Two Poems by Czesław Miłosz

PN Review 9, September - October 1979

FROM A NOTEBOOK: BON ON LAKE GENEVA

Copper beeches, glistening poplars
And pine-trees steep above the October fog.
In the valley the lake steams. On the other side,
On mountain ridges, snow already lies.
What remains of life? Only this light,
Peculiar to sunny weather in this season,
Which makes you blink. People say: this is,
And there is neither skill nor talent
Able to reach beyond whatever is,
And unnecessary memories lose their strength.

A smell of cider in barrels. The priest
Mixes lime with a spade outside the school.
By a path my son is running there. Boys carry
Sacks of chestnuts they have gathered from the slopes.
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
(Saith the prophet) let my right hand wither.
An underground tremor shatters that which is:
Mountains crack, forests are rent asunder.
Touched by what was and by what will be,
What is crumbles into dust.
Violent, clean, the world is again in ferment,
And neither ambition nor memory will cease.

Autumn skies, who are the same in childhood,
The same in manhood and old age, I shall
Not look at you. And landscapes,
Who nourish the human heart with gentle warmth,
What poison is in you that lips are numb,
And arms folded across the chest, and eyes
Like a drowsy animal's. But whoever in what is
Finds peace, order and an eternal moment
Will vanish without trace. Do you agree then
To destroy what is and seize the eternal moment
From flux-a gleam on the black river? I do.

1958

NOTHING MORE

I ought to tell you some time how my view
Of poetry has changed, and how it came about
That today I think of myself as merely one
Of those craftsmen or merchants of Imperial Japan
Who composed poems on how the cherry-tree blossoms,
On chrysanthemums and the full moon.

If I could describe that courtyard of Venetian courtesans,
One of them teasing a peacock with a twig,
And could peel the silken drape and the sash studded with pearls
From the full weight of a breast and from the reddish
Stripe on a belly where the dress had been fastened —
At least as the captain of the galleons saw it
Whose fleet laden with gold sailed into port that morning;

And if at the same time I could enshrine their poor bones
— Now laid in the graveyard whose gate the fat sea licks —
In words more durable than the last of their hair-combs
Which in dust under the slab, alone, waits for the light,

Then I would have no doubts. What can be gathered
From stubborn matter? Nothing: at most, beauty.
And therefore we should be content with cherry blossom,
With chrysanthemums and the fullness of the moon

1957

---

Czesław Miłosz was born in Lithuania in 1911. He was one of the leaders of the avant-garde poetry movement in Poland in the 1930s, was in the Resistance during World War II, and edited an anti-Nazi anthology. After several years in the diplomatic service he severed his ties with the post-war Polish government and emigrated to America. In 1978 he was awarded the Neustadt International Poetry Prize and in 1980 the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of California. He died in Krakow in August 2004.

Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.