22
PARTISAN REVIEW
This may seem an unduly sumptuous wagonful of prose in response to
those clear stanzas, but readi ng Milosz gives you the sensation of inhabiting
an unbounded region and prompts the search for a correspondingly ample
language of commentary. Yet the Virgil analogy is, I believe, more than an
ornate compliment. I don't mean to suggest by it that Milosz could ever be
thought of as an epic poet since elegy and irony are far too deeply implicat–
ed in hi s understanding and hi s undermusic. But the picture of Virgil
enshrined in Hermann Broch's great prose-poem about his death, the picture
of a man hallucinating at the center of the world of
realpolitik,
a man ashim–
mer w ith memory even as he is turned to for prophecy, a man at work in the
nLineshafts of language whom others see on ly in the corridors of power, thi s
picture fi ts the figure of the poet that Milosz has created for our times. T he
an ti-Marxist apologist, the Aquinas of the Cold War, this Atlas of C hri stian
humani sm will claim that he is no more than a small boy playing about on a
riverbank. And yet we know him to be the poet from the provinces who
comprehends all hi story and cu lture because he was born and grew up in the
anthropological equivalent of the golden age: survivor of wartime Europe,
veteran intell ectual in exile in Ameri ca, the latter-day equival ent of the court
poet in R ome, he has lived on to know the decadence of the post-imperial
as it declines and fal ls towards the postmodern. This is the destined c1Lild who
enters the monastery and becomes the sage, a consciousness at once Orphic
and Tiresian, eas tern and western, the same consciousness that speaks from
behind its rhetori cal brocade in the first section of Milosz's sequence cal led
"From the Ri sing of the Sun." [Reads poem.]
Everything we adnLire in Milosz and trust and turn to aga in and again is
in these lines: what is exis tentially urgent and necessary, yet pondered and
caught up into the lucid order of poetry itself. Everything they call up is like
an elucidation of their import. They uni te, in Eliot's phrase, " the most
ancient and the most civilized mentality." They could well have been spo–
ken by Broch's Virgil or Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian , or James Joyce's
Anna Livia, but they are in fact spoken by one who knew in hi s childhood
(as the poem later discloses) "the scent of smoke, of late autumn dahlias
I
On
the sloping little streets of a wooden town
I . ..
so long ago, in a millennium
visited in dreams
I
Far from here, in a light of which I am uncertain ."
Still, the important thing here is not who is speaking, but what the
reader is hearing, which is a music that comes over us like the fulfillment of
Eliot's desire that the transitory time be redeemed: "See, see, they vanish,"
Eliot wrote in the 1940s, "the faces and places,
I
Wi th the self, which, as it
could loved them,
I
To be renewed, transfigured, in another pattern ."
Milosz's poetry reaches across borders because it answers the deeply con–
tradictory needs experienced in the modern world. It recogni zes, if you will
forgive the phrase, the instabili ty of the perceiving subj ect and reveals con-
