Another Day: Poet in the New World by Czesław Miłosz

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Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953
by Czesław Miłosz, translated and edited by Robert Hass and David Frick, with a foreword by Robert Hass
(Ecco, 2025, 160 pp., $28.00)

“In Warsaw,” the poem that opens this important collection (and serves as a thematic prologue), finds the poet not in the New World but “on the ruins” of the Old. “What are you doing here, poet,” he asks himself, “on the ruins / Of St. John’s Cathedral this sunny / Day in spring?” It is 1945, and Miłosz, whom luck enabled to escape internment by the Nazis in 1944, has returned to Warsaw, which the Nazi occupiers laid waste ahead of the Red Army’s invasion. Here, “where the wind / Blowing from the Vistula scatters / The red dust of the rubble,” he questions his stance as a poet. The “lament of Antigone / Searching for her brother,” which he hears in his mind, challenges his determination “never to be / A ritual mourner,” a eulogist who sanctifies in verse the “wounds” of his nation. “I want,” he insists, “to sing of festivities, / The greenwood into which Shakespeare / Often took me.” Though Miłosz does, in this collection, memorialize by name “Creatures transformed by death into insects” (“Day and Night”)—and contemplates throughout “The retributions of a malignant fate,” which “the human microcosmos…delivers, serenely, on a daily basis” (“Summer Movies in Central Park”)—still, he cannot believe that “All that is worth remembering is our pain.” So Antigone says to her sister in a dramatic poem apparently occasioned by Hungary’s becoming a one-party “people’s republic” in 1949. In reply Ismene observes that even in winter’s slums, “life greens again” (“Antigone”). Amid the rubble of Warsaw’s St. John’s Cathedral Miłosz asks (with Antigone’s unburied brother in mind, as well as fellow Poles perhaps),

How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?

At the end of “In Warsaw,” he insists,

It’s madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice […]

words salvaged as it were from a ruined cathedral whose patron saint, John the Baptist, made “straight the way of the Lord,” the Word that incorporates such ideals as Truth and Justice. In his 2017 biography, Andrzej Franaszek observes that Miłosz while at the site “scribbled” this poem “on small pages pulled from a notebook, and at the top of one of them he added and underlined this disturbing sentence: ‘God is just.’” Disturbing it does seem, but here is Miłosz, I think, affirming his faith (which has pantheistic attributes as well as Christian)—though doing so appears to require a physical act of will—that Truth and Justice as ideals endure despite the destruction of cathedrals like St. John’s, despite in general the all but unspeakable horrors of the war in Europe.

Later that year, 1945, Miłosz entered the diplomatic service for the new Soviet-controlled Polish government, which posted him initially to its consulate in New York City, then six months thereafter to the embassy in Washington, D.C. (One of his motivations appears to have been a desire to live in the West, though not necessarily the United States.) There he remained until 1950. Robert Hass in a splendid introduction summarizes Miłosz’s outreach in his capacity as cultural attaché. Suffice it to observe that Miłosz’s New World poems find the poet not only in those two cities but also in San Francisco, where he and a Polish companion eye amusedly “the terrible fish” that look alternately “like a Javanese dancer” and the “haut bourgeois” in Proust (“Untitled”); in Mexico as vividly evoked—he never actually went there—by the “work / Of the People’s Graphic Workshop,” where “Little Jose tinkles in the middle of the room and eyes this with careful wonderment” (“The People’s Graphic Workshop,” a poem in which Miłosz channels Neruda channeling Whitman); in Princeton, where he’s received by Einstein, “with the face / Of a clockmaker from the Jewish neighborhood in Warsaw,” whose “Faith in the light of reason… / Chafes” (“To Albert Einstein”); in Detroit, where the frosty, synthetic, antiseptic-seeming environment of high-rise hotels ironically “frees” their guests from their sensual selves and from the emotions that such hallucinations as

…naked women with daggers in their white necks
Left under slag heaps of scrap iron
In fields where gaunt Negroes
Fan campfires with cardboard boxes

would otherwise arouse (“He Has No Sight”); and in the Pennsylvania Coal Region, where, as seen from a kitchen window, “A dark red forest spills down the mountainside,” below it “a massive gray slag heap / Like the wall of an abandoned fortress,” while an incongruously named Mrs. Baker, whose miner husband, Piekorz, hails from Poland, as did her parents, as likely she does too, advises her daughter not to “tell anyone you come from Eastern Europe” (“Notebook: Pennsylvania”). As often as not, however, disturbing scenes from war-torn Europe, whether witnessed or imagined, vividly intrude—“the clay of the battlefield,” whose whiteness is evoked by the sandy beach where the poet enjoys a seaside holiday, “Where my friend fell, clutching at dry grasses” (“Day and Night”)—or local color from Miłosz’s early life in his culturally ambiguous section of Lithuania, which might arouse nostalgia but whose keenly realistic depiction checks it:

