POETRY
AND
THE
SACRED
81
And so we come to the small, slight figure of the librarian Miss Jadwiga,
lost in the chaos of Warsaw, who accompanies the poet's long hfe in her long
death. She is irretrievably vanished, and yet, hke the tin plate and half-peeled
lemons of a Dutch painting, in her the Real once existed. Milosz gives to
Miss Jadwiga, and to us, the only restoration he is able: the analogous, human,
and insufficient Paradise of the poems. It is not enough; it is what he can do.
What is our obligation
to
the Sacred? In his Nobel lecture, Milosz
describes an "insoluble contradiction" between the poetic impulse to write
only
of God-created being,
esse,
and the requirement to recognize his sol–
idarity with the fate of his fellow men.
Yet to stand in solidarity with others is not an avoidance of the sacred,
but one of its demands-or so Mahayana Buddhism teaches, with its ideal
of the
bodhisattlla:
the person who, though fully awakened, refuses to enter
Nirvana, remaining in the world of suffering until every last being, every
last blade of grass, is able to enter as well.
Whether any art, even an art that stands wi th others, can be a sufficient
fulfillment of the soul's obligation is a finally unanswerable dilenmlJ of
Milosz's poems. The question is already fully present in "Dedication;' writ–
ten in Warsaw in 1945: "You whom I could not save / Listen," the poem
begins, then goes on
to
ask its famous question: "What is poetry which does
not save / Nations or people?" The poet offers his words to the dead, lays his
book at the graveside "like millet or poppy seeds....So that you should visit
LIS
no more." But over the many decades the dead continue to visit, to "stare
OLlt, silent, as if from behind a glass," and incomprehension before their fate is
a note the poet returns to again and again. He strives in his words to effect
what he knows words cannot do-reach past the glass, into the realm of the
ones who are silent. The obligation of the hving to the dead goes unresolved.
But when Milosz docs come to his moments of peace-of grace, or of
respite-it is in two ways. One is in the transcendent, physical gift–
moment in which time dissolves. The other is in accepting his human
solidarity with both the dead and the living, his full kinship with others.
That kinship appears in the late, sweetened compassion of poems such as
"My-ness" or "On a Beach" or "Blacksmith Shop," in which he can say:
"...And I delight in being here on earth / For one more moment, with
them, here on earth, / To celebrate our tiny, tiny my-ness."
In
which he
can say: "A sensation of my neighbor's misfortune pierces me and I begin
/ to comprehend / / In this dark age the bond of our common fate and a
compassion / more real than I was inclined to confess."
In
which he can
say: "It seems I was called for this: / To glorify thingsjust because they are."
Steve Kowit:
I
have much to say about Milosz and little about the sacred-the
realm about which we cannot speak and with which all poets grapple. Poetry
