80
PARTISAN REVIEW
Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees,
From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices
And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only
to
me.
Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning
They wai ted, ready, for all those who call themselves mortals,
so that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.
The joy that is given "not only to me"-is it given to other humans nearby,
to
angels, to God?
It
is hard
to
say. But because for Milosz a central dilenm1.a
is the contradiction between our glimpses into the eternal Real and our human
subjection to transience, what can be said is what is signaJled by the title, and
by each image of the poem: whatever joy we achieve is ours for a moment
only, perhaps an hour-but always the knowledge is clear: it will pass.
The statement appears Jgain in the poem "On Angels:"
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic. [...
J
The theme clarifies: transience itself, for Milosz, requires praise of what pass–
es. Praise is the temporal soul's only possible gesture-the way existence
does honor before existence. And so Milosz describes the blacksm.ith shop
of his childhood,a place of construction and of repair, of sensuous blazing,
filled with sound and smell and the demands of accurate, muscular making.
The living horses stamp nearby, and nearby, too, nows his beloved river; the
poem closes by describing both the young boy Milosz once was and the
older self, looking now back at that boy: "I stare and stare.
It
seems I was
called for this: / To glorifY things just because they are."
Memory's act of retrieval, preserving for all time whJt is lost for all time:
the act mirrors the poet's conception of Christian redemption:
apokatastasis,
the reversal of time's unravelling into a restoration of all that has ever been.
A recurring statement in
Provillccs
serves as that collection's presiding spirit:
"Once only, from the beginning till the end of the world." Under such
knowledge, and in the light of the eternal, the poet chose his task-to recre–
ate in his words all he has seen and known.
It
is the way he will attempt to
answer the last theme on my list-the poet's obligation to the sacred in this
life, and his reply to the heavenly injunction he hears at the end of the poem
"On Angels": "day draws near / another one / do what you can."
