“You whom I could not save,” Czesław Miłosz implores, “Listen to me” (ll. 1–2). In classical tradition, a dedication is a formal act, a delineation of space in response to loss. The poet offers up Warsaw to the memory of the dead: “Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers . . . the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave” (ll. 10, 12).

Images of this “broken city” imply severance from the larger world, as rivers are too shallow to be ferried and a bridge disappears into fog, never reaching any connecting shore. In the year before this poem was written, the Warsaw Uprising of 1943 had bathed the city in blood; when the fight ended, 85 percent of the city had been destroyed by the Germans. Though in 1945 the larger war was ending, Miłosz uses the rhetoric of contradiction to inform the dead that their victory has been pyrrhic: “You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one, / Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty, / Blind force with accomplished shape” (ll. 7–9).

Tradition would demand a heightened tone for ceremony, except World War II has perverted all ritual. The poet takes refuge in “simple speech” to say “I would be ashamed of another. / . . . / I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree” (ll. 3–5). Locating a universal language in nature is an ongoing theme of his work, yet Miłosz is also responding to the timely question, posed by philosopher Theodor Adorno, as to whether poetry could be written after the horrors of Auschwitz.

Miłosz suggests that the solution to Adorno’s concern lies in the “salutary” aims of poetry. In the fourth stanza the diction intensifies, as the supplicant reaffirms his identity as poet: “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?” (ll. 14–18). The poet’s salvation is his desire for “good poetry”—poetry that has both aesthetic and moral qualities. Of this period in his life, later Miłosz would say, “I had to go back to poetry to save myself from philosophy.”

But the speaker is not pure in his dedication, either to the dead or to poetic principle. Miłosz subtly complicates the poem by resisting the siren’s call to self-sacrificing devotion, which is the secondary meaning of dedication. The speaker is haunted not by the ghosts of idealized ancestors, but instead by peers whom he knew in all their human compromises. He cannot help but remark, “What strengthened me, for you was lethal” (l. 6).

The elegant closing gesture is one of appeasement, not of martyrdom: “They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds / To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. / I put this book here for you, who once lived / So that you should visit us no more” (ll. 22–25). The poet knows that holocaust has, paradoxically, given life to these poems, and he feels the burden of having survived. He can only pray that the hungry dead will be content to consume the art—and not the artist.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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