Here the rust of wrecked machines, lashed by rain
Under the black sails of the windmills beyond the dike,
And, boarding the ferry, a small shaggy horse,
With shaft-bow and shafts, skids on the wet planks. (“Marsh”)

“Representing a country that was turned into the province of a totalitarian foreign state was wrong and degrading,” Miłosz later wrote. By 1950, as Franaszek reports, he had become “ideologically…alien” to his superiors, who also found his wife to be “a fierce enemy of the Soviet Union.” It is a complicated story—Franaszek’s account is engrossing—but in 1951 Miłosz defected to the West. With his then-pregnant wife and three-year-old son at home in the States, he sought political asylum in France. According to Hass’s tally, thirty-three months elapsed before a reunion could take place. Poet in the New World concludes with a visionary lyric set in a French village near Lac Léman that commemorates the occasion.

In 1953 Miłosz published his New World poems, including seven written in France after his defection, in the volume Daylight, the same year, amazingly, as saw the publication of The Captive Mind, his now-classic analysis of the accommodations made by intellectuals to communism, and The Seizure of Power, the first of his two novels. (The Old World poem “In Warsaw” was, according to Franaszek, a late addition to Miłosz’s 1945 collection, Rescue.) You can find eleven of these forty-four poems in the two omnium-gatherums, the 1988 Collected Poems and the 2001 New and Collected Poems, and several of them, including two of the best, “Child of Europe” and “Mittelbergheim,” in the 1973 Selected Poems, which introduced Miłosz in English. “Child of Europe,” which Miłosz appears to have written soon after arriving in New York, bitterly satirizes the myriad attitudes that “we” adopt, consciously or not, to preserve our psyches from debilitating pity and guilt, while perhaps preparing to collaborate with the new regime. “Mittelbergheim,” written five years later in France, is a “recovery poem,” as Franaszek describes it, a hopeful response to Miłosz’s “struggle” with an almost madness-inducing threat of nihilism due to his uprootedness: “the fear that the home country, heavenly and earthly, is lost.” “Child of Europe” and “Mittelbergheim” (a longtime personal favorite of mine) are remarkable, convincing poems in English. For the remaining thirty-three poems, their inclusion in Poet in the New World is their first appearance in English, in versions adapted by Hass, Miłosz’s faithful collaborator since the 1980s, from literal translations by the late David Frick, a scholar of Slavic languages and literatures. As Hass relates, Miłosz was dissatisfied by his own arrangement of the poems in Daylight, describing it as “rather haphazard,” even “chaotic.” The poems as now presented in chronological order “tell the story” in a satisfyingly coherent way “of a poet recovering from a war of extraordinary violence, taking his bearings in a new world, and trying to locate and understand his task as a poet.”

That Miłosz wrote all of these poems in “formal measure,” many of them rhyming, may explain the poet’s reluctance to publish English translations. This possibility is more than likely for “Treatise on Morals,” the longest poem (fourteen pages) and a historically important one, “the most outstanding Polish poem written since 1939,” a compatriot in 1947, as quoted by Franaszek, judged it to be: “If anyone wants to find out how Polish writers…defied the gloom and isolation, and discovered within themselves powers of resistance—they will find a key to it in [‘A Treatise on Morals’].” This “tour de force,” as Hass describes it, “was written in a regular eleven-syllable line, with rhymed couplets, and what has been described as the raucous rhythm of a Kraków cabaret song.” It was Miłosz’s view, Hass explains, “that the translation had to rhyme if it was going to convey what the author was up to, and he hated translations of his work that didn’t say in English more or less exactly what the Polish said.” Consequently, their attempt to render it in English went nowhere. Now this translation doesn’t rhyme (except at the very end), nor does the versification follow a pattern. Admittedly, I haven’t scanned each line, but my ear tells me that Hass, in order to convey something of the “dance-hall rhythm” (which is at odds with the poem’s tedious polemical thrust), has used as the basis for his measure a loose (anapestic-sounding) four-beat line, which he allows to contract and expand at will. The result is a jauntiness, sometimes even an archness, of tone: “there ain’t no spring. It’s always December.” In any case, it may be thanks to the distracting tone that “Treatise on Morals” evaded the Communist censors, despite, as Franaszek points out, the presence not far into the poem of the type of revolver used by the Soviet secret police to execute, with a shot to the back of the head, some 21,000 Polish officers in spring 1940. The poem did, as Hass observes, disturb Miłosz’s superiors in the diplomatic service.

