A Case of Substance Over Style: Milosz's Provinces

     Off and on for the past few years, I've been working my way through a voluminous edition of collected poems of the late, great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. While I might post my impressions of the whole collection later, I've recently been thinking about some of his later poems. At present, I'm working my way through his 1991 volume Provinces. The poems are obviously the work of an old man (though he'd continue to publish for 10 more years), and the book came over a decade after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
     This later work is still characteristic Milosz both stylistically and thematically. Indeed, it's remarkable that Milosz's work stayed so steadily consistent in quality over such a long period. Working over such a long period as Milosz did, however, will inevitably bring some changes, and to my eye at least, his later work did display some subtle differences from his earlier pieces. Most notably, I found Milosz's earlier work to be much more appealing artistically - it had an energy and imagery that really propelled the work forward in a way you don't always find in his later poems. That said, however, I still oddly enough seem to be enjoying some of his later poems as much, if not more, than some of his earlier ones.
     I believe this is largely due to the subject matter of Milosz's work in Provinces. By and large, these poems are the philisophical musings of an old man pondering the transience of our mortal world and what happens when we pass from it. If you don't think mortality and aging is on his mind, then just look at a sampling of some of the lines that open poems in this volume: "You would like to hear how it is in old age?" ("A New Province"), "Your unhappy and silly youth" ("Youth"), "Listen, perhaps you will hear me, young man" ("Inheritor"), "In my old age I decided to visit places where I wandered long ago in my early youth" ("Return"), "When I die, I will see the lining of the world" ("Meaning").   
It's a theme common enough to poetry, granted, but Milosz here is grappling with the lofty subject with an apparent sincerity that is much more rare. It is this grappling that makes these poems so interesting, to me at least, even if the verse itself lacks some of the artistic integrity of his earlier pieces.
     You see, one of the things that bothers me about contemporary poetry is that often it's the opposite case. Many of the talented poets today, particularly those being cranked out by some of these MFA programs, seem to care more about the style of their poetry than the message that so often gets pushed to the background or diluted by their obscure renderings. Oftentimes, I even get the distinct impression that some of these poems start with the stylistic structure and then finds a subject to incorporate into it. It's a pet peeve when I read many literary journals today.
     Some of these later poems of Milosz are the complete opposite, and it's refreshing. In fact, let me close with one of the poems Milosz writes that seems to be just about that subject. It's called "Good Night," and in it, one senses that the poet is glad that he's at the stage of his career where he doesn't need to worry about the artistic reception to his poetry:

No duties. I don't have to be profound.
I don't have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: "You were running,
That's fine. It was the thing to do."
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs,
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That's better than examining one's private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It's here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell.

Grappling with Dylan Thomas

          You may have started to pick up on it in my post a couple weeks ago, but I was not overly enthusiastic about Dylan Thomas at the time. I’ve actually had this volume of his poems (New Directions' Collected Poems 1934-1952) for about 15 years or so, and I’ve tried a couple of times in the past to read it only to put it down after a few poems in frustration. I decided a few months ago to try again, and knowing what to expect this time, I was determined not to permit the unfinished book to continue hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles (as you can tell from the analogy, leaving books unfinished does not sit well with me). I’m happy to say I made it all the way through this time. I can also say that, as with most things, a little more familiarity did breed a fair bit more appreciation of the poems. And while I still can’t quite call myself a Dylan Thomas fan, I have at least come to the point where I can admit a grudging admiration for the man.

          A good portion of my way through the book, I actually decided to look up a little information about Thomas. Typically, I avoid doing this, preferring to let my first reading remain as unbiased by outside sources as possible, but I couldn’t help myself in this case. I consider myself a fairly good reader of poetry, and the frustration I felt reading Thomas was beginning to wear on me. Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to realize such a reaction is by no means uncommon. In fact, I ran across Elder Olson’s 1954 review of the Collected Poems (originally published in Poetry), which opens, “There is some evidence that even well-equipped readers have found the poetry of Dylan Thomas difficult; and one would be surprised, considering the nature of his work, if the case were otherwise.” Olson then spends the remainder of the lengthy opening paragraph explaining some of the various reasons for this difficulty. Suitably relieved to find it wasn’t just me, I toughed it through the remainder of the volume.

          The consensus on Thomas’s poetry more or less tends to be that it’s full of powerful, unique language that can captivate the reader, even while some of its exact meaning remains clouded beneath surreal and fantastic imagery. I tend to agree with this assessment. In fact, it seems Thomas wishes more to engage with the reader on an emotional level and is not overly concerned about his poems’ literal interpretation. When Thomas’s confident voice and striking imagery and rhythm all work together, the result is some fantastic poetry, as in one of my favorites, “All all and all the dry world’s lever,” which opens:

                   All all and all the dry world’s lever,

                   Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,

                   All from the oil, the pound of lava.

                   City of spring, the governed flower,

                   Turns in the earth that turns the ashen

                   Towns around on a wheel of fire.

                   How now my flesh, my naked fellow,

                   Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,

                   Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.

                   All all and all, the corpse’s lover,

                   Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,

                   All of the flesh, the dry world’s lever.

It’s moments like these I really enjoy in Thomas. There’s a vitality and originality to the language and imagery that sticks to you. Even if you have trouble getting your exact bearings at any one point in this poem, the piling on of images in this section and the ones that follow make it clear Thomas is describing the simultaneous fruitless and regenerative processes of the mortal world.

          Unfortunately, for every poem I found like this, I also would find one along these lines:

                   And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,

                   From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,

                   The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;

                   Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,

                   Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.

                   Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.

                   For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,

                   Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,

                   A climbing sea from Asia had me down

                   And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,

                   Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel

                   Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa

                   By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil

                   And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw.

This is a sonnet from the sequence “Altarwise by owl-light,” an often-discussed Thomas piece that has to deal with religious experience. I found it frustrating, as was often the case in this book.

          As I typically do when encountering a difficult poem, I relied on subsequent close readings of this and other poems like it to try and open the door to Thomas. Sometimes these subsequent readings led to epiphanies, but often they didn’t, and that is where my main frustration with Thomas stemmed from. I enjoy challenging poets, but when their works are too obscure for me to confidently form any sort of interpretation, I get annoyed. At this point of opaqueness, the verse becomes less a mystery to be unlocked and more an intellectual puzzle to be solved. As a result, I find the lyrical rewards of the verse are greatly diluted – one is too distracted by the challenges of meaning to focus on anything else.

          But again, when Thomas hits the right balance and has everything working – music, imagery, originality – he is quite a poet, particularly when he doesn’t go over the deep end of obscurity. He does so in poems like the aforementioned “All all and all the dry world’s lever,” as well as others like “A saint about to fall,” “We lying by seasand,” and “Into her Lying Down Head.” It’s the promise I see in poems like these that I think frustrates me that he can’t demonstrate it more consistently throughout his work.

          All the same, I have to admit I’ve come a long way with Dylan Thomas. As I was nearing the end of the volume, I originally thought I would probably just pass it along to charity or something when I was done. But I have to admit, there’s a haunting quality about Thomas’s verse, and it really sticks with you. Now I don’t think I’m quite done with Thomas after all. I think I’m going to hang on to the book for a while and maybe one day revisit it. There may be some poems I skip the second time round, but the fact that I’m willing to give it another shot at all is a sign of how things have changed.