Short Analysis
Czesław Miłosz portrays himself as a stone in the depths of the sea that has witnessed disaster, The poem speaks to those who have not realized what their purpose is in life and those who expect themselves not to live a full life.
The content of the poem being that of waging war, indefinite and vague questioning towards God as to why his life is so full of suffering and death Still acknowledging he may never be able to realize his dreams.
Miłosz redirects his thought to mathematics. ( non-Euclidean space -Space that cannot be measured by the simple geometric rules defined by the Greek mathematical Euclid (300 B.C.)
and nature by speaking of "amoebas and their pseudopodia tall mounds of termites."
The poem applies to the span of human history using metaphors to express how countries are deprived from their freedom and of the horrors he has witnessed of the world throughout history. With all the death around him at all times he uses a quote from the bible [1] Allusion to Ecclesiastes 9:4: “But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” meaning he still believes it is better to be alive than dead.
The content of the poem being that of waging war, indefinite and vague questioning towards God as to why his life is so full of suffering and death Still acknowledging he may never be able to realize his dreams.
Miłosz redirects his thought to mathematics. ( non-Euclidean space -Space that cannot be measured by the simple geometric rules defined by the Greek mathematical Euclid (300 B.C.)
and nature by speaking of "amoebas and their pseudopodia tall mounds of termites."
The poem applies to the span of human history using metaphors to express how countries are deprived from their freedom and of the horrors he has witnessed of the world throughout history. With all the death around him at all times he uses a quote from the bible [1] Allusion to Ecclesiastes 9:4: “But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” meaning he still believes it is better to be alive than dead.
Story Summary |
The context of the poem is the social and political disturbance that Miłosz has witnessed during his lifetime and world war with thousands of people dying. Even through all of all this horror, Miłosz believes that it is better to be alive than dead. He seeks a respite from the dark realities that surround him by thinking of the eternal phenomena of nature and of mathematics the poem brightens with sensuous imagery and Arcadian visions. The poet acknowledges that he may never be able to realize his dreams. He vaguely questions God on why his life has been so full of suffering and who to blame for it, but he finds no answers.
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Author Bio
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Czesław Miłosz born - ( June 1911 – 14 August 2004) Miłosz was a Polish poet,
His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of twenty "naïve" poems. After the war, he served on staff for the polish cultural ambassador in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 moved to the West. His book The Captive Mind became a classic of anti-Stalinism. He was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley from 1961 to 1998 . He became a U.S. citizen in 1970. In 1978 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 1980 the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Song of a Citizen” Czeslaw Milosz. Was written in 1943, while the Germans occuppied Warsaw and was published in the Polish language in 1945. The poem was unavailable in English until 1973, when it appeared in Milosz’s Selected Poems in a translation by the author. |