“Treatise on Morals,” which Miłosz offers to his Old World audience as a “refuge against despair,” opens with a question to the poet, ostensibly from the audience but just as likely from himself: “Just what, oh poet, do you propose to save?” (A hortatory rendition, as Hass points out, of the question as literally translated: “Where, poet, is rescue?” One appreciates from the get-go the challenge of translating this poem.) Save what, the poem asks, and whence the rescue now that “so-called” peace has dawned—“so called” because with Nazism’s defeat, Soviet Communism like a force majeure is laying Eastern Europe under, its “firmly settled ethical foundation” stressed as if by the “pressure of avalanches.” Some 400 lines on, Miłosz the realist when it comes to images answers:

The wind picks up, and stirs little eddies
Of dried leaves in the grass;
Pigeons soar over the rooftops.
A dog barks, a child runs by,
Somebody signals someone with a handkerchief.
This is your world. It is on the line.

However, seeing “your world,” the “pigments in common objects,” requires “penetrating vision,” whose nurture itself requires “the discipline / Of paring down,” of shunning, among other things, such “theories” as French existentialism and German phenomenology and the company of such characters as “competent madmen” whose schizophrenic alibi is that “it isn’t I but someone else / Performing these deeds of mine”; hypocritical if charismatic politicians, who “Shout: the People, and whisper: dregs”; and blind-as-moles aristocrats—and quitting vodka, which is “akin to the fumes of extermination.” (Impishly, I can’t resist recalling an anecdote from Cynthia Haven about an exchange, relating to Gnosticism, between the poet Brenda Hillman, Hass’s wife, and Miłosz: “‘What is heaven?’ she asked him. ‘What is it like?’ To which the poet replied: ‘Brenda, heaven is the third vodka.’”) The “rescue,” Miłosz insists, “is in you alone. / Perhaps it is simply health / Of mind, a balanced heart”—prophetic lines in view of the suicidal angst, the “madness” that is life “without joy,” that threatened Miłosz himself soon after his defection to Paris. “You are not…helpless,” he argues,

And even if you were a stone in a field,
An avalanche changes its course
Depending on the stones it rolls over.

“Treatise on Morals” concludes emphatically (overly so perhaps) with a rhyming couplet in iambic tetrameter: “I need to say this with some starkness: / Before us lies ‘The Heart of Darkness”—communism, yes, but less specifically the moral void, as personified by Conrad’s Kurtz, whose gravitational force Miłosz, haunted as he remains by the evils of Nazism and besieged by those of Stalinism, is fighting off.

As Hass observes in a note to the most enigmatic—surrealistic, allegorical—of the New World poems, Miłosz’s “mind was still in Europe in 1946.” In “Two Men in Rome” Miłosz adopts, or so I think, the persona of an aged poet, an acolyte of Ovid, who has won his laurels. As with Ovid, his subject is metamorphosis. At “the globe’s still point” (which Hass hears as an allusion to Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” in “Burnt Norton,” which Miłosz has translated), this royally clad persona envisions a moonlit scene as observed by himself and a Cardinal: “Shapes of the earth appear, having been summoned,” by whom the poem doesn’t say, “And there’s the dancing girl,” who personifies, alternately, erotic allure (“she draws up her knees / And the dark sex is visible…masked by threads of beads / That sway”), nurture (her breasts, which “Precede her flight / To an invisible star,” display “the dark marks from which we sucked, / Where we nestled with our deceased mothers”), and destructive force (before their eyes and those of millions of others, she “falls headfirst” from her soaring dance “In a quiet burst like a burst of magnesium,” the type of bomb used by the Germans on Warsaw at the beginning of the war—a perverse exploitation of mineral Mother Earth). What the poet says to the Cardinal at the end recalls to my mind that cathedral, now windswept “rubble,” in Warsaw:

If your Vatican lies broken
I will keep going, to bear in the windstorm
The aurea aetas from heart to heart.

Miłosz’s attitude to his Ovidian persona’s magniloquent assertion about a Golden Age—and about poetry’s capacity to replace religion (as symbolized by the Vatican)—is skeptical, his stance ironic. Fragmentary images of a documentary nature, conveyed in fractured syntax—images of refugees perhaps, displaced by war, that burst as it were of magnesium—conclude this bewildering poem.

