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Incantation by Czeslaw Milosz   
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Czeslaw Milosz
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Czeslaw Milosz
(30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004 / Kedainiai)
33 poems of Czeslaw Milosz
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  Incantation

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  Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.


Czeslaw Milosz

Submitted Date Friday, January 03, 2003



Read poems about / on: justice, poetry, beautiful, despair, birth, nature, truth, friend, hope, sun, world, time

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  Comments about this poem (Incantation by Czeslaw Milosz )
Doris Voina (1/15/2012 8:05:00 AM)
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1 person did not like.
This poem is highly ironic. Actually, this is Milosz's irony at its best.
I think the actual meaning of incantation here is probably 'series of many words, that hide lack of content'. Milosz's praise of human reason here is absolutely contrary to what his philosophy endorses... look up Lev Shestov's works. it's indeed interesting :)
Marilyn Hochfield (3/12/2009 6:33:00 PM)
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0 person did not like.
Magari! as the Italians would say. How we wish for this enchanted place!
 
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