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Czeslaw Milosz - A Treatise On Poetry: IV Natura
Work rating: Low

Pennsylvania, 1948-1949


The garden of Nature opens. 
The grass at the threshold is green. 
And an almond tree begins to bloom. 


Sunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii! 
Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! 
Ignis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus, 
Salvete!—says the entering guest. 


Ariel lives in the palace of an apple tree, 
But will not appear, vibrating like a wasp’s wing, 
And Mephistopheles, disguised as an abbot 
Of the Dominicans or the Franciscans, 
Will not descend from a mulberry bush 
Onto a pentagram drawn in the black loam of the path. 


But a rhododendron walks among the rocks 
Shod in leathery leaves and ringing a pink bell. 
A hummingbird, a child’s top in the air, 
Hovers in one spot, the beating heart of motion. 
Impaled on the nail of a black thorn, a grasshopper 
Leaks brown fluid from its twitching snout. 
And what can he do, the phantom-in-chief, 
As he’s been called, more than a magician, 
The Socrates of snails, as he’s been called, 
Musician of pears, arbiter of orioles, man? 
In sculptures and canvases our individuality 
Manages to survive. In Nature it perishes. 
Let him accompany the coffin of the woodsman 
Pushed from a cliff by a mountain demon, 
The he-goat with its jutting curl of horn. 
Let him visit the graveyard of the whalers 
Who drove spears into the flesh of leviathan 
And looked for the secret in guts and blubber. 
The thrashing subsided, quieted to waves. 
Let him unroll the textbooks of alchemists 
Who almost found the cipher, thus the scepter. 
Then passed away without hands, eyes, or elixir. 


Here there is sun. And whoever, as a child, 
Believed he could break the repeatable pattern 
Of things, if only he understood the pattern, 
Is cast down, rots in the skin of others, 
Looks with wonder at the colors of the butterfly, 
Inexpressible wonder, formless, hostile to art. 


To keep the oars from squeaking in their locks, 
He binds them with a handkerchief. The dark 
Had rushed east from the Rocky Mountains 
And settled in the forests of the continent: 
Sky full of embers reflected in a cloud, 
Flight of herons, trees above a marsh, 
The dry stalks in water, livid, black. My boat 
Divides the aerial utopias of the mosquitoes 
Which rebuild their glowing castles instantly. 
A water lily sinks, fizzing, under the boat’s bow. 


Now it is night only. The water is ash-gray. 
Play, music, but inaudibly! I wait an hour 
In the silence, senses tuned to a beaver’s lodge. 
Then suddenly, a crease in the water, a beast’s 
black moon, rounded, ploughing up quickly 
from the pond-dark, from the bubbling methanes. 
I am not immaterial and never will be. 
My scent in the air, my animal smell, 
Spreads, rainbow-like, scares the beaver: 
A sudden splat. 
                                  I remained where I was 
In the high, soft coffer of the night’s velvet, 
Mastering what had come to my senses: 
How the four-toed paws worked, how the hair 
Shook off water in the muddy tunnel. 
It does not know time, hasn’t heard of death, 
Is submitted to me because I know I’ll die. 


I remember everything. That wedding in Basel, 
A touch to the strings of a viola and fruit 
In silver bowls. As was the custom in Savoy, 
An overturned cup for three pairs of lips, 
And the wine spilled. The flames of the candles 
Wavery and frail in a breeze from the Rhine. 
Her fingers, bones shining through the skin, 
Felt out the hooks and clasps of the silk 
And the dress opened like a nutshell, 
Fell from the turned graininess of the belly. 
A chain for the neck rustled without epoch, 
In pits where the arms of various creeds 
Mingle with bird cries and the red hair of caesars. 


Perhaps this is only my own love speaking 
Beyond the seventh river. Grit of subjectivity, 
Obsession, bar the way to it. 
Until a window shutter, dogs in the cold garden, 
The whistle of a train, an owl in the firs 
Are spared the distortions of memory. 
And the grass says: how it was I don’t know. 


Splash of a beaver in the American night. 
The memory grows larger than my life. 
A tin plate, dropped on the irregular red bricks 
Of a floor, rattles tinnily forever. 
Belinda of the big foot, Julia, Thaïs, 
The tufts of their sex shadowed by ribbon. 


Peace to the princesses under the tamarisks. 
Desert winds beat against their painted eyelids. 
Before the body was wrapped in bandelettes, 
Before wheat fell asleep in the tomb, 
Before stone fell silent, and there was only pity. 


Yesterday a snake crossed the road at dusk. 
Crushed by a tire, it writhed on the asphalt. 
We are both the snake and the wheel. 
There are two dimensions. Here is the unattainable 
Truth of being, here, at the edge of lasting 
and not lasting. Where the parallel lines intersect, 
Time lifted above time by time. 