In contrast there is “Summer Movies in Central Park,” an outstanding poem, a lucid one whose style is that of the familiar essay, addressed in fact, and offered as “a little drawing,” to Juliusz Kronski, aka Tiger, in Paris. (A Polish compatriot, Tiger is Miłosz’s intellectual sparring partner in the last two chapters of Native Realm.) Here the effect of outdoor movies on trees and buildings—trees “spring[ing],” “skyline shift[ing]”—while couples, uniformed soldiers and their girls, make out on “the trampled grasses,” brings to the poet’s mind a horrifying scene:

…a field where the radiance
Of the burning city colors the dry wormwood
And crickets play, red from the glow,
Through which an army of smoke marches.

And he envisions how “The water rushing along the road flutters / The dress on the corpse of a woman.” Meanwhile, the couples, “trembling,” as if the earth were newly theirs alone as “after the flood,” “enter the quiet groves of sex,” oblivious of the “warning” conveyed by what the onlooker remembers. The sight of an “ambassador’s limousine” amid the traffic prompts him to remember that “duplicitous” statecraft, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, lay behind the invasions of Miłosz and Tiger’s “native realm,” thereby bringing Poland “Under the militarized feet of foreign powers,” Germany and the Soviet Union. With Germany’s defeat “we placed,” while “barely mourn[ing] in our secret hearts,” “old wisdom and bloody cobblestones…on the scales opposite the new faith,” dialectical materialism. (Modern Europe’s cultural inheritance from Ancient Greece, the source of that wisdom, is much on Miłosz’s mind. The civil war in Greece provides the occasion for his 1947 poem “A Reminder.”) As the poem moves to its conclusion, Miłosz returns in memory, with affection and humor, to mid-1930s’ Paris:

I don’t know whether Montaigne’s monument
Still stands, whose white marble lips
A girl, as a joke, has painted blush red,
And run off, lowering her head in laughter.

This gesture, faintly erotic as it is, returns the reader to the seemingly carefree lovers in Central Park at the beginning of the poem. The statue, by the way, would have been new as remembered by Miłosz, whom a scholarship had enabled to spend a year in Paris; repeatedly damaged by student vandals, it was replaced in the late 1980s by the bronze one whose leg-crossed slippered foot offers good luck on exams to students who rub it. Meanwhile, Miłosz has assured both himself and Tiger that “this age of darkness will pass the way winters / Pass when strong sap rises under the brittle bark”—a trope that together with the personal memory implies a parallel between the return of spring, a person’s psychological revival, and a society’s political renovation.

A conventional, romantic trope, though handsomely phrased…Still, it points to a dependable source of hopefulness, even joy for Miłosz, penetrating as his vision is regarding “things of this earth.” As he insists in Native Realm, poetry’s “optimism,” for him an essential feature in the twentieth century, depends on “its sensual avidity.” So it is that “When the magnolias bloom / And the park is a splash of muddy green,” Miłosz can “listen to your lovely tones with joy,” while informing the bird (to whom he addresses this poem) that “I was witness to misfortunes,” even finding “My home of a second” in birdsong. (As Keats aspires to do: “On the Song of a Bird on the Banks of the Potomac” echoes Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” in a remarkable way.) And when Antigone, whose “lament” Miłosz finds (in “In Warsaw”) to be “beyond the power / Of endurance,” reminds her sister that she has seen “Beneath the steps of a destroyed Cathedral” their brother’s corpse

With tufts of light hair wafting from his skull
Like any little boy’s. A crumpled handful
Of bones…

Ismene responds:

Yet even in bleak neighborhoods, life greens again.
Nettle and wormwood creep across the rubble.

Believe me, powerful rhythms reassert themselves.
Sobs commingle again with celebration.

By the end of this dialogue Antigone, like Miłosz in “Treatise on Morals” and “Summer Movies in Central Park,” is taking the long view, doubting that her tyrannical uncle can control a country whose every stone is “engrained with memories / Of its own tears of despair, tears of hope” (“Antigone”). And even if “you” happen to be “thinking of the dead” at Hiroshima, you cannot help hearing in “morning fog,” as “Light green pastures / Steam in the sloping fields of Michigan,” “the cry of wild geese, flying north / Over the Great Lakes to the marshes of Labrador”; and if you recall that Japan, which attacked Pearl Harbor, was the “land of the rising sun” and it dawns on you that the test explosion of the atom bomb, as Daniel Cordle reports, “was experienced as a new dawn” by observers—“Sunrise such as the world has never seen,” as one eyewitness described it—still, perhaps, you cannot but rejoice:

Day, day. A red-breasted thrush
Standing straight on a maple branch
Rises from song. Transparent song.
Brilliant song. And the steady drip of dew,
Trickling, chasing itself. Oh light, oh day.
Sun, day. A day of spring.
…………… (“Three Choruses from an Unwritten Drama ‘Hiroshima’”)

