Where shall we start the new year with but Hope? The earth is crying out for it. Where shall we look for it? In this poem, hope comes from a surprising source: we can only have it when we quit thinking of earth as a dream and start thinking of it as real, solid, alive. Our senses don’t lie. There it is.
Oh really? Okay, we know things aren’t concrete. We know they’re made of atoms, of subatomic particles. We know the brain puts it all together: nothing is “real.” Things only “seem” to be. If we turn our backs, they’ll disappear. Physicists, scientists, are pretty clear on that point. But unless — and this is where the poem is going, I think — we rely on our senses, there’s no hope at all.
But, Milosz says, we see our world as if from a garden gate. It’s actually full of wonders (a strange new flower, an unnamed star). We need to look closely and more wisely to see what’s there. Hope, in this poem, comes from trusting in the concreteness of things.
Milosz put its like this: “To exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.”
What to make of this poem? I think — and this is me, here — we must resolutely live within a solid reality if we want to have any hope for the world. That means collecting clothing, feeding the hungry, signing peace treaties, re-building bombed buildings. Rubbing the back of a distressed infant. If we’re to have hope for this new year, it is going to be in individual acts of kindness. And small, hopeful poems.
Czesław Miłosz (pronounced chez·laa mee·waash) was born in Lithuania in 1911. He worked with the Polish resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and was later stationed in Paris and Washington, D.C., as a Polish cultural attaché. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, and was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2004.