82
PARTISAN RE VIEW
that is more than entertainment is always an attempt to dance around, and
point to, the sacred . Milosz's poems are fill ed with as toni shment at the glory
of exi stence, despite the nightmare of the twentieth century , of human nature,
of the natural sys tem , of the o rder o f the wo rld- that built- in engineering
fl aw that demands that we kill and be slaughtered. "Thi s World ," from
Facillg
the River,
reiterates the fundamental C hri stian longing fo r things to be o ther
than they seem: the heartfelt if perhaps naive insistence that thi s wo rld of suf–
fering and loss surely cannot be all that God intended. I read thi s poem as a
putatively innocent but touchingly ironi c res tatement o f R evelatio ns 21,
which promi ses that " there shall be no more death, no r sorrow, nor crying.
There shall be no more pain , for the fo rmer things have passed away.. . .Behold,
I shall make al l things new." Milosz res tates that lovely dream like thi s: " It
appears that it was all a mi sunderstanding. / What was only a trial run was
taken seriously. / [. . .
1
What a relief] Breathe freely, you who suffered much."
The hea rt of th e poem is in that po ignant las t line. Isn't that what we
all long fo r, and wish to beli eve; isn't that our fa ntas ti c dream? The dream
o f renewal, of a new beginning; the hope that thi s world is different from
what on e supposed-and lucki er. In
A Yea r of the
HII
II
ter,
Mil osz qu otes
Karol Ludwik Komirl ski , a contempo rary whose brand of Ca th oli cism is
similar to hi s own: "Th e meaning o f m y fa ith in God is that I sho uld have
hope that th e nobl e and just yearning of th e human hea rt will be fulfill ed ."
But Mil osz knows that thi s world , fill ed with suffe ring and injusti ce as
it is, is no nethel ess a magnifi cent, incomprehensibl e gift. Hi s poem "Gift"
records that realizati o n, a moment no t of the soul' s lo nging but o f th e
heart' s fulfillment. It's the record o f an "ordinary" moment, one that's no
less ex trao rdinary fo r that: a moment wh en th e hea rt-center has opened
and the poet finds himself full y in the presence of th e wo rld , in reverential
gratitude, "bowing"-as Bill Men v in o nce so marvelo usly put it-"no t
knowing to what."
1
R eads poem .
1
Let me close with a lin e from
T he Separate No tehooks,
a statement that
bo th encompasses aspects of human rea li ty and summari zes Mil osz's rever–
ential but unsentimental sense of th e sacred: " In the hall of pain , what
abundance o n the tabl e." Thank you .
AI Zolynas:
I will talk on what I call "Three Faces of the Sacred in the
Poetry of Czeslaw Mil osz" by commenting o n " Blac ksmith 's Shop," on
"Secretari es," and on " A Meadow." But I first wa nt
to
refer to Mi] osz's
quo tati on at the end o f the introducto ry essay to hi s anthology,
A Book
C!f
LllmillOIlS
Th il1,~s.
In that essay, he says he is interes ted in " the visibl e world
again and aga in unve iling itself and opening itself to the eye." There's an
interes ting paradox in the no ti on that th e vi sibl e has to be unveil ed . What
is the probl em if we ca n see it? And yet what we think we see is no t always
