Chekhov’s Mistess

Marginalia: On Milosz and the Self-fulfilling Prophesy of Doubt

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Last night I read an admiring article on Czeslaw Milosz in the Wilson Quarterly, a non-partisan journal of “the world of ideas.” One thing you get from reading a general interest journal (for what is “the world of ideas” if not general interest) is that authors tend to be kind enough to inform of us things like how to pronounce the names of those dang fareners – “CHESS-wahf MEE-wosh,” so it goes, which is I guess not too distant from what I’ve always called him: CHESS-lav Me-Losh. Now I know.

This article, called “The Ecstatic Pessimist” was interesting as a political/intellectual background on Milosz – although what other background is there for such a man – who truly seems to have brought a poet’s sensibility to all the terrible things that happened in twentieth century Eastern Europe. Robert Royal, the article’s author says of Milosz’s 1953 book The Captive Mind,

“To re-read it today, more than a decade after the fall of Soviet Communism, is to be astonished, page after page, not only by the sheer genius of the exposition but by the then-recent defector’s almost superhuman refusal to indulge in simplistic hatred or bitterness.”

Another good thing about the article is that it sent me on the trail of “Orpheus and Eurydice.” I picked up my copy of Milosz’s Second Space, his last poetry written, which was published after his death last year. I had not previously looked through it all; one of the first things I noticed was the above mentioned poem. One of my favorite Rilke poems is “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” so naturally I went back and read it again. The two different interpretations made me curious, so I read Ovid’s version in Metamorphoses.

Ovid’s version, written in the early years of the Christian era, is not the first telling of the tale and many have told it after in operas, poetry and even in a movie (which I did not see). Rilke’s is still the finest I’ve read and no quote from it will do it justice. Milosz’s “Orpheus and Eurydice.” is firmly set in the 20th (or perhaps even the 21st) century. Orpheus’ decent into Hades (to retrieve his wife who died of a serpent’s bite):

“He pushed open the door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,

Corridors, elevators. The livid light was not light but the dark

of the earth.

Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly.

He descended many floors, a hundred, three hundred, down.”

The electronic dogs makes me think of the Stalags or something, but it could mean (I’m always agnostic when it comes to poet’s meanings, so I have a wide latitude with which to guess) something like a robot, or even if not futuristic, robotic in a death-like manner. Nonetheless, elevators put us in the industrial age.

The best piece of this little quote is “The livid light was not light but the dark of the earth.” Livid, according to the dictionary, can mean “(of a light) imparting a deathlike luminosity,” even though I usually think of it as angry, as in “my mom was livid when she caught me…” But it can also mean “discolored by coagulation of blood beneath the skin; ‘beaten black and blue’; ‘livid bruises’.” While maybe less obvious, I like the last meaning, because it evokes the deathly pale of the inhabitants there, although Milosz’s Eurydice is described as: “Her face no longer hers, utterly gray.”

Rilke’s Eurydice is not so much described in her current state, but who she is not:

“She was no longer that woman with blue eyes

who once echoed through the poet’s songs,

no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,

and that man’s property no longer.


She was already loosened like long hair,

poured out like fallen rain,

shared like a limitless supply.


She was already root.”

In Rilkes OEH, Orpheus, a poet, musician and perhaps the world’s most famous failure (at least at getting his wife back), is

“no longer conscious of the delicate lyre which had grown into his left arm, like a slip of roses grafted onto an olive tree.”

I’ve always taken that as saying that he was not playing music any more, but you could say, like the computer that seems to be grafted onto the tips of fingers, Orpheus did not forget the music, which would be more positive despite his failure. Ovid’s Orpheus plays on his descent and ends with him playing his lyre among the trees. Milosz’s Orpheus though:

“For his defense he had a nine-stringed lyre. He carried in it the music of the earth, against the abyss That buries all of sound in silence.”

Although his lyre is silent later.

The last line from the quote above, “She was already root,” makes me wonder of how things would have been had Orpheus been successful. Eurydice was

“Deep within herself. Being dead filled her beyond fulfillment.”

Of course there are some physical/sensual references in the poem too (and this reminds me of a Frank Bidart poem that I read in a recent issue of Poetry, but that’s another story), and this could be part of that. Mythical Hades is different than what we necessarily associate with the underworld as well, and Eurydice could be on her way to Elysian Fields (correct me if I have my mythology off a bit here). In Rilke’s story, Hermes is disappointed, but Eurydice is not.

The last thing (because I have to cut myself off somewhere) is a line I wrote in my notes reading Milosz’s poem: the self-fulfilling prophesy of doubt.

As the stories go, Orpeheus is allowed by the gods to retrieve Eurydice from Hades as long as he does not look back at her as she follows him on their ascent to the living world. Of course Orpheus can’t stand not knowing if she has fallen faint (according to Ovid), he looks back and she slips back to her second death.

But Milosz portrays his concern (for her fainting) or reason for looking back differently as he hears

“the light patter of her feet fettered by her robe as if a shroud…”


“Under his faith a doubt sprang up

And entwined him like cold bindweed.

Unable to weep, he wept at the loss

Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead,

Because he was, now, like every other mortal.

His lyre was silent, yet he dreamed, defenseless.

He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith.

And so he would persist for a very long time,

Counting his steps in a half-wakeful torpor…”



“…It happened as he expected. He turned his head

And behind him on the path was no one…”

There’s a lot to chew on here, but Milosz, I believe, confirms his power as a poet by bringing this centuries old story into modern relevancy, a universal lament, and the above passage is where that is most clear to me. Where Rilke’s Orpheus has the impatience of a lover…

“His sight would race ahead of him like a dog,

stop, come back, then rushing off again

would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn,-”

Milosz’s Orpheus, the poet in the poem, seems to be something more like a poet in his nineties that has seen a lot of humanity lost, perhaps a poet like Milosz himself. Royal draws a similar (albeit far more positive) conclusion in his WQ article. All of the above are worth reading.

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So much for my first entry into marginalia being short.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: January 20, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Poetry

Tags: Czeslaw Milosz, Rilke

• Comments:0
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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