Then again, there's Czeslaw Milosz's response:
TO ROBINSON JEFFERS
If you have not read the Slavic poets so much the better. There's nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek. They lived in a childhood prolonged from age to age. For them, the sun was a farmer's ruddy face, the moon peeped through a cloud and the Milky Way gladdened them like a birch-lined road. The longed for the Kingdom which is always near, always right at hand. Then, under apple trees angels in homespun linen will come parting the boughs and at the white kolkhoz tablecloth cordiality and affection will feast (falling to the ground at times),
And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths where burying a warrior they broke his bones so he could not haunt the living. From the sea night which your forefathers pulled over themselves, without a word. Above your head no face, neither the sun's nor the moon's, only the throbbing of galaxies, the immutable violence of new beginnings, on new destruction.
All your life listening to the ocean. Black dinosaurs wade where a purple zone of phosphorescent weeds rises and falls on the waves as in a dream. And Agamemnon sails the boiling deep to the steps of the palace to have his blood gush onto marble. Till mankind passes and the pure and stony earth is pounded by the ocean.
Thin-lipped, blue-eyed, without grace or hope, before God the Terrible, body of the world. Prayers are not heard. Basalt and granite. Above them, a bird of prey. The only beauty. What have I to do with you? From footpaths in the orchards, from an untaught choir and shimmers of a monstrance, from flower beds of rue, hills by the rivers, books in which a zealous Lithuanian announce brotherhood, I come. Oh, consolations of mortals, futile creeds.
And yet you did not know what I know. The earth teaches More than does the nakedness of elements. No one with impunity gives to himself the eyes of a god. So brave, in a void, you offered sacrifices to demons" there were Wotan and Thor, the screech of Erinyes in the air, the terror of dogs when Hekate with her retinue of the dead draws near.
Better to carve suns and moons on the joints of crosses as was done in my district. To birches and firs give feminine names. To implore protection against the mute and treacherous might than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing.
-- Czeslaw Milosz
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My problem is I love them both.
Mike Geary Memphis
Wow. It's been years since I read this. And I have the sense that I never read it before. Wow.ck
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