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Lunch Note #002: Czelaw Milosz
Apr. 15th, 2025 02:25 pm
As part of my personal celebration of National Poetry Month, I'm reading through a collection of Selected and Last Poems by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by his son Andrew Milosz. Because it's such a thick book, I'm taking my time with it—more so than I, admittedly, usually take with poetry collections.
One of the most powerful poems so far is one titled "Café." The final stanza goes:
It is a devastating ending to a poem that begins with the observation that, of "those at the table in the café" whom the speaker of the poem is remembering, the speaker is the one alone who survived. Given the time and place where this poem was written—Warsaw, 1944—it is a devastating, haunting poem about war and the people we lose. The many lives that are cut short due to state violence (whether inter-state or intra-state).
To me, this is a lament for the living, too. Not only is the speaker alive and mourning the people who are lost, but they are imagining the dead as experiencing a kind of joy in the afterlife that is inaccessible to the living. The people at the wobbling table, the waiter, they are laughing at the speaker for being still alive. This isn't out of cruelty, but the speaker is barred from knowing what they know. The speaker, if all goes well, would never know what they know, and that feeling is bittersweet: they don't want to know what it is to die at the hand of man, but not knowing means that there is something that separates them from their friends, even in death.
When I picked up this collection of poems from the library, I was drawn to Milosz because the cover flaps of the connection spoke highly of his commentary on the tumultuous times he lived through: two world wars and the shifting landscape of violence and revolution that followed after. There have been many connections made between the times we're living in and what happened a century prior, but the way that I make those connections, personally, is through creative writing. Reading Milosz's poems is helping me focus my energy as a reader and writer. What did Milosz see and feel a century before? And what can I learn to see through his poems?
One of the most powerful poems so far is one titled "Café." The final stanza goes:
Sometimes when the evening aurora paints the roofs in a poor street
and I contemplate the sky, I see in the white clouds
a table wobbling. The waiter whirls with his tray
and they look at me with a burst of laughter
for I still don't know what it is to die at the hand of man,
they know—they know it well.
and I contemplate the sky, I see in the white clouds
a table wobbling. The waiter whirls with his tray
and they look at me with a burst of laughter
for I still don't know what it is to die at the hand of man,
they know—they know it well.
It is a devastating ending to a poem that begins with the observation that, of "those at the table in the café" whom the speaker of the poem is remembering, the speaker is the one alone who survived. Given the time and place where this poem was written—Warsaw, 1944—it is a devastating, haunting poem about war and the people we lose. The many lives that are cut short due to state violence (whether inter-state or intra-state).
To me, this is a lament for the living, too. Not only is the speaker alive and mourning the people who are lost, but they are imagining the dead as experiencing a kind of joy in the afterlife that is inaccessible to the living. The people at the wobbling table, the waiter, they are laughing at the speaker for being still alive. This isn't out of cruelty, but the speaker is barred from knowing what they know. The speaker, if all goes well, would never know what they know, and that feeling is bittersweet: they don't want to know what it is to die at the hand of man, but not knowing means that there is something that separates them from their friends, even in death.
When I picked up this collection of poems from the library, I was drawn to Milosz because the cover flaps of the connection spoke highly of his commentary on the tumultuous times he lived through: two world wars and the shifting landscape of violence and revolution that followed after. There have been many connections made between the times we're living in and what happened a century prior, but the way that I make those connections, personally, is through creative writing. Reading Milosz's poems is helping me focus my energy as a reader and writer. What did Milosz see and feel a century before? And what can I learn to see through his poems?