From the Rising of the Sun
Czeslaw Milosz’s poem bearing the Polish title
‘‘Gdzie wschodzi słon ́ce i kedy zapada,’’ later
translated as ‘‘From the Rising of the Sun,’’
was published in 1974 in a collection titled with
the name of the same poem. An English trans-
lation of ‘‘From the Rising of the Sun’’ is avail-
able in Milosz’s New and Collected Poems
(1931–2001)(2001). Milosz was born in Lithua-
nia, which at the time, in 1911, was a part of the
Russian Empire. (Following the Russian Revo-
lution in 1917 and the subsequent Russian Civil
War, which lasted from 1918 until 1921, the
region known as the Russian Empire would
become the Soviet Union.) Milosz was educated
in an area of the Lithuanian region that after
World War I had become a part of Poland;
hence the language in which he wrote the major-
ity of his works was Polish.
‘‘From the Rising of the Sun’’ is a lengthy
poem featuring a combination of verse and prose
and is considered by some critics to be among
Milosz’s greatest works, although in his lifetime
Milosz’s poetry was somewhat overshadowed by
his political and philosophical essays. The poem
is a work of great thematic and stylistic complex-
ity. Like many of Milosz’s works, poetic and
otherwise, it explores issues that were dear to
him throughout his life, including those pertain-
ing to religion and theology, the relationship
between faith and reason, and the natural
world. The work also reflects the poet’s longing
for his native Lithuania, in part through
77CZESLAW MILOSZ
1974