Czeslaw Milosz' "Blacksmith Shop"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Czesław Miłosz (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".

Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry—particularly about his wartime experience—and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, The Captive Mind, brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual.

Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience. He wrote in Polish and English.

Miłosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004. He is interred in Skałka, a church known in Poland as a place of honor for distinguished Poles.

-bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.3	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, December 7, 2023.
0:09.7	Today's poem is by Polish-American poet Chesla Miwosh, and it's called Blacksmith Shop.
0:19.2	I will read it once, offer a few comments and then read it one more time.
0:25.7	Blacksmith Shop.
0:29.8	I liked the bellows operated by rope, a hand or foot pedal, I don't remember which,
0:36.8	but that blowing and the blazing of fire and a piece of
0:40.6	iron in the fire held there by tongs, red, softened for the anvil, beaten with a hammer, bent into
0:48.0	a horseshoe, thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam. And horses hitched to be shod, tossing their mains, and in the
0:57.3	grass by the river, plowshares, sledge runners, herrows waiting for repair. At the entrance,
1:04.3	my bare feet on the dirt floor, hear gusts of heat. At my back, white clouds.
1:12.0	I stare and stare.
1:14.5	It seems I was called for this
1:16.5	to glorify things just because they are.
1:25.2	I almost always think of this poem when I think or read or hear yesterday's poem, the Village Blacksmith by Longfellow.
1:39.7	And I like to imagine these poems sort of working together as a unit, Miwosh's poem, providing a more concrete or zoomed-in look at the shop and work of the village blacksmith himself.
1:57.4	I also appreciate this poem because Miwosha is often thought of and remembered as a very political poet, a poet of the violence and turmoil of the 20th century, a outspoken social critic, a refugee voice in many ways.
2:26.2	Miwosha's poetry is often dealing with very heavy themes.
2:33.9	Whereas this poem is less burdened.
2:41.0	Even the task of the poet, which can feel to someone like Miwosh as a burden that must be
2:48.5	borne up nobly, here the task of the poet is a kind of gift, a calling to
2:57.0	the service of beauty. It seems I was called for this to glorify things just because they are.
	...

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