Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources Further Reading

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay(1988) is a collection of short essays, originally published in Polish in 1969. Milosz moved to California in 1960, so his reflections on American culture figure prominently in these essays — essays that cover a wide range of topics, from literature to religion, philosophy, and history.
• Postwar Polish Poetry: An Anthology by Czeslaw Milosz (1983) is a collection by Milosz of 125 poems by twenty-five Polish poets writing since World War II. The emphasis is on poems published after 1956, when the lifting of censorship and the breakdown of official political doctrines produced an explosion of new schools and talents.
• A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (1996) edited by Milosz includes a wide range of poems selected by Milosz and grouped under thematic headings such as “Epiphany,” “The Secret of a Thing,” “The Moment,” “Woman’s Skin,” and “Nonattachment.” Milosz’s introduction and his notes on individual poems give valuable insight into the reasons for his choices.
• Destroy Warsaw!: Hitler’s Punishment, Stalin’s Revenge (2001), by Andrew Borowiec, is a description of the Warsaw Uprising by a man who took part in it and survived. Borowiec gives a lively and sometimes harrowing account of those sixty-three fateful days in 1944 when Polish citizens rose up against the ruthless Nazi occupation forces.
• Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s first novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration, written in 1948, is the story of a young Polish doctor who begins his career in a mental hospital, hoping to avoid the horrors of the German occupation.

The idea expressed in this quatrain is that somehow the whole of creation (indeed, the whole of being itself) is contained in every part of it, and it is the poet who is able to see this. Surely it is this concept that underlies the otherwise puzzling line in stanza six of “Song of a Citizen”: “where a wandering atom flares up like Saturn,” since the atom is Blake’s “grain of sand” and Saturn is his “world.”

Another echo of Blake’s quatrain occurs in the second stanza of Milosz’s poem “By the Peonies,” which is part of the cycle “The World”:

Mother stands by the peony bed,
Reaches for one bloom, opens its petals,
And looks for a long time into peony lands,
Where one short instant equals a whole year.

Other images in stanza six of “Song of a Citizen” have a Blakean flavor. Consider the lines “... the greenhouse of the worlds, / where a tiny beetle and spider are equal to planets.” Blake’s poetry is full of images of tiny things, including insects, that have a significance well beyond what might be supposed from the evidence of ordinary perception. An example would be the following lines from his long poem “Milton,” which Milosz almost certainly did not know at the time he wrote “Song of a Citizen”:

Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a
grain of sand?
It has a heart like thee: a brain open to heaven &
hell,
Withinside wondrous & expansive: its gates are not
clos’d;
I hope thine are not: hence it clothes itself in rich
array.

Once more, the minute thing contains whole worlds hidden to normal sight (note how in the line from “Song of a Citizen” quoted above, Milosz uses the plural, “worlds,” where one would have expected the singular form of the noun).

It is remarkable that Milosz, who at the time had access to only a few of Blake’s poems, should so thoroughly have imbibed the spirit of the English poet. Part of the explanation is that Milosz himself had the Blakean gift of seeing, in sudden moments of heightened perception, into the depths of things — a gift which is quite independent of literary influences. It is this aspect of Milosz’s work that is apparent in these earlier lines in “Song of a Citizen”:

And yet so often I was near,
I reached into the heart of metal, the soul of earth,
of fire, of water.
And the unknown unveiled its face.

In Milosz’s autobiography, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, he recalls one such moment from wartime, and it serves as a detailed gloss on the above lines:

Lying in the field near a highway bombarded by airplanes, I riveted my eyes on a stone and two blades of grass in front of me. Listening to the whistle of a bomb, I suddenly understood the value of matter: that stone and those two blades of grass formed a whole kingdom, an infinity of forms, shades, textures, lights. They were the universe.... I saw into the depths of matter with exceptional intensity.

Milosz would later associate such intense moments with experiencing life in the present, the now, the eternal moment, when consciousness of self is lost and the universe appears to disclose its inner essence and meaning. On some occasions, the poet senses the potential presence of such moments of illumination but they hover just beyond his conscious awareness. In the poem “Mittelbergheim,” in Collected Poems (written in 1951), for example, he lies half-awake in the early morning and contemplates his many years on earth:

I felt I was attaining the moving frontier
Beyond which color and sound came true
And the things of the earth are united.
.....................................
Let me trust and believe I will attain.

