Wyatt Grose
Ms. Del Dotto
16 March 2016
7th Period ENG2
The Child of Europe
A poem by: Czeslaw Milosz
Born in Lithuania in 1911, Czeslaw Milosz spent most of his early life in pre-Great War Czarist Russia. Upon the beginning of World War One, his family moved away briefly with him to avoid being caught in the conflict. Upon their arrival, they discovered that their hometown had become part of the new state of Poland, where Milosz attended local Catholic schools for the rest of his childhood. He published his first collection of poems, Poemat o czasie zastyglym (“Poem of the Frozen Time”), at the age of twenty-one. When WWII began in 1939, Milosz began working with the Warsaw underground resistance movement for the duration of the war. Milosz continued to publish his works, although due to the tension of the war he was forced to publish them under the pseudonym “J. Syruc”. Following the war, Milosz became a member of the new communist government’s diplomatic service and was stationed in Paris, France, as a cultural ambassador. In 1951, he left this post and defected to the West, where he resided in San Francisco. Milosz died in his home town of Kraków, Poland on August 14th, 2004. He was 93 at the time. In 1946, directly after World War Two, Milosz published his poem “Child Of Europe”, which played upon the duality of mankind, and what kind of effect that has on the outcome of a major conflict.
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Picture of Czeslaw Milosz, taken in 1983 (LINK)
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The Speaker
The speaker of the poem seems to be someone who had witnessed war and its effects on human life in all respects. Although the poem seems to be dictated in a calm tone, the events the speaker illustrated would undoubtedly leave a sever emotional dent in anyone’s soul.
Imagery
A significant amount of imagery is utilized in the poem, with great effect, in the third stanza, Milosz states: “We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires...”. This event not only gives the mind a grey, sinister view of captivity and suffering, but also directly references the Nazi death camps, in which millions of bodies were burned in large coal furnaces in order to dispose of them. Further down the poem, Milosz writes, “We, the last who can still draw joy from cynicism…” Milosz uses such grave, sincere wording to illustrate the severity of war, and how happiness and joy become long lost concepts when so much death and destruction happens all around you. The theme of the poem has a dark, eerie feel of loss and solemnity. In effect, this gives the reader a first-person view of what it would be like to live in a world that had just witnessed a long period of devastation to an effect that had never been experienced before.
Figurative Language
Throughout the poem, Milosz uses a variety of figurative language to get his point across. In the third stanza he uses the line, “We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in paroxysms of pain...” By using this type of language, Milosz gets the point across that the intensity and amount of pain and suffering that was taking place was immense enough it could be accurately represented by the bullets “wounding the air”. Throughout the poem, Milosz repetitively references the “child of Europe”. Although not an actual child, Milosz is using this metaphor to display the fact that within Europe resides many cultures, beliefs and people, that occasionally come to a disagreement that can (and did) lead to a war. This “child”, is effectively the odd, mixed offspring of what happens when two sides collide to prove that they, and their opinions, are right.
Theme
All; in all, the theme of the poem offers an extremely complex, yet highly insightful view into the causes and effects of war, and how humanity as a whole manipulates the events that happen within it. The poem shows that we can in fact learn from these horrific events; about how we can act ahead to prevent them in the future, and what we can do now to rebuild and heal from what has happened in the past.
Works Cited:
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