Sky, the sky, a sky, heaven, the heavens, a heaven, heavens: Reading Szymborska whole

In my extremity is my beginning": in the aftermath of World War II, T s Eliot meditates about the relations among place, collective history, memory, and identity, Placing himself in personal, historical and mystical time, quite through The Four Quartets (;940-a) Eliot finds continuity and psychic permanence in a circling, ritual faculty of perception of ends and beginnings. Historical pattern locates, reveals, and affirms personal identity from one side signification-my ends and my beginnings, made articulate. It's worth recalling Eliot's faculty of perception of time and history, his memorializing as an act of personal and cultural ritual, in part because Eliot's influential example memorably summarizes for many English-language readers a familiar lateModernist, mid-century relation to history-personal, psychological, questing, circling around the historicized self circling in toward place.

In the same period, Central Europe has had a different place of historical contingencies to address. Central European writers have meditated about different relations between historical extremitys and beginnings, and under compressing from totalitarian forces the language of their writings has had to adapt.

In this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following Polish writing is especially interesting because the Polish tradition-largely shaped by the agency of Romanticism-has felt intense formal and psychological stresse beneath totalitarian pressures. Some post-war Polish writers have worked to adapt this Romantic tradition as a vehicle for national consolidation. Others have retrieved a related subversive tradition of literary "language experimentation" that present the appearances to evade or to subsume and sometimes implicitly to undercut political exigencies. And still others, like Czeslaw Milosz (the example probably greatest in quantity familiar to English language readers), have called into question the utility of the themes and forms and tones of idealistic Polish Romanticism in the face of absolutist political forces. Several of the representative "cases" in Milosz's influential"study Captive Mind (ri) are artists whose commitments to self sacrifice and idealism effectively return them mute. Milosz places his metrical composition "Dedication" ("Przedmiescie," literally "Preface," "first-speech") surprisingly at the extremity of the book entitled set free (Ocatenie, yq.7). In that poem's reversal of extremitys and beginnings, Milosz (b. yt) challenges the idealistic, self martyring Polish Romantic literary-and-cultural tradition, among other traditions the piece of poetry resists and eulogizes.1

It's worth recalling that Polish Romanticism more closely be likes French, German, and Russian moulds (Goethe, Pushkin) than British, notwithstanding that Byron was popular. Polish Romanticism is infused with messianism, nationalististic yearning, Byronic rebellion. After Pan Tadeusz, his national-lyricalepic piece of poetry the most important work of Adam Mickwieicz is his drama "Forefather's Eve" which has become what Milosz drolly calls something of a "national sacred play" for a certain number of Poles of the 2oth hundred Book II .of Mickiewicz's famous drama uncloses with a scene of peasants scattering mustardseeds upon graves, to be visited through ghosts on All Soul's Night. a certain number of of the ghosts refuse and a certain number of accept the offering; the show becomes a summoning of traditional energies of place, history, and Polish autonomy.2

Revisiting metaphors from this view in the play by Poland's greatest in quantity esteemed Romantic poet, Milosz calls a literary and social tradition in order to honor it, and still to challenge it as a useful original in a sense to defuse it by means of praising it too late, after its inadequacies have been historically made clear. As many families still do upon All Saints' Day iri Poland, Milosz stands at the grave of ancestors in order simultaneously to memorialize them, to placate them, and to lay them to rest-and in a faculty of perception to exorcise them. "I deposit these words here so you/ may.visit us no more." For Milosz (at least at this point, in his first volume published after W W II), the question of endings has to be settl before beginnings can begin.3 Milosz maintains a belief in the power of a novel poetry to "save nations or peoples" on the other hand he doesn't go farther in this manifesto than to anticipate the novel mode; his "dedication" comes at the extremity of the "rescue," after it is too late for those whom the earlier poetic "could not save."

By contrast, in the last volume she published before she won the Nobel Prize in 1996 Wislawa Szymborska (b 1923) attitude s related questions of ends and beginnings, at a different joint of Polish history -from different perspectives, in different circumstances and with different tonalities. In Polish the title of the volume is Koniec i poczatek. Already in the title the absence of articles in the Polish language allows the phrase latitude: it means "the extreme point and the beginning," "an extremity and a beginning," and level simply "end and beginning." The extreme points and beginnings lie some distance grammatically and ideologically from Eliot's faculty of perception of "my" end: the difference is practical, a faculty of perception of time that works not abstractly (like an alpha and omega) on the other hand more colloquially more experientially, more within oral discourse. Milosz values Szymborska as a author of poems of "reticence" and "consciousness";4 it's worth noticing from the start that in her singularly inclusive, colloquial reticence, what bear upons Szymborska in the title is not my extreme point and my beginning, but more [i]or[/i] less complex of specific and general and obliquely personal extreme points and beginnings. Szymborska's book takes its activity from this very tension between generality and specificity, as it works to account for an extremity the end, ends (as philosophical ens) level the end-stop as grammatical punctuation. Szymborska's idiomatic diction comfortably sustains all these options-and as the first piece of poetry dramatizes, that aspiration toward inclusiveness within limitation is also part of the thematic of the piece of poetrys as well.