These cryptic lines suggest the elusiveness of such moments, existing as they do in a “moving frontier,” and yet they remain central to Milosz’s quest for an authentic mode of being. In “This Only,” for example, a poem written in 1985 and included in Collected Poems, the poet returns to a place of his youth, where he felt great joy in nature’s variety and constant movement. Now, on his return, he does not ask for such moments to be repeated:

He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes.
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

It is in such moments “at the edge,” where all distinctions between subject and object vanish in an eternal moment, that poetry — at least a certain kind of poetry — is born. Once again, Blake has the right words, in lines that were well known to the later Milosz:

For in this Period the Poet’s Work is Done: and all
the Great
Events of Time start forth & are concievd in such a
Period —
Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “Song of a Citizen,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Josh Ozersky

Ozersky is a critic and essayist. In this essay, Ozersky considers Milosz’s poem as a statement of faith in the power of life.

Czezlaw Milosz, in his acceptance for the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, asked what tyranny had to fear from experimental poetry. His response was that “Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous.... There is no reason why the state should not tolerate an activity.” He continued:

that consists of creating ‘experimental’ poems and prose, if these are conceived as autonomous systems of reference, enclosed within their own boundaries. Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous.... In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

It is telling that Milosz sees the formal aspects of verse as a political decision and compares it to the sound of a shot. Milosz’s vision was tested in wartime, and afterwards in the repression of Soviet Poland, from which he defected in 1951. A poet at the center of the century’s greatest catastrophe, Milosz is one of the great spirits in contemporary literature, a seer who speaks truth to power through his rich sense of nature and the universal laws that govern it. But can the truth reside in poetry as mystical, abstract, and Olympian as his? For Milosz, as he also said in his Nobel address, is not concerned in his art primarily with the traditionally political. Rather, he believes so strongly in the power of the Truth, that speaking it, on whatever level, serves the ultimate reality, the eternal. This eternal will survive all human catastrophes, Milosz believes, because it exists outside humanity and even outside the natural world:

Complaints of peoples, pacts more treacherous than those we read about in Thucydides, the shape of a maple leaf, sunrises and sunsets over the ocean, the whole fabric of causes and effects, whether we call it Nature or History, points towards, I believe, another hidden reality, impenetrable, though exerting a powerful attraction that is the central driving force of all art and science.

This is heady stuff, mystical and metaphysical. It does not seem the stuff of a poet baptized by fire. Yet it is his very philosophical bent that allows Milosz to see beyond the devastation of his own lifetime. A humane Platonist, Milosz believes in the eternal, in an “impenetrable” reality behind all the forms of the world. Such a cosmic worldview seldom stops to make distinctions between public and private, large or small, or past and present. Life and death, truth and falsehood are its only coordinates. It certainly has no time to pay attention to poetry, a trivial form scarcely fit for attention. For that reason, Milosz’ poetry has a weight of meaning that formal experimentation, of the sort

“Such a cosmic worldview seldom stops to make distinctions between public and private, large or small, or past and present. Life and death, truth and falsehood are its only coordinates.”

explored by his modernist peers, can never approach. For Milosz, poetry is not just poetry. It is a shot fired in self-defense.

For Milosz, the truth is a weapon, a precious power that alone can defeat despair and death. In “Song of a Citizen” the semi-divine consciousness of the poet conflates and contrasts the horrors of war (it was written in Warsaw in 1943) with the infinite glories of life. And the poet is at the center of it all.

A stone from the depths that has witnessed the seas
drying up
and a million white fish leaping in agony,
I, poor man, see a multitude of white-bellied nations
without freedom. I see the crab feeding on their
flesh.

The poem begins, appropriately, with a horrific image on conquest. Writing in occupied Poland in 1943, Milosz composed this poem at what was probably the nadir of the war. The Nazis had occupied the poet’s native land in the first days of the war, in possibly the most one-sided conquest in modern history. Other peaceful countries had followed, as well as other military powers, and now, in his ruined capital, Milosz saw the world as many did: as an ocean of desperate, dying lives, about to be extinguished either by the Nazis or by “the crab” of general devastation. Milosz is rarely explicitly political, in the sense of speaking to the specifics of the time and place, and the “I” of the third line is not necessarily Milosz, any more than the poem is necessarily about Poland.

The next stanza continues on theme of devastation, spoken from an eternal, nameless observer.

I have seen the fall of States and the perdition of
tribes,
the flight of kings and emperors, the power of
tyrants.
I can say now, in this hour,
that I — am, while everything expires,
that it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion,
as the Scripture says.

Notice the weight and formality of the first lines, the slow, stately, iambic cadences — and how they contrast with the rest of the stanza. The general dissolves into the first person “I” and becomes more immediate as the line grows choppier, until it stops dead at the word “am.”

