Orpheus in Heaven
Naturalism and Modernity in Miłosz's "Orpheus and Eurydice"
Orpheus and Eurydice by Czeslaw Miłosz
Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades
Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind
That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,
Tossed the leaves of the trees. The headlights of cars
Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.
He stopped at the glass-paneled door, uncertain
Whether he was strong enough for the ultimate trial.
He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”
He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets
Usually have – he knew it – cold hearts.
It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art
Is given in exchange for such an affliction.
Only her love warmed him, humanized him.
When he was with her, he thought differently about himself.
He could not fail her now, when she was dead.
He pushed open the door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,
Corridors, elevators. The livid light was not light but the dark of the earth.
Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly.
He descended many floors, a hundred, three hundred, down.
He was cold, aware that he was Nowhere.
Under thousands of frozen centuries,
On an ashy trace where generations had moldered,
In a kingdom that seemed to have no bottom and no end.
Thronging shadows surrounded him.
He recognized some of the faces.
He felt the rhythm of his blood.
He felt strongly his life with its guilt
And he was afraid to meet those to whom he had done harm.
But they had lost the ability to remember
And gave him only a glance, indifferent to all that.
For his defense he had a nine-stringed lyre.
He carried in it the music of the earth, against the abyss
That buries all the sounds in silence.
He submitted to the music, yielded
To the dictations of a song, listening with rapt attention,
Became, like his lyre, its instrument.
Thus he arrived at the palace of the rulers of that land.
Persephone, in her garden of withered pear and apple trees,
Black, with naked branches and verrucose twigs,
Listened from the funereal amethyst of her throne.
He sang the brightness of mornings and green rivers,
He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks,
Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue,
Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs,
Of feasting on a terrace above the tumult of a fishing port,
Of the tastes of wine, olive oil, almonds, mustard, salt.
Of the flight of the swallow, the falcon,
Of a dignified flock of pelicans above a bay,
Of the scent of an armful of lilacs in summer rain,
Of his having composed his words always against death
And of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness.
I don’t know – said the goddess – whether you loved her or not.
Yet you have come here to rescue her.
She will be returned to you. But there are conditions:
You are not permitted to speak to her, or on the journey back
To turn your head, even once, to assure yourself that she is behind you.
And so Hermes brought forth Eurydice.
Her face no longer hers, utterly gray,
Her eyelids lowered beneath the shade of her lashes.
She stepped rigidly, directed by the hand
Of her guide. Orpheus wanted so much
To call her name, to wake her from that sleep.
But he refrained, for he had accepted the conditions.
And so they set out. He first, and then, not right away,
The slap of the god’s sandals and the light patter
Of her feet fettered by her robe, as if by a shroud.
A steep climbing path phosphorized
Out of darkness like the walls of a tunnel.
He would stop and listen. But then
They stopped, too, and the echo faded.
And when he began to walk the double tapping commenced again.
Sometimes it seemed closer, sometimes more distant.
Under his faith a doubt sprang up
And entwined him like cold bindweed.
Unable to weep, he wept a the loss
Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead,
Because he was, now, like every other mortal.
His lyre was silent, yet he dreamed, defenseless.
He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith.
And so he would persist for a very long time,
Counting his steps in a half-wakeful torpor.
Day was breaking. Shapes of rock loomed up
Under the luminous eye of the exit from underground.
It happened as he expected. He turned his head
And behind him on the path was no one.
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.
Miłosz, Czeslaw. “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Second Space: New Poems, Translated by Czelsaw Miłosz and Robert Hass, Harper Collins Publishers, 2004. pp. 99-102.
Orpheus in Heaven
In his 2002 collection Second Space, Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz includes a re-telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. In his adaption, Miłosz alters the reader’s familiarity with the myth by including images of modern phenomena which are foreign to the original Greek context. The presence of modern imagery in Miłosz’ Orpheus and Eurydice demands the reader’s attentiveness, as it provides a distinctly new element to a familiar myth. While this imagery is concentrated in the first stanzas of the poem, it provides a contrast between modern and naturalistic themes and supports a view of Miłosz’ Orpheus as in love with nature.
