While not widely known among American readers, Czesław Miłosz is a poet of longstanding reputation in Europe; he has a well-deserved reputation, as well, for his work as an essayist, a novelist, and a literary scholar. Early in his life he began his work as a poet, becoming one of the leaders of “new poetry” in Poland during the 1930’s. During the terrible years of World War II he was in the Resistance movement, editing an anthology of anti-Nazi writings entitled Invincible Song. A few years after the war ended, he left Poland for America, where he now teaches, in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to his writings in Polish, he has published a study of Polish poetry after World War II, a history of Polish literature, volumes of essays, a translation of the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, and a volume of his own selected poems. In 1978 he was awarded the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
At the center of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry is the realization that we humans are unable to grasp our experience, that as time passes what we have experienced becomes more and more difficult to comprehend. The poet relates this approach to life by writing poems in which he leads us to see the world as a manifestation of another, superior realm. Joseph Brodsky’s written presentation of Miłosz as a candidate for the Neustadt Prize explains: “Shortcutting or, rather, short-circuiting the analytical process, Miłosz’s poetry releases the reader from many psychological and purely linguistic traps, for it answers not the question ’how to live’ but ’for the sake of what’ to live.” Not all the poems in Bells in Winter, it should be noted, are published for the first time in English, for some appeared earlier in magazines: American Poetry Review, Antaeus, and New Poetry.
One way to gain, or at least begin, understanding this excellent series of poems is to begin a second reading with “Bells in Winter,” the title poem and final selection in the collection, as well as the sixth and last of a series of poems from “The Rising of the Sun.” The poem starts with an imagined experience within an imagined experience. The “I” of the poem says that late one day, while on a journey, he stopped his horse and began to read in St. Paul’s epistles. While reading he fell asleep and dreamed that a young man from Paul’s Greece spoke to him. Then the “I” of the poem tells the reader that what has just been read is but an exercise in style, a prelude to something that is not invented. Apparently drawing from Miłosz’s own experience, the poem leads the reader to student days and a student’s lodging in Literary Lane, to see an old woman named Lisabeth who brought firewood to the student’s room. Why bring this back? asks the poem, replying that everything has a double existence, “both in time and when time shall be no more,”—the kind of belief held by St. Gregory of Nyssa, Johannes Scotus Erigena, and William Blake. Returning to the old woman and memories of her, the poem places her among the saints, among the souls of women abused in earthly existence by men and society. Returning to the “I” of the poem, the reader is led to contemplate a different world, the world of modern-day California, where firewood is cut with a chain saw and the towers of San Francisco can be seen in the distance. The poem ends by reminding us of the words of Old Testament prophets, and the promise of completion when every form will be “restored in glory.”
One of the problems of being a poet is what appears to the poet’s eyes when he has written a poem. In “Ars Poetica?” Czesław Miłosz suggests that the poet produces something he himself did not know he had in him, that the written poem can make its creator blink his eyes as if suddenly confronted by a tiger lashing its tail. Still speaking of the poet, Miłosz asks what responsible man wishes to be home to a collection of demons who, not satisfied with stealing the voice and hand of the poet, change his destiny to suit their convenience. He goes on to suggest that poems should be written “rarely and reluctantly,” with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, will choose the poet for their instrument. The purpose of poetry, he suggests further, is to remind the reader of the difficulty of remaining a single person, for we are, each of us, a house with unlocked doors, through which invisible guests go in and out at will.
In a different vein, as if to show the variety of poetry which Czesław Miłosz can write, stand four poems from “The Chronicles of Pornic.” Each of these poems takes a bit of local history and uses it not only for descriptive purpose, but also for an overt or implied irony. The first of the four, “Bluebeard’s Castle,” is about Gilles de Laval, Baron de Retz, educated in Latin and the liberal arts, staunch supporter of Joan of Arc in the fifteenth century. This is the same man who for his evil deeds was condemned by both lay and ecclesiastical courts to be put to death by strangulation. But, says the poem, there were those who said he was put to death because some members of his family, the prince, and the bishop all were greedy for his land. The second poem of this group, “The Owners,” is about different owners of the same castle at different times, recounting how, during the French Revolution, the castle passed from the hands of its noble owners, after a period of emptiness, into the possession of a blacksmith, then a merchant, and finally into the hands of a cloth manufacturer. Third in the series of poems is “Vandeans,” which accounts an episode of vengeance. The Vandeans, having taken Pornic, shoot a number of men purely for vengeance. Drunkenly celebrating their victory, they were themselves attacked and captured by men led by a priest-patriot. Two hundred fifteen of the Vandeans were killed in a brief encounter; another two hundred fifty, taken prisoner, were slaughtered on the beach near the castle. The fourth in this group of poems, “Our Lady of Recovery,” is about miracles performed by St. Mary. Local people believed it was she who saved some of the local men who would otherwise have been lost at sea. The poem suggests that she also willed it that the survivors of a shipwreck should, in their celebration, become drunk and father children.
In “Encounter,” an early poem written in 1936 and printed as the opening poem of the present volume, the poet shows the reader how some of the same questions have arisen for him throughout almost half a century; for this poem, like later ones, takes a piece of experience and asks what the poet, or the reader, should find as meaning in that experience and the memory of it. The poet relates how years before there was an occasion when he and a companion rode on a wagon across frozen fields at dawn one day. Suddenly a startled hare ran across the road before them, and the poet’s companion pointed to it. Now, says the poem, both hare and companion are dead. But, it goes on to ask, where is “The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles” going? And the poem adds that such a question is posed, not from sadness, but in wonder.
Czesław Miłosz uses decades of experience in his poetry, frequently moving from his childhood before 1920 through time to the present, from his childhood’s environment in eastern Europe to the West Coast of the United States, where he resettled. A portion of “Diary of a Naturalist,” another of the poems from “The Rising of the Sun,” illustrates this use of decades of experience. It recalls the poet’s childhood with pictures of men, armed with scythes, cutting the summer’s second mowing of hay while dressed in the unbleached linen shirts and dark-blue trousers which were the uniform of the farmworkers in the province. The same poem relates a recent experience when he visited Oregon’s Rogue River, observing the banks of the boulder-strewn river and the wooded mountains above it. One of the details he noted was that the Alpine Shooting Star (Dodecatheon alpinum) grows in the mountain forests. Thinking of the flower, and the river, too, he comments on how language is deceptive, for language allows us, even forces us, to use different names for the same phenomenon at different times and places. He recalls that French-speaking trappers called the river La Riviére des Coquins, literally River of Scoundrels, now Rogue River. And he goes on to remind us that the name the Indians gave the flower and the river may well never be known. As he comments, “A word should be contained in every single thing/ But it is not.”