TWO GIFTED POLES REACH FOR THE ESSENCE
Author: By Christina Robb, Globe Staff
Date: Friday, May 16, 1986
Page: 27
Section: LIVING
Poles apart:
Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for literature six years ago.He lives in
California, a congenital idealist, irretrievably hooked on religion,
metaphysics, form -- in prosody as well as in some more spiritual sense -- and
yet a thoroughgoing modernist. He quotes whole poems by Whitman, D. H.
Lawrence and Baudelaire in his latest book, which is a wonderfully personal,
commonplace book of Milosz' own poetry and prose and gobbets of a few modern
greats and a few of his best friends.
Zbigniew Herbert is a lawyer. He lives and works in Poland. At a time of
constitutional insanity in his nation's life, Herbert creates "a minority
politics of sanity and survival," as A. Alvarez writes in his introduction to
''Selected Poems." Herbert is the congenital nominalist, committed to the
particularity of ordinary things that he feels redeem us from the grandiosity,
whose underside of cruelty has given our century its peculiar aura of
inhumanity.
A skeptic who is utterly without cynicism, Herbert relishes the simple
things. "Drawer" celebrates the drawer where he kept the verse he was unable
to publish in Poland till "the thaw" of 1956. "Attempt at a Description" takes
on the little finger of his left hand. "Pebble" finds a sure foundation for
the universe in a stone.
Herbert's touchstones are the classics. Thucydides, Plato, the sages of
Rome and Shakespeare are the compass points his craft sails by. Yet the form
of his verse is free and idiomatic, completely at home with the free style of
his generation. He invokes Marcus Aurelius this way:
Good night Marcus put out the light
and shut the book For overhead
is raised a gold alarm of stars
heaven is talking some foreign tongue
this is the barbarian cry of fear
your Latin cannot understand
Terror continuous dark terror
against the fragile land
If you read them together, Milosz and Herbert almost answer each other. Milosz
writes in "One More Day": "And the old artist thinks that all his life he has
only trained his hand/One more day and he will enter the core as one enters a
flower." Herbert searches the inner being of his lover "to see what she wears
at her center" and finds, in "Silk of a Soul," "a pair of silk stockings." But
he loves the silk stockings as a child loves his blankie. He loves the flotsam
and jetsam that keep art in touch with life and keep artists humble.
mr artist
builds a world
not from atoms
but from remnants
To Milosz, love ennobles. To Herbert, love grounds and brings us down to
earth in an age that is dizzy with delusions of grandeur. Milosz writes a
prose description of resurrection that almost makes theology fit for human
consumption. Herbert writes a prose description of the Paradise of the
Theologians that parodies this theology as well as Milosz popularizes it.
''Better to be the creaking of a floor than shrilly transparent perfection,"
Herbert writes in "Anything Rather Than an Angel." "I would like everyone to
know they are the kings' children," Milosz writes in "Elegy for Y. Z." Herbert
would like everyone to know that kings are children.
''Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the
world," Milosz writes in "Winter." It doesn't so much matter that the meaning
got away -- or, as Herbert writes in "Revelation," "that the postman rang just
as the mystery of life was about to reveal itself." Somehow that doorbell --
that incarnate "so-soness" of life, as Milosz puts it -- is the essence. And
these immensely gifted poets adore it -- from opposite poles drawn from the
same magnetism.
MFEENE;05/14,11:17 CORCOR;05/16,12:51 FRIBUK16
|
