A poet who gave over but never gave up

Approaching 90, Czeslaw Milosz wrote in the poem “Late Ripeness”:

I felt a door opening in me and I

entered

the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former

lives were departing

like ships, together with their sorrows.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas

assigned to my brush came closer,

ready now to be described better than they were

before.

For years the Polish poet, who died in August at 93, had been fashioning a serenely youthful vision out of his old age. “Late Ripeness,” placed at the end of his “Collected Poems” published in 2001, raised the suggestion of a second beginning. Now, included near the start of “Second Space,” it takes on a different color. It introduces what follows ripeness: a withering.

But Milosz was a witness and luminous transmuter of much of his century’s pain -- underground resister of the Nazis; brief believer, then lucid denouncer of the Communists; an exile for half a century. And he can encompass withering as well. He doesn’t transform it -- it remains desolate -- but he speaks truth to it; and not just at the surface but in the unsuspected patterning of its sedimentary layers.

There was a time before his 1980 Nobel laureateship when Milosz’s poetry displayed a conviction that it was empowered to confront reality in both its beauty and its horror. Later, quite as vital and more affecting, it explored its own powerlessness. He became a poet who outwitted poetry’s sin of pride -- affirmation that edges into imperious possession -- by writing hope in terms of doubt. Even his Catholicism grew its hope out of doubt: “I am not, and I do not want to be, a possessor of the truth. / Wandering on the outskirts of heresy is about right for me.” This comes from the new collection, but it turns darker, as if religious sensibility were one more faculty that age undermines, like eyesight. In “If There Is No God,” we read:

Not everything is permitted to man.

He is still his brother’s keeper

And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,

By saying that there is no God.

This is not belief struggling; it is belief dried into a talisman.

In “Hear Me,” prayer is closer to imprecation. He asks God to protect him from the day “of dryness and impotence. / When neither a swallow’s flight nor peonies, daffodils and irises in the flower market are a sign of Your glory ... When I will accuse You of establishing the universal law of death.” His Father Severinus -- title figure for an extended sequence -- is a priest who imparts faith without having it. Frequently, the Milosz of “Second Space” is a poet who imparts poetry’s redemption without having it.

“The word is our surety for final peace,” wrote Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish poet and philosopher. Milosz’s religious faith always did flicker -- and the flickering, like a candle’s, dazzled all the more -- but here it is the poetic surety that wavers: his faith in the word. Some of the poems waver too; the terse beauty of a line is muffled sometimes by three or four lines of elaboration. One long section, “Apprentice,” is a cloudy, heavily footnoted effort to revive the memory of his father, who was also a poet but a lesser one.

“Shame” is a word that recurs with some frequency, as if Milosz suspected a fraudulence not just in his fame and success but in the very machineries of his art. Only a few years ago, he wrote a series of brief recollections (“Milosz’s ABC’s”) that upheld his faith that memory can resurrect the forgotten. A beautiful schoolmate is made to pirouette briefly just by the bare listing of her name. Now the dance is invoked once more, but heavily and all but stilled:

Why her, precisely, I don’t understand.

I’m not sure I’d recognize her on a busy street.

... Farewell Piorewiczowna, unasked- for shadow.

I don’t even remember your first name.

Yet in these last poems, if Milosz’s balance of affirmation and doubt has tilted downward, it resembles relinquishing more than denial: Prospero breaking his staff, compelled not by Shakespeare but by its waning powers.

“If the Sun and Moon should doubt, they’d immediately go out,” Blake wrote, but before Milosz did go out, he simply lowered the flame. “Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?” he asks in a brief flaring of faith -- or is it the need for faith? And then, turning Mary into his own Martha, he adds with nice domestic concern: “And where will the damned find suitable quarters?”

Irony has always attended Milosz’s passions; here it remains, delicate as ever and a memory, at least, of what it once attended. Why should he feel humiliated by his physical decline? Animals don’t seem to mind -- “a falcon no longer fast enough to catch a pigeon / a lame stork expelled by the sentence of his flock, which rises and flies away” -- and he asks: “What’s worse, consciousness or lack of consciousness? Well, there weren’t any mirrors in Paradise.”

His irony still catches a sunlit gleam or two on its metallic surfaces. Of his eyes: “And you were a pack of royal greyhounds once / with whom I would set out in the early mornings,” he writes. “Now what you have seen is hidden inside me.” And he makes one of his old casts at sublimity or perhaps -- a dying fisherman whose wrist twitches on the counterpane -- a remembrance of such casts. “Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in.”

Finally, the writer’s notebook, kept up to near the end, lists as if fresh-minted the materials that poetry transforms and always leaves the same:

To express. Nothing can be expressed.

Fire under a stove lid. Anastasia is making

pancakes.

December. Before dawn. In a village near Jaszuny.

I should be dead already, but there is work to do. *