the poet’s efforts to connect with faith is some-
how negated. The poet’s longing for his native
Lithuania, for a sense of home and community,
has been a stand-in throughout the poem for the
poet’s longing for the comfort offered by faith.
In the poem’s final section, the home of his past
makes an appearance once again as the poet
remembers an old servant named Lisabeth,
with whom he now identifies. He remembers
Lisabeth going to morning Mass and thinks
how long ago that was. The poet recognizes
that he, too, is now old, just as he remembers
Lisabeth to be. Emphasizing his affinity with
her, he notes that they are the same, and the
implication is that it is not just in their ages
that they are similar. Perhaps he, too, longs for
the solace offered by morning Mass. The poet
then draws the reader back to the present time
and place in which he is writing the poem and
suggests that maybe his reverence will offer him
salvation after all; perhaps his respect for the
faith will be enough. Yet his hope for the final
peace that faith promises is undercut by the sen-
timents of the poem’s final line. In this line the
poet acknowledges that judgment will befall him
for his despair, for his inability to accept the
glory of God on faith. In this ultimate line, the
poet suggests that his desire for faith will not be
sufficient in the end, for he has been unable to
accept without question the tenets of his faith
despite his deep desire to do so.
Throughout ‘‘From the Rising of the Sun,’’
the poet demonstrates his inability to approach
faith without question, using various methods to
accomplish this. The speaker’s longing for his
homeland is a major theme in the poem in its
own right, yet it serves additionally as a meta-
phor for his yearning for true faith and the spi-
ritual sustenance such belief can provide. His
sense of alienation from both his countrymen
and the faithful highlights his pain and his
despair. Although affirming Milosz’s essential
Catholicism in an essay published in the reli-
gion-oriented journal First Things following
Milosz’s death in 2004, Jeremy Driscoll writes
that ‘‘Milosz often sensed a lack in his own
faith.’’ In ‘‘From the Rising of the Sun,’’ this
deficiency and its ramifications are thoroughly
explored; for the poet, hoping for the ability to
accept faith without question yields not comfort
but alienation and despair.
Source:Catherine Dominic, Critical Essay on ‘‘From the
Rising of the Sun,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2009.
Suzanne Keen
In the following excerpt, Keen comments on
Milosz’sCollected Poems: 1931–1987, including
‘‘From the Rising of the Sun.’’ Keen draws upon
Milosz’s essays in order to interpret his poetic
work.
This fall, Ecco Press reissues one of the
essential books of our time, The Collected
Poemsof 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz.
Born in Lithuania in 1911, educated in Wilno
(Vilnius), a city with overlapping Polish and
Lithuanian identities, Milosz has written in Pol-
ish while living in France, Poland, and, since
1961, California. He does not regret the decision
to write in the language in which he is the best
poet, nor should he, for his translators convey
his vivid particularity and his range of tones with
such success that I must remind myself to think
of what I’m missing. Despite the loss of the
Polish sounds, rhythms, formal structures, and
idiomatic and cultural resonances, Milosz’s
poetry in translation is the real thing.
The poet Robert Hass has frequently colla-
borated with Milosz in translating himself, most
recently inProvinces: Poems 1987–1991.From
that volume, the poem ‘‘The Thistle, the Nettle’’
demonstrates how superbly these poets make
English poetry from Milosz’s original.
...The desolate music of the lines defies the
‘‘earth without grammar’’ that the aging poet
faces. The poet reanimates his cousin Oscar
Milosz’s catalog of weeds, quoted in the epigraph
to the poem, making continuity out of arranged
words even as he disbelieves in the efficacy of
poetry’s claim on the future. My own experience
of vacant lots and the accidental meadows of the
postindustrial landscape, not to mention the
prospect of the end of the poet’s vocation, is
whipped into shape by this rigorous lyric.IN HIS NOBEL LECTURE, WHICH CLOSES
BEGINNING WITH MY STREETS,MILOSZ ASKS HIS
AUDIENCE’S FORGIVENESS FOR ‘LAYING BARE
A MEMORY LIKE A WOUND.’’’FromtheRisingoftheSun