With his lyric Encounter, the poet Czesław Miłosz returns to the village of his childhood in Lithuania for a meditation on transience in the natural world.

The first four lines establish a simple narrative mechanism: In a dawn so still that a bird’s flutter seems like warning, a hare crosses the road and by extension, the path of man; a traveler gestures to the rabbit with his hand, choosing an act that is cognizant without being predatory.

The second half of the poem reflects on the first, as the speaker observes equilibrium in that past moment—a mutual quiet—and in the more lasting silence of the present, acknowledging, “today, neither of them is alive” (l. 5).

The truths of this spare poem are interstitial, found in the spaces between words. Nonetheless, bound to his duties as speaker, Miłosz allows his rhetorical language to falter and stutter: “O my love, where are they, where are they going”—interrupted once more by the primary moment—“the flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles” (ll. 7–8).

The poet’s essential question telescopes neatly between the past, in which it could trace the red wing’s and hare’s literal journeys, and the present, in which it interrogates the unknowable destinations of the soul. The final line affirms his intent not to mourn, but to “wonder” and contemplate.

Written in Wilno (present-day Vilnius) shortly after Miłosz’s first trip abroad, this is the voice of a young poet finding his first grasp on mortality and coming to terms with what he does not know—a humility that could always be found in Miłosz’s poetry, even in the dense philosophies of later work.

The presence of the red wing is notable not only for the image’s beauty, but for Miłosz’s strategic creation of a plural and potent animal force. Otherwise the poem might be reduced to the dynamic of hunted-hare and hunter-man.

Instead, it is clear that the men are only one part of a much larger equation—while humans merely ride along, birds are able to rise in darkness. The poet was a great naturalist, particularly attentive to the names of creatures and vegetation native to his birthplace.

In interviews he elaborated on his “amazement for the innumerable and boundless substance of this earth . . . everything is intelligent and probably eternal.”

Categories: British Literature, European Literature, Literature

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