Hope Poem by Czeslaw Milosz

Perfectly wonderful poem, in fact.

Somewhere in the garden.....thanks for posting.....

The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist, As if snatched up by the hand of thieves............................. Nice ending. Observation and exposition uniquely blended. Thanks.

The poem answers the doubts of skeptics who think 'That there is nothing, just a seeming'. Thanks. Hope is with you when you believe The earth is not a dream but living flesh, We might discover.... A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Very positive poem. One should see the world as a beautiful garden where flowers colors bloom in abundance and there is peace and happiness. 'We might discover somewhere in the garden A strange new flower and an unnamed star.' is very nice. Thanks for sharing.

i hadn't seen this poem before. some housekeeping first. it looks to me like the third line, like all the rest, should begin with an upper case letter. and the twelfth line should begin with they instead of there. milosz is the editor of one of my favorite poetry anthologies, a book of luminous things. and hope is a worthy subject. years ago, hearing an interview with the dalai lama, this came to me- hope is one of the basic food groups. i like how milosz shows that hope can be based, is largely based, in what is seen. if you're reading this and would care to look, i have a lighter even briefer poem along these lines, faith of a feline. gk

When you believe! ! ! Thanks for sharing this poem with us.

Everything lies in hope and this poem is so interesting.

Milosz was a man of great intellect and depth of feeling. He understood suffering and injustice and was unusually talented in his ability to convey it in his writing. Much of work has a feeling of estrangement and the melancholy that results from such separation. I wonder if this poem isn't motivated by his feelings, his own fears, that the world he hopes for remains beyond our collective grasp. The first two stanzas address his hopes and beliefs, but they are held at arms length, separate and intangible except in the mind. And then in the third stanzas he accuses others of being the deniers, the ones without hope. But if those people do not trust their eyes, what do they trust? Their thoughts that even their ethereal ideations of what seems to be can be robbed from them. And then who would they imagine those thieves to be? As if it could be none other than themselves. Hope is a fragile thing here. A star that cannot be anywhere but in the heavens, and if we can but isolate it and name it, it can be ours and we can own it. The substance of hope is something that lies beyond the surface of its appearance. At least that's what I think Milosz is trying to convey in this poem of apparent lightness but invested with a density of, of what? Human longing and hope?