Miłosz introduces modernity to the Greek myth in the first line of the poem: “Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance of Hades” (1). The reader has presumably read the title of the poem; he now discovers in the first line that Orpheus (introduced in the second line) is standing on a sidewalk outside Hades. The following lines introduce Orpheus himself, and reveal more about the setting: “Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind/ That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,/ Tossed the leaves of trees” (2-4). These lines contain natural imagery; the reader is shown wind, fog and trees. However, Miłosz does not let these naturalistic images stand alone. The full fourth line, into the fifth line reads, “Tossed the leaves of trees. The headlights of cars/ Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave” (4-5). The wind, fog and trees coexist with cars; the natural coexists with the modern. Not only do they share the stanza, the shift from natural to modern occurs within one line. The combination of images is not necessarily strange; it fits the description of a modern city––cars driving past Orpheus as he stands on the sidewalk, wind and fog moving through the streets, rustling the leaves of trees planted in the sidewalk. But he is in a city where there is an entrance to Hades.
The second stanza tells the reader more about what Hades might be: “He stopped at the glass-paneled door, uncertain/ Whether he was strong enough for that ultimate trial” (6-7). Hades, so it seems, has a glass-paneled door. Orpheus hesitates here; the reader perhaps has a familiar image of a man pausing for a moment with his hand on the door’s handle. The second stanza, in two lines, confirms the modern element of hell and sets up Orpheus’ hesitation.
The third and fourth stanzas give his hesitation more detail. He remembers Eurydice, as well as his struggle to trust her good opinion of him. The reader is told that lyric poets (as Orpheus is assumed to be) have “cold hearts./ It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art/ Is given in exchange for such an affliction” (10-12). While there have been “medical conditions” for the length of history, the phrase itself suggests a modern notion of medicine, one through which Orpheus understands himself. The fourth stanza reveals that “Only her love warmed him, humanized him” (13). Together, the third and fourth stanzas show the reader a glimpse of Orpheus’ consciousness. He understands himself through a somewhat modern medical view, where his ability with lyric poetry is paid for with his cold heart. Eurydice warms him, which, in the eyes of the poet, also means his humanization. Therefore, “He could not fail her now, when she was dead” (15). If she means to him both warmth and humanity, to lose her is to lose himself as well.
In the fifth stanza, Orpheus enters: “He pushed open the door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,/ Corridors, elevators. The livid light was not light but the dark of the earth” (16-17). The first line break contains a subtle move. It ends with Orpheus walking through a labyrinth, a familiar allusion to the labyrinth of the Minotaur in Greek mythology. Yet as the next line begins, the labyrinth changes. It is a corridor, nothing modern in its own right, but carrying a connotation different from that of the labyrinth. Then the reader discovers that the corridors have elevators. The bowels of Hades simultaneously contain the elements of Greek myth and modern architecture. While Orpheus navigates the underworld, the reader is told that “Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly” (18). This image is the strongest allusion to modernity, in that it suggests a relatively autonomous piece of technology: a robot. The reader can now have no doubt that Orpheus is in a modernized Hades.
The following stanzas contain less modern imagery. Orpheus walks through Hades in stanzas six through eight. In stanza nine, he meets “the rulers of that land./ Persephone, in her garden of withered pear and apple trees,/ Black, with naked branches and verrucose twigs” (37-39). While there is no specifically modern image here, the reader does discover with Orpheus a garden of dead or dying trees. This stands in contrast to Orpheus’ song in stanza ten, where he praises all kinds of beautiful things on earth, most of which are natural. The only exception is the terrace in stanza ten, line five, but even this does not seem heavily artificial. Orpheus concludes his song on the subjects “Of his having composed his words always against death/ And of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness” (50-51). The subject matter of Orpheus’ poem, with its focus on experience of the natural world, will become a crucial moment of this text.
Modern imagery does not appear throughout the rest of the poem. Orpheus receives Eurydice with the stipulation that he must not look back. In stanza thirteen, Orpheus doubts whether or not Eurydice is behind him, and he mourns “at the loss/ Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead” (75-76). He looks back in stanza fourteen: “It happened as he expected. He turned his head/ And behind him on the path was no one” (84-85). There is an ambiguous element here as to whether Eurydice was behind him at all in the first place. He does not see her at all once he turns around.
Before examining the final stanza, we should note that the modern imagery largely disappears after the fifth stanza. There is, from stanza six onward, little description of Hades’ physical appearance. Stanza six offers a more abstract view of Hades, and stanza seven gives a description of the souls in Hades. The next physical image of Hades is in stanza nine, where Miłosz describes Persephone’s garden. The physical descriptions which employ modern imagery are all found in the first five stanzas, and all describe Hades. The reader encounters a modernized Hades along with Orpheus, a Hades which sounds like a building in a modern metropolis: the entrance is a glass-paneled door, entered from a sidewalk; the inside is a labyrinth of corridors and elevators patrolled by electric dogs. The only natural image in hell is the garden introduced in stanza nine, but even this is dying or already dead.