Life matters most to the singing “citizen,” who is a citizen of life and the world, rather than any particular country. Though “a poor man” caught in the world, his consciousness reaches out to embrace life in all its forms — from the “starry sky” of the heavens to the unimaginable forms of non-Euclidean space to the tiny and shapeless, ever-changing shape of amoebas. And the “I” is not merely the “transparent eyeball” of transcendentalism, but a living, breathing, sweating reality, the perspective of a single human being. For Milosz, reality must be read like a map; seeing is a heroic existential act, in which, as he tells us, “the unknown unveil[s] its face.” He tells us, in heroic rhythms, “I reached into the heart of metal, the soul of earth, of fire, of water.” The truth is eternal, residing in the elements; in the very stuff of the world. Can such a perspective be enchained by brute force? Throughout “Song of a Citizen,” it soars beyond the grasp of warfare and brutality.

And so near, just outside the window — the green-
house of the worlds
where a tiny beetle and a spider are equal to plan-
ets,
where a wandering atom flares up like Saturn,
and, close by, harvesters drink from a cold jug
in scorching summer.

We see developed here the poetic ideas which have been developing throughout the poem begin to blossom. Small and large are equally miraculous; life in and of itself is the one force connecting the separate wonders enumerated by the poet. Even non-poets feel the force of life, “reach into” the elements: the harvesters drinking from the cold jug in hot sun grasp the harmony of extremes.

In this way, Milosz is very “Whitmanesque.” Like Whitman, no part of nature is alien to him, nor do contradictions get in his way. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes),” wrote Whitman. For Milosz, the power of existence is unconquerable, but unlike Whitman, the poet is himself a flawed and imperfect vessel for that existence. As is his medium.

Milosz regards it ironically. In two stanzas beginning, “this I wanted and nothing more,” he regards his own self, daring to take into the context of the world his own puny suffering.

This I wanted and nothing more. In my later years
like old Goethe to stand before the face of the earth,
and recognize it and reconcile it
with my own work built up, a forest citadel
on a river of shifting lights and brief shadows.
This I wanted and nothing more. So who
is guilty? Who deprived me
of my youth and my ripe years, who seasoned
my best years with horror? Who,
who ever is to blame, who, O God?

The hubris and grandiose self-pity here is a stark contrast to the high-minded exaltation of the narrator up until now. One interpretation is simply that the poet is here being ironic, overdramatizing his own personal problems as a way to put individual pain in perspective. But this would be an oversimplification. Milosz is an intensely emotional poet, one very sparing in his use of ironic artifice. Such an ultra-cool gambit as the one just described would be very unlike him. Nor does it make much sense in the larger context of the poem. Why bother belittling the narrator, when he has already been established as a “poor man” with his eyes fixed in the infinite distance?

Perhaps because, despite his best efforts to the contrary, Milosz in unable to attain the pantheistic rapture he seems on the verge of. Despite his best efforts to the contrary — the poet’s imagination, his intellect, his bold grappling with the elements — he is still caught caught inside his own skin. Beyond his philosophizing is a comfortless mystery, the sense every person experiences in times of defeat. The repeated, rhetorical “who?” questions change the tone of the poem from an elevated, eloquent, and philosophical one to one of common exclamation. The penultimate stanza is the most conspicuously “unpoetic” in the poem. It is certainly the most unreflective, the one farthest from the empyrean musings of the poem’s first two thirds. It suggests the difficulty of seeing beyond the prison of one’s own circumstances. And the final stanza takes a final step away, putting the narrator’s outburst back into symbolic context.

And I can think only about the starry sky,
about the tall mounds of termites.

These lines reconcile the split in the poem. To whom is a termite mound “tall?” Not the starry skies or the infinite perspective they represent. Is the mound tall to a person? Only given that it is made by creatures so tiny, that its scale is so wildly disproportionate to the beings that produced it. Perhaps, the poet suggests that his own verse is a similar undertaking — as hopeless in the face of the infinite, as ridiculous, and as stark a product of deliberate will.

“Song of a Citizen” is a trivial enough undertaking, after all, given the time and place of its writing. Composing metaphysical verse during wartime can, and was, seen by some as fiddling while Rome burns. But to transcend military defeat, and to defeat war and violence itself, required a great act of the spirit. To some extent, Milosz’s entire career has been one long act of liberation.

Source: Josh Ozersky, Critical Essay on “Song of a Citizen,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

“It is remarkable that Milosz, who at the time had access to only a few of Blake’s poems, should so thoroughly have imbibed the spirit of the English poet.”