When accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, Czesław Miłosz said, “I am a child of Europe, as the title of one of my poems admits, but that is a bitter, sarcastic admission.” Miłosz composed Child of Europe during a diplomatic posting in New York, as the poet looked back at his homeland with increasing cynicism.

The poem asserts that the only inheritance Europe offers its children is moral decay. Miłosz’s poem is bold in its vitriol, yet nuanced in its craft—using polyphonic voices that shift between the second and third person, an imperative tone, and a form reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s verse-essays—and its multiple sections presage subsequent book-length poems.

In the sardonic and swaggering latter sections, the speaker’s commands outline an egocentric path: “Love no country: countries soon disappear. / Love no city: cities are soon rubble . . . Do not love people: people soon perish.” What is even more of an inconvenience, people “are wronged and call for your help” (vi, ll. 1–2, 5–6).

In the course of World War II, Europe had already traveled far along this path to self-destruction. A founder of the catastrophist movement, Miłosz believed that humankind’s penchant for self-fulfilling prophecy would lead to annihilation: “Learn to predict fire with unerring precision. / Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction” (iii, ll. 11–12).

The poet ironically employs couplets reminiscent of Pope’s to describe the death of critical wit, as his speaker swears that “Stern as befits the servants of a cause, / We will permit ourselves only sycophantic humor” (vi, ll. 5–6). The culminating section is a wicked vision of a world without recognized truth: “Tight-lipped, guided by reasons only, / Cautiously let us step into the era of unchained fire” (vi, ll. 6–8).

How did it come to this? The anonymous “we” of the first section speaks in disquieting but not abominable tones, as celebration of survival creeps delicately toward righteousness: “We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day . . . are better than those who perished” (i, ll. 1, 3). The speaker, part of this unified second person, inspects the slippery moral slope of sinning for the sake of self-preservation: “Having the choice of our own death or that of a friend, / We chose his, coldly thinking: let it be done quickly” (i, ll. 14–15).

From these flawed but understandable origins comes hubris; and in the second section Miłosz creates a linguistic and ethical schism between speaker and body: “You have a clever mind which sees instantly / The good and bad of any situation. / You have an elegant, skeptical mind which enjoys pleasures / Quite unknown to primitive races” (ii, ll. 7–10). The seed of pride has morphed into the flowery language of eugenics.

Miłosz was fascinated by a good man’s ability to lose himself in a greater evil, which he described as a schizophrenia of the public self and the private. He said, “Utopian expectations, projected on historical reality, could become justification for totalitarianism.”

A few years later Miłosz incorporated the issues examined in this poem into his seminal philosophical volume, The Captive Mind.

Categories: British Literature, European Literature, Literature

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