Czeslaw Milosz: Quotes about the world
Czeslaw Milosz was Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator. Explore interesting quotes on world.
“Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.”
"In Warsaw" (1945), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz, Robert Hass and Madeline Levine
Rescue (1945)
Context: How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything; five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
"Ars Poetica?"
Context: There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
"Hymn" (1935), trans. by Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Three Winters (1936)
“On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.”
"A Song On the End of the World" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19195