24
What once was great, now appeared small.
Kingdoms were fading like snow-covered bronze.
What once could smi te, now smi tes no more.
Celestial earths roll on and shine.
Stretched on the grass by the bank of a river,
As long, long ago, I launch my boats of bark.
PARTISAN REVIEW
Edward Hirsch:
One chilly gray dusk in 1973, in Warsaw during a year of
travel in Europe, I walked through the neighborhood that had once been the
Warsaw Ghetto. There was a lot of noise on the street-people were bustling
home from work-but their activi
ty
only seemed to accentuate what was for
me the eerie and even ghostly absence of all those missing persons, an anni–
hilated people. One didn't need to travel to Auschwitz to feel guilty absence
and palpable vacancy. As an American Jew, Polish cuI tme seemed poignant–
ly familiar to me, and yet I found a bewildering scarci
ty
of actual Jews. And
I,
who had dreamed of European culture my entire life, was being brought
face to face with Europe as a place of barbarism, the si te of a double total–
itarianism, one German, one Soviet. That night I reread Czeslaw Milosz's
poems "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," "A Song on the End of the
World," "Child of Europe," and "Dedication." This last poem is addressed
"To you whom I could not save," and dated Warsaw, 1945. Its key stanza has
thereafter set a standard of seriousness in poetry:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people'
A connivance wi th official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
R.eadings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its sal utary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
Milosz's early war and post-war poems are all haunted by survivor's guilt,
the poignancy of living after what was, for so many, the world's end. Poetry
here becomes an offering to the dead, a form of expiation, a hope for
redemption.
Milosz has lived in America for nearly four decades. But because even
this part of Milosz's world feels too vast and monumental
to
me, I want to
