MILOSZ AND WORLD I)OETRY
23
sciousness as a si te of contending awarenesses and discourses; and yet it does
not sell the pass of individual responsibility or allow the fact that values are
culturally based and ratified to negate the fundamental necessity of values
themselves.
In
the self-interrogation that Milosz conducts between the
moments of liberation offered by his poetry, the part of him that is Derrida
is put into the cell with the part that is Solzhenitsyn and each suffers the
force of the other's antagonism until the reintegrated poet re-emerges and
utters one of my favorite descriptions of his intellectual predicament: "I was
stretched," Milosz writes in
Native Realm,
"between the contemplation of a
motionless point and the command to participate actively in history."
The curator of the Shakespeare birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon
once told me about seeing an early nineteenth-century visitors' book from
the place that contained John Keats's signature. There it was, in the column
marked
Name:
"John Keats." But in the column marked
Address
he had
written only one word: "Everywhere." And in that entry, I find one way
of thinking of Milosz and world poetry: no matter where we are or where
we come from, his name and his work make us feel at home. And then,
more recently, I found another image for this response when I read some–
thing about the siting of the image of the god Terminus in the Temple of
Jupiter in ancient Rome. The statue of this god of boundaries, of borders
and frontiers at their most local and most international, was placed under
the open air, at a part of the temple where the roof was all skylight, as if to
suggest that, while at ground level borders had to be an acknowledged fact,
the hankered-for dream was unbounded space equal to desire itself
Milosz's poetry both tests and fortifies the conviction that the boy
entranced by his riverbank dream will never be superceded by the adult in
thrall to necessi ty.
Milosz occupies his place in world poetry because he fulfills the
appetite for seriousness and joy which the word "poetry" awakens in
every language. What entrances his readers is the plangency and cer–
tainty of his tone. The cadence too is irresistible, the cadence of a
wisdom that is, against all expectation, unwearied and resilient, issuing
every time as freshly as Coventina's river and yet growing as strong and
as opulent as the mill-pond riding over its weir in that medieval wood–
en town.
Milosz restores the child's eterni ty at the water's edge and equally he
expresses the dismay of the adult that his name is writ on water.
In
cele–
bration of which vision and tough-mindedness, I conclude with this
six-line poem wri tten more than forty years ago and dedicated to his fellow
Lithuanian poet, Aleksander Wat, and his wife. The title comes from the
first line-"What Once Was Great":
