A song about the end of the world
The poem comes from the volume of Salvation published in 1945 year. The vast majority of works included in this collection were written in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, Some texts were published during the war in underground publications. The whole book is groundbreaking in Miłosz's work, is a departure from pre -war fascination with avant -garde poets, Announcement of a new language, the author's different understanding of poetry tasks, whose imagination, The internal world has significantly shaped the tragic experience of the war.
The song about the end of the world is one of the songs of the votes of the poor in Łudzi (The poet speaks in it on behalf of the so -called. simple people), which in an almost realistic way (Although and with a slight ironic distance) presents the phenomena accompanying the war, occupation, extermination. Gives a testimony of those times, when the songs from the poem world (also placed in the discussed volume) They were an attempt to escape from the occupation nightmare, creating a vision of a dream world.
The title of the discussed poem is already surprising: song, which talks about the end of the world. We have oxymoronic opposition of light, entertainment form of speech with a negative topic: fulfilling the apocalypse. Of course, This is an ironic statement, An attempt to look at the disaster from a distance. The war destroys everything, Also the world order, In this and literature, The old criteria for "appropriateness" of such and not other forms of expression do not make any sense anymore.
The basic issues of this song are focused on the opposition of Ład-Zagłada, life-death, Calm-Catastrophe. Seemingly the day of the end of the world is no different from other summer days:
On the day of the end of the world
The bee circulates over the flower of nasturtium,
The fisherman repairs a shiny network.
Happy dolphins jump in the sea,
Young sparrows cling to the gutters
And the snake has golden skin, how should he have.
Similarly, the next stanza of this poem also brings the idyllic images. Nothing announces the inevitable extermination, which soon sweep this cheerful world from the earth's surface. And no one is aware of this, that there are already crushing people and landscapes a roller of destruction – After all, there were no signs announcing the apocalypse. Humanity, brought up on the Bible, she was not awaiting such an end to history, She expected an end to the lightning light, Accompanied by thunders, with the sound of Archangel trumpets, dying all nature. Meanwhile, life is still in the world from the poem, lively movement, There is almost idyll – Like a song about a sunny day, happiness. Nay, A starry night will take place after the end of the world! There are no expressive, conventional characters, So nobody believes, that this is the final end day, He can't even understand, that the days are full.
Meanwhile, there will be no other end of the world – Since the war destroyed everything, This is how traditional props could have survived, Symbols of extermination, Images about it? In this situation, only an attitude is possible (also paying attention to strength, I prefer survival) old woman: I don't want to be a prophet, prefers to cultivate tomatoes. As if nothing, jakby było to zwykłe lato, One of many. The end of the world will happen anyway (maybe only in the unit dimension, But isn't the death of a man to the end of the world for him?), Even without his prophecies. The inevitable tragedy moves with the everyday life of human existence, The nightmare will not have a majesty, It will be common and banal. Archangel trumpets will replace a series of machine guns.
This perverse, A bit grotesque song (How far from the paintings of extermination from the Apocalypse of Saint John) It was written in a very simple language, almost discursive, the opposite of the biblical language. Maintaining the general sense of biblical announcements of the end of humanity, it definitely paraphrases them, transform, modern, reflects with extremely different images, or rather one picture (The poem should be read as a whole, do not divide it into any parts).