Before the butterfly and its color, he, numb, 
Formless, feels his fear, he, unattainable. 
For what is a butterfly without Julia and Thaïs? 
And what is Julia without a butterfly’s down 
In her eyes, her hair, the smooth grain of her belly? 
The kingdom, you say. We do not belong to it, 
And still, in the same instant, we belong. 
For how long will a nonsensical Poland 
Where poets write of their emotions as if 
They had a contract of limited liability 
Suffice? I want not poetry, but a new diction, 
Because only it might allow us to express 
A new tenderness and save us from a law 
That is not our law, from necessity 
Which is not ours, even if we take its name. 


From broken armor, from eyes stricken 
By the command of time and taken back 
Into the jurisdiction of mold and fermentation, 
We draw our hope. Yes, to gather in an image 
The furriness of the beaver, the smell of rushes, 
And the wrinkles of a hand holding a pitcher 
From which wine trickles. Why cry out 
That a sense of history destroys our substance 
If it, precisely, is offered to our powers, 
A muse of our gray-haired father, Herodotus, 
As our arm and our instrument, though 
It is not easy to use it, to strengthen it 
So that, like a plumb with a pure gold center, 
It will serve again to rescue human beings. 


With such reflections I pushed a rowboat, 
In the middle of the continent, through tangled stalks, 
In my mind an image of the waves of two oceans 
And the slow rocking of a guard-ship’s lantern. 
Aware that at this moment I—and not only I— 
Keep, as in a seed, the unnamed future. 
And then a rhythmic appeal composed itself, 
Alien to the moth with its whirring of silk: 


O City, O Society, O Capital, 
We have seen your steaming entrails. 
You will no longer be what you have been. 
Your songs no longer gratify our hearts. 


Steel, cement, lime, law, ordinance, 
We have worshipped you too long, 
You were for us a goal and a defense, 
Ours was your glory and your shame. 


And where was the covenant broken? 
Was it in the fires of war, the incandescent sky? 
Or at twilight, as the towers fly past, when one looked 
From the train across a desert of tracks 


To a window out past the maneuvering locomotives 
Where a girl examines her narrow, moody face 
In a mirror and ties a ribbon to her hair 
Pierced by the sparks of curling papers? 


Those walls of yours are shadows of walls, 
And your light disappeared forever. 
Not the world`s monument anymore, an oeuvre of your own 
Stands beneath the sun in an altered space. 


From stucco and mirrors, glass and paintings, 
Tearing aside curtains of silver and cotton, 
Comes man, naked and mortal, 
Ready for truth, for speech, for wings. 


Lament, Republic! Fall to your knees! 
The loudspeaker’s spell is discontinued. 
Listen! You can hear the clocks ticking. 
Your death approaches by his hand. 


An oar over my shoulder, I walked from the woods. 
A porcupine scolded from the fork of a tree, 
A horned owl, not changed by the century, 
Not changed by place or time, looked down. 
Bubo maximus, from the work of Linnaeus. 


America for me has the pelt of a raccoon, 
Its eyes are a raccoon’s black binoculars. 
A chipmunk flickers in a litter of dry bark 
Where ivy and vines tangle in the red soil 
At the roots of an arcade of tulip trees. 
America’s wings are the color of a cardinal, 
Its beak is half-open and a mockingbird trills 
From a leafy bush in the sweat-bath of the air. 
Its line is the wavy body of a water moccasin 
Crossing a river with a grass-like motion, 
A rattlesnake, a rubble of dots and speckles, 
Coiling under the bloom of a yucca plant. 


America is for me the illustrated version 
Of childhood tales about the heart of tanglewood, 
Told in the evening to the spinning wheel’s hum. 
And a violin, shivvying up a square dance, 
Plays the fiddles of Lithuania or Flanders. 
My dancing partner’s name is Birute Swenson. 
She married a Swede, but was born in Kaunas. 
Then from the night window a moth flies in 
As big as the joined palms of the hands, 
With a hue like the transparency of emeralds. 


Why not establish a home in the neon heat 
Of Nature? Is it not enough, the labor of autumn, 
Of winter and spring and withering summer? 
You will hear not one word spoken of the court 
of Sigismund Augustus on the banks of the Delaware River. 
The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is not needed. 
Herodotus will repose on his shelf, uncut. 
And the rose only, a sexual symbol, 
Symbol of love and superterrestrial beauty, 
Will open a chasm deeper than your knowledge. 
About it we find a song in a dream: 


Inside the rose 
Are houses of gold, 
black isobars, streams of cold. 
Dawn touches her finger to the edge of the Alps 
And evening streams down to the bays of the sea. 


If anyone dies inside the rose, 
They carry him down the purple-red road 
In a procession of clocks all wrapped in folds. 
They light up the petals of grottoes with torches. 
They bury him there where color begins, 
At the source of the sighing, 
Inside the rose. 


Let names of months mean only what they mean. 
Let the Aurora’s cannons be heard in none 
Of them, or the tread of young rebels marching. 
We might, at best, keep some kind of souvenir, 
Preserved like a fan in a garret. Why not 
Sit down at a rough country table and compose 
An ode in the old manner, as in the old times 
Chasing a beetle with the nib of our pen?
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