POETRY AND HEALING

The Heart is a Stone: Numbing and Grief in Milosz's Wartime Poem

by David Shaddock

This regular column for Poetry Flash looks at poetry to illuminate issues relevant to health, mental health, and coping with our lives today.

CZESLAW MILOSZ'S 1945 poem, "In Warsaw," starts with the question: "What are you doing here, poet…?" It's a question I ask myself as well, as war sizzles abroad and climate change sizzles everywhere and my mind sizzles from the latest load of our new president's bombast. I fear the answer is not much, or not enough, or, at my worst, nothing at all. I've spent much of this last year practicing psychic numbing—not thinking of war and carnage, not reading the paper, clicking to sports talk radio when the news comes on in my car. It feels necessary for survival, but at what cost?

I'm turning for this column to a poem where the psychic numbing appears to wear off in real time: "In Warsaw," by Czeslaw Milosz. I am indebted in my reading of this poem to Peter Dale Scott, whose just-published book on Milosz, Ecstatic Pessimist: Czeslaw Milosz, Poet of Catastrophe and Hope is an essential guide to this great poet. The poem "In Warsaw" is available on PoemHunter.com: www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-warsaw/#google_vignette.

Milosz had returned to Warsaw in 1940 to be with his beloved Janina (Janka). He was active in underground activities in socialist organizations, including attempts to rescue Jews. But he stopped short of armed resistance to the Nazis, and tried to maintain an intellectual life, working for Polish radio and participating in literary activities. By 1945, the Soviet Army had liberated Poland from the Nazis, but Milosz's spirits were exhausted. His country lay in ruins, under the rule of yet another foreign power. My heart responds to the opening of this poem:

What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins

Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny

Day in spring?

What are you thinking here, where the wind

Blowing from the Vistula scatters

The red dust of the rubble?

Though I've not experienced anything remotely like the scale of destruction Milosz is witnessing, I feel—with American democracy teetering and my hometown of Pacific Palisades in ruins from the climate change induced fire—a resonance with the question Milosz is asking. What, indeed are we doing here?

The simplest answer for Milosz is writing, or at least thinking about writing. What can we save, what must be saved? Although he couches this in aesthetic terms, he is dealing with his personal, as well as poetic, survival. He spent much of the war years reading and translating English poetry, Blake and Shakespeare, as well as Auden and Eliot. He hoped for a haven in poetry, shelter from the storm. And he wanted to avoid the temptation to sanctify or ennoble war and suffering:

You swore never to be

A ritual mourner.

You swore never to touch

The deep wounds of your nation

So you would not make them holy

With the accursed holiness that pursues

Descendants for many centuries.

There is something noble in this stance, the wish to break the chain that celebrates and sanctifies suffering. But Milosz is too self-aware, or at any rate is becoming too self-aware, to reject the agony of the people of Warsaw on aesthetic or cultural grounds. Or to make poetry into a haven, an alternative universe. Through a remembrance of Greek tragedy, the agony of war—in this case Antigone's lament on the loss of her brother, killed in the Theban civil war—pierces his intellectualized defenses. Antigone will sacrifice her own life to perform funeral rites for her brother, who has by decree been left outside as carrion. Her loyalty moves Milosz to remember his loyalty to his fallen countrymen.

But the lament of Antigone

Searching for her brother

Is beyond the power

Of endurance. And the heart

Is a stone in which is enclosed,

Like an insect, the dark love

Of a most unhappy land.

"The dead wield greater power—" Milosz will write a few years later, in his own version of "Antigone," (a poem available now in English for the first time in the just-published collection Poet in the New World, edited by Robert Hass,) "so great no man / Can hide from it." "How can I live in this country," Milosz asks, in the poem we are considering, "Where the foot knocks against / The unburied bones of kin?"

One reason I turn to Milosz for guidance in difficult times is that he is a poet of both despair and hope. In this poem despair seeks its own antidote in the act of writing itself:

I did not want to love so.

That was not my design.

I did not want to pity so.

That was not my design.

My pen is lighter

Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden

Is too much for it to bear.

Light as a feather. Too much to bear. Milosz does not spare us his contradictions. So many poets, myself included, feel silenced by the ominous world situation. But silence, for Milosz, was not an option. "We can, we must continue," my teacher Denise Levertov wrote. Denise, who addressed her letters to Milosz "My dear master," took inspiration from his perseverance. "It's madness to live without joy," Milosz writes in the concluding stanza, to only mouth to the dead, who were once full of vitality, abstract slogans like Truth and Justice. Slogans that are so easy for totalitarian regimes to bend to their purposes. All through this poem we hear Milosz arguing with the tradition, and with himself, against poetry that feels salvaged. For the dead's sake, don't settle, he implores. But I find myself wanting to go further. I want to wrest Truth and Justice from the propagandists, to proclaim them as the apotheosis, not the gravestone, of our sorrow and outrage.

David Shaddock PhD is a poet and psychotherapist. His most recent poetry book is A Book of Splendor: New and Selected Poems on Spiritual Themes. He is also the author of Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field, from Routledge, and two books on relationships and couples therapy. He lectures widely on those topics, and maintains a private practice in Berkeley.