken tulip. [...
J
This poen"! is binocular, seeing things from the top of the high mountain and
from the back of the child's eye. It is as if the Virgil who envisaged the panora–
ma on Aeneas's shield, those ordeals of war and catastrophe that would
eventually lead to the Pax Romana, as if thjs tragic eye were joined and turned
and trained along with another eye on another scene; it is as if some of our
wishful thinking Irish commentators were right and Virgil were indeed a man
of Cel tic stock, a farm boy from Mantua who here suddenly declared ill s inde–
pendence of the realities of ill story and power and revealed instead ills native
dream of
tir-na-n-6g,
ills land of youth, reimagined now deliberately and rue–
fully from the perspective of Augustus's imperial court. As if, indeed, Milosz
were repeating the poetic strategy of Virgil's
Eclogues,
in willch the Roman
poet sees the hard social and political realities of Augustus's Italy through eyes
that had once opened innocently on the childhood world of his father's farm.
