Poems for a Dark Hour
I wish I could read Polish
"Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter. I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid."
These lines are from T.S. Eliot's"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," published in 1915. Eliot's feeling of despair is not the despair we feel today. We are afraid, as the speaker of Prufrock was afraid, but our fears are different. The malaise, the alienation that Eliot felt as he tried to cope with all the razzmatazz of the early decades of the 20th century seems, a hundred years later, as the complaint of an aesthete trying to find a place for himself, and his ideas, in a vulgar, de-sensitized, mass-market world. We face different problems.
What poetry speaks to our fractured times? I find myself regularly re-reading the works of Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet (1923-2012) who won the Nobel Prize in 1996. She spent almost her entire life in Krakow and witnessed her country being overrun twice, first by Hitler and then by Stalin. In her twenties she accepted Communism and Soviet-style Social Realism, but by the 1950s her writing became apolitical. As she put it, her task was now to "appeal to those cells in the reader's brain which hadn't yet submitted to the invasion of the Polish People's Republic.....The poet can't keep up. He lags behind. In his defense I can say that someone's got to straggle in the rear, if only to pick up the pieces of what's been trampled on...The poet tends to the world's hidden histories; she becomes the poetic patron saint of lost and overlooked things, the literary caretaker of a cosmic lost-and-found."
Szymborska, along with Czesław Miłosz (1914-2011), who won the Nobel Prize in 1980, and Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) are the best-known and most widely translated modern Polish poets, though there are many others from the Post-War era. You can sample their work in the anthology that Milosz edited.
Here is Szymborska’s "The End and the Beginning,” published in 2001.
After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall. Someone has to glaze a window, rehang a door. Photogenic it’s not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war. We’ll need the bridges back, and new railway stations. Sleeves will go ragged from rolling them up. Someone, broom in hand, still recalls the way it was. Someone else listens and nods with unsevered head. But already there are those nearby starting to mill about who will find it dull. From out of the bushes sometimes someone still unearths rusted-out arguments and carries them to the garbage pile. Those who knew what was going on here must make way for those who know little. And less than little. And finally as little as nothing. In the grass that has overgrown causes and effects, someone must be stretched out blade of grass in his mouth gazing at the clouds.
People in Szymborska’s vision are an amalgam of both low and high intelligence; the instincts of the primate exist side-by-side with our capacities for wisdom. There's a hard, sharp edge to her poetry, one that's not softened by any romantic or mystical yearnings. Her voice, however, is not lacking in wit or irony, as "Possibilities," published in 1997 shows:
I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here to many things I’ve also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.
To commemorate 9/11 the artist Jenny Holzer projected Szymborska's poem, "Could Have" (1996) on to a Manhattan skyscraper and then photographed it for The New Yorker.
It could have happened. It had to happen. It happened earlier. Later. Nearer. Farther off. It happened, but not to you. You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. Alone. With others. On the right. The left. Because it was raining. Because of the shade. Because the day was sunny. You were in luck -- there was a forest. You were in luck -- there were no trees. You were in luck -- a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake, A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . . So you're here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave, reprieve? One hole in the net and you slipped through? I couldn't be more shocked or speechless. Listen, how your heart pounds inside me.
Lastly, here is Zbigniew Herbert's "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito," written in 1993.
Go where those others went to the dark boundary for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize go upright among those who are on their knees among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust you were saved not in order to live you have little time you must give testimony be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous in the final account only this is important and let your helpless Anger be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten let your sister Scorn not leave you for the informers executioners cowards—they will win they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography and do not forgive truly it is not in your power to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn beware however of unnecessary pride keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring the bird with an unknown name the winter oak light on a wall the splendour of the sky they don’t need your warm breath they are there to say: no one will console you be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain repeat great words repeat them stubbornly like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand and they will reward you with what they have at hand with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes Be faithful Go
What appeals to me about lyric poetry in general, and these Polish poets in particular, is how far removed this writing is from narrative, from storytelling that aims to tie up the loose ends of our recalcitrant, untamable reality. There's no beginning, middle or end here in the sense that we’ve come to know these elements of storytelling. Whether Pip and Estella eventually married is not the subject matter of the closing stanzas of any lyric poem. In times of deep uncertainty and worry, such as our present moment, the arc that defines a narrative, that completes the circle from beginning to end, still provides us with escape, and is a balm with many benefits. Yet, in times of trouble, I seek a different meaning from literature—-one that abides in uncertainty, yet is able to cast some light upon the darkness.
This quality of poetry no doubt explains why the public rarely reads it these days, as we have for a long while been living in a culture dominated by the narrative. We are at a deep level of our psyches drawn to plots, to the pleasure we feel from vicariously following someone else's life, riding along, from a safe distance, on their adventures. This is gratifying on many levels, but I think that, above all else, narratives give us the comfort of a resolution. Comfort is necessary for peace of mind and body, like a soft wool blanket is on a winter's night.
Szymborska and Herbert are purveyors of a different kind of wool, one that is neither soft nor plush, nor a source of warmth. As Adam Jagajewski (1945-2021), another remarkable Post-War Polish poet, put it in his memoir, Another Beauty (1998): " We shouldn’t think that things could never turn out otherwise...We must keep in mind the vast supplies of wool from which our suits have been made. Rough bales of that wool, secured against time's ravages, are packed in scrupulously guarded warehouses...Their stockrooms don't just hold wool for coming centuries. They also store the unused wool of distant times, the wool of events that never came to pass, nations that were never realized, cities that remained unbuilt, the wool of people who were never born, of those who died too soon, of those whose lives didn't turn out, the wool of unpainted pictures, of thoughts that never came to mind, the wool of a world in which fate worked differently.