“You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter.
I give you thanks for good and ill.
Eternal light in everything on earth.
As now, so on the day after my death”
– “Thankfulness”
“To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.”
– Czeslaw Milosz, from Unattainable Earth, trans.
Robert Hass (HarperCollins, 1986)
Everyone should read him. He is a great poet and great poets should be read. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, born in 1911, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three. He never petered out in silence. It astonishes and encourages me, who at eighty-six feels and fears the steady depletion of creative energy, that Milosz was still writing strong and marvellous poetry up to the time of his death.
