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  • "Inheritor":A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz
  • Jeremy Driscoll OSB (bio)

Listen, perhaps you will hear me, young man. Noon. Crickets sing as they did for us A hundred years ago. A white cloud passes, Its shadow runs beneath it, the river glitters. Your nakedness. The echo Of a tongue unknown to you, here, in the air, Our words addressed to you, gentle and guiltless Son of invaders. You do not know What happened here. You do not seek Faith and hope as they were practiced here, You walk by smashed stones with the fragments of a name. Yet this water in the sun, the scent of calamus, The same ecstasy of discovering things Unite us. You will find again The sacredness they tried to expel forever. Something returns, invisible, frail and shy, Adoring, without name, and yet fearless. After our despair, your hottest blood, Your young and avid eyes succeed us. Our heir. Now we are allowed to go. Again, listen. Echo. Faint. Fainter.1 [End Page 35]

I think that Czeslaw Milosz's poem titled "Inheritor" is most certainly one of his greatest. It is not long, only twenty-one lines. And the lines advance slowly, surely, sadly to a finish that takes the reader's breath away. One cannot help but admire the way in which poetic craft delivers the message of this poem. Every line and indeed every word conspire to carry through its intent. The poem is profoundly Christian, even if there is no explicit Christian theme in it. I wonder even if Milosz himself was aware of how deeply Christian is this poem's achievement. In any case, the reader admiring it, knowingly or not, is admiring Christian truth in art. What Milosz says here is clearly uttered from his depths, the depths formed and molded through the Christian culture and history of Poland and the history through which Milosz himself lived. I want to indicate in this commentary why I make these claims about the poem.

In some sense the whole of Milosz's life is condensed into the twenty-one lines of this poem. It is a poem of his old age, published in 1991. To hear it well, the reader must be mindful from the start of the broad outline of Milosz's life story, which unfolded under the force of some of the most significant, some of the most horrible events of the twentieth century. There was his upbringing in the countryside around Wilno and in Wilno itself in present day Lithuania. There was the invasion of this land and its appropriation by communist Russia. The countryside itself and the Polish culture of that region were destroyed and replaced by the invaders. Meanwhile, Milosz himself was forced to leave not only that place but eventually Poland itself, since his conscience could not make peace with Poland's postwar-Communist regime, a shameless puppet of the invading Russians. Then there was and is the bitter irony of defeated Germany faring better than Poland in the postwar decades, even though the Poles had fought valiantly against the Germans and were among the supposed victors. Milosz fled the land he loved and felt himself an exile during decades in France and then in America, even if he in many ways flourished there. [End Page 36]

In addition, wherever he went, Milosz was always a sensuous man. I do not praise him for his weaknesses in this regard, which he himself confesses and loathes. But there is a splendid side to his sensuous nature, which knows how to bask gratefully and joyfully in the beauty of the earth, the beauty of the other, the beauty of oneself. The sensuous capacity of the poet and all this history roll themselves out in the lines of this poem. It is quintessential Milosz.

The poem is an icon displaying the magnificent beauty of the virtue of forgiveness. How forgiveness could make for peace is its lesson. Its lines reveal the process of arriving at the point where, in fact, real forgiveness is realized. "Listen, perhaps you will hear me, young man." So the poem begins. By its end, forgiveness is achieved, but a deal must first be cut...

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