The Bible and Ancient Myth in the Poems of Czesław Miłosz

Abstract

Whenever the Polish modernist Czesław Miłosz places ancient mythical motifs at the center of his poems, he subjects them to reinterpretation and transposition. However, these motifs and themes are not sufficiently central in his oeuvre in order to serve as a constant tool for arranging and hierarchizing the reality he describes. More systematic is the poet’s use of biblical motifs, which enables readers to discern certain constant and repeatable patterns behind individual motifs and symbols. According to Northrop Frye’s “grammar of literary archetypes,” the most frequent biblical motifs in Miłosz’s poems are connected with both poles of apocalyptic metaphors, the future idyll and the threatening or already ongoing Armageddon, and their type – that is, scenes from Genesis, which Miłosz centers around three axes: memories of childhood in idyllic surroundings (i.e., the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man); nature alienated because of awareness of suffering (i.e., the Garden of Eden after the Fall of Man); and banishment from the Garden of Eden (i.e., alienation in the world). The last echo of these issues is the modified images of hell and heaven originating in folk Christianity. – Comparing the use of biblical motifs in Miłosz’s poems with the mythic method as defined by T. S. Eliot for Joyce’s Ulysses reveals some basic differences: Miłosz also feels the necessity to organize or, even more strongly, to assign meaning to the experience of the modern world; however, with Miłosz, this primarily involves deciphering an already recorded meaning, inaccessible to human experience and hidden behind its external manifestation. In addition, the poet’s attitude towards the “unattainable earth” is more often related to his astonishment at the innumerable quantity and inexhaustibility of its manifestations than a negative experience of an inconceivable and unrepresentable chaotic reality. Moreover, in Miłosz’s poems, the use of biblical motifs is connected with wider religious issues, which are part of the discussion on the civilization experience of the human race.