With passages like these, which together compose an aubade of sorts, Miłosz is reaffirming an enduring desire, as he puts it in lines already quoted from “In Warsaw,” “to sing of festivities, / The greenwood into which Shakespeare / Often took me.” That greenwood is, of course, a metaphor for comedy, also perhaps a representation of benign, pre-Darwinian nature, neither of which exactly harmonizes with Miłosz’s cast of mind. His attitude to nature is complex. As an adult, he explains in a 1986 interview, “I see Nature as a constant reminder of immutable laws of suffering and devouring,” which govern human nature as well. As a child, however, on his maternal grandparents’ farm in Lithuania, “I was primarily a discoverer of the world, not as suffering but as beauty,” which was for him, as he writes in his 1998 essay “Happiness,” the wellspring of “bliss.” Then, as he points out in Native Realm, “My hero was the brave nineteenth-century naturalist, such an ardent collector of insects that on his wedding day he forgot about his beloved waiting at the church.” (Faithful readers of Miłosz will remember Dr. Catchfly from “Diary of a Naturalist,” the second section of “From the Rising of the Sun,” his greatest poem.) What fueled in boyhood his “passion for nature” and in adulthood his choice of vocation was the determination to preserve “that élan” which grownups, “in their sobriety, disdained”: “In choosing poetry…I remained loyal to the pledge I made to myself: that I would never be like them and succumb to the force of inertia.” When, in “My Mother’s Grave,” Miłosz addresses this plea to his mother (who died in Poland in 1945), he is renewing, at a tragic time in human history, that pledge to himself as a boy:

Help me to create a love eternally alive
From my constant quarrel with the world.

Help me, mother. Strengthen in the man
What you knew as the child’s ardors.

“I regret being so little able,” Miłosz tells Einstein in the poem for him, “To help people value the great beauty of the world.” (No wonder; he is living, after all, in an “age,” as he describes it in “My Mother’s Grave,” “set ablaze by human bodies.”) “Everything interested me,” he says to Einstein. Those concluding lines in “My Mother’s Grave,” with their focus on “the child’s ardors,” suggest that the poet by “paring down,” as he advises in “Treatise on Morals,” has tapped his source of bliss.

“Nature has an enormous beauty,” Miłosz acknowledges in that 1986 interview, “and I am very sensitive to it. But there is…a repetition of patterns in Nature,” which he finds monotonous—unless he happens, as in the family reunion poem that ends the book, to envision within that repetition of patterns the “Heraclitian fluidity” that poetry, “through its premonitions of change,” “imitates.” (So he maintains in Native Realm.) As noted, Miłosz defected to the West while in Paris in 1951. Some two and a half years later, his family, which now included a toddler as well as an older boy, was able to travel to France, where the four of them together vacationed in the fall at a village near Lac Léman, Bons-en-Chablais, some fifteen miles northeast of Geneva. Miłosz describes the scene invitingly:

Red beeches, shining poplars
And steep spruce behind October fog.
In the valley the lake steams. There is snow
Already on the hillsides of the other shore.

The serenity invites the vacationer, bedazzled by the noonday sun, to yield to the illusion that here is not merely an evocation of paradise but eternity itself, arrival there being the end goal of life: “this is, / And no capacity, no artfulness / Can reach beyond what is.” Perhaps the presence of his son, who “runs there on the path,” heightens his sense of absence from his culture: “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, / Says the prophet, let my right hand wither,” the poet’s writing hand. Miłosz’s identification of the Psalmist as “the prophet” implies a fear that he will indeed forget. The “Underground tremors” that now “shake what is” seem to be as much a manifestation of psychological recoil as an imagined geological phenomenon. The welcome effect of this vision of flux is the poet’s release from his torpor induced by monotonous-looking “landscapes,” much as the innocent boy’s “passion for nature,” even if it looked when first discovered benignly beautiful, “safeguarded” him against the “inertia” directing the lives of grownups: “Whoever finds order, / Peace, and an eternal moment in what is / Will vanish without a trace,” the poet exclaims. “Artists crave…a communion with the divine promise inside creation,” Miłosz writes in Native Realm. Instead of yielding to “what is,” he resolves to “pluck from movement,” from Heraclitian fluidity, as though his eye can seize, “The eternal moment as a gleam” of that promise “On the current of the black river”—and thereby leave a trace, which becomes the oeuvre to which Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953, an ambitious, polyphonic collection, deep-minded and deeply felt, biting and tender, and avid-eyed, is now a crucial chapter.