42
PARTISAN REVIEW
In "A Mirrored Gall ery," he began to add prose commentaries to hi s
poems [Reads excerpt].
In
the middl e of this wild cascade, in the wildness
of Milosz, I guess, comes a woman's voice :
You talked, but after your talking all th e res t remains.
After your talking-poets, philosophers, contri ve rs
of romances-
Everything else, all th e res t dedu ced inside th e
fl
esh
Whi ch lives and kn ows, not just wh at is permittcd.
I am a woman held fas t now in a grea t sil ence.
N ot all creatures have your need for words.
Birds you kill ed, fi sh yo u tossed into your boat,
In what words will th ey find res t and in w hat Heaven'
You received gifts from me; th ey were accepted .
But you don't understand how to think about th e dead .
Th e sce nt of winter appl es, of hoa rfros t, and of lin en:
There are nothin g but gifts on thi s poor, poor Ea rth.
Having written a perfect lyri c poem mos t poets would walk away. But
Mil osz goes on to meditate on the educa tion o f women in the nin eteenth
century in
" A
Dark Academy" [Reads poem.]
In
1983,
somewhere near the end of thi s extrao rdinary cascade o f
wres tling with memory and hi sto ry, th e nature of consc iousness, and the
possibili ties of language, he wri tes in prose :
To find my home in o ne sentence, concise, as if hammcred in metal.
Not to enchant anybody. Not
to
ea rn a las ting name in prosperi ty. An
unn amed need for order, for rhythm , for fo rm , whi ch three words are
opposed to chaos and nothin gn ess.
Thank you very mu ch.
Seamus Heaney:
I
too shall begin with H and M. T hi s is a poem call ed
"Rivers," translated by Bob
I
think. " Rivers." No t by me, by Czeslaw
Milosz.