Perhaps the reader now understands why Miłosz writes, “He was cold, aware that he was Nowhere” in stanza six (20). Orpheus has already revealed that he has a cold heart, and that his cold heart is directly associated (like a medical condition) with his gift in poetry. Only Eurydice can warm him and make him human. This is why he goes to hell; to save her, which is also to save himself. In this journey there are two points of irony. The first is that, even though his cold heart is the exchange for his poetic gift, he attempts to use the poetic gift to warm himself through Eurydice. Second, and nearly indistinguishable from the first, is the irony that in saving Eurydice, he really is attempting to save himself.
Of course, as the familiar myth goes, Orpheus fails to save Eurydice. In accordance with the irony mentioned above, Miłosz’ Orpheus fails to save both Eurydice and himself. However, Miłosz adds a further amendment to the familiar myth in his final stanza:
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth (86-90).
The Orpheus in Miłosz’ poem seems doubly disappointing––after going through Hades and failing to save Eurydice, he then falls asleep a little too quickly. The reader should be disappointed at how easily Orpheus forgets his despair over losing forever his “consoling one.” However, the journey was never really about Eurydice. In the end of the poem, the reader finds that Orpheus really only went to Hades to save himself. Orpheus had a gift in poetry in exchange for a cold heart; he wanted to be warm. He believed that Eurydice was the means of making himself warm, but he falls asleep “on the sun-warmed earth” in the end.
It is ultimately nature, not Eurydice, which keeps Orpheus warm. Orpheus’ song in stanza ten reveals a strong commitment to the beauty of the natural world, which becomes associated with being “against death” and opposed to “the praise of nothingness.” Persephone’s garden shows that Hades is a place of death through the natural image of the tree, and in stanza six, Orpheus knows that he is “Nowhere” which, given as a proper noun, may correspond to the “nothingness” of line 51. After Orpheus sings his song, Persephone says, “I don’t know… whether you loved her or not” (52). The irony in Persephone’s statement is that it reveals more about Orpheus than he is aware of. He goes to Hades to claim Eurydice but sings in praise of the natural world, something which he loves more. In the end, it is the sun’s warmth, not Eurydice, which comforts Orpheus.
At the beginning of this essay, I set forth to examine the difference in natural and modern imagery in Miłosz’ “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Although it appears only in the first five stanzas, the modern imagery is crucial in portraying Hades as an artificial place, devoid of life, where “The livid light was not light but the dark of the earth” (17). The artificiality of Hades, along with Persephone’s dead garden, stands in contrast to Orpheus’ love of nature, which manifests itself in his song, and reveals itself in the end…it is not Eurydice who keeps him warm and humanizes him, it is nature. In opposition to the “dark of the earth,” Orpheus finally falls asleep “on the sun-warmed earth” (90).
Throughout Second Space, Miłosz wrestles with a world that has lost faith: “Have we really lost faith in that other space?/Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?” (Second Space 7-8). He declares, “The beauty of nature is suspect…/ Science is concerned with depriving us of illusions” (Scientists 1-3). On the other hand, his Treatise on Theology asks, “Let reality return to our speech./ That is, meaning. Impossible without an absolute point of reference” (A Young Man 11-12). Of Mary’s appearance to the children at Lourdes he says, “What astonished these children was Your loveliness, unsayable./ As if you wished to remind them that beauty is one of the components of the world./ Which I am able to confirm” (Beautiful Lady 2-4). In these excerpts we see the tension between a faith which gives meaning and beauty an “absolute reference” and a world which has lost faith, subjecting even the beauty of nature to scrutiny.
The same theological and existential concerns permeate Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus “wept at the loss/ Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead” while “He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith” (75-76, 79). Reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “faith in faith,” Orpheus has no object in which to place his faith. The “Second Space” of Hades appears as industrial as ancient; the myth is modernized, the robotic dogs more agreeable to a scientific age than the many-headed Cerberus.
Orpheus knows there is no resurrection, even as he enters. Eurydice is gone; Orpheus goes to the underworld only to save himself. What else is there for the modern hero, condemned to a world with no point of reference, to a nature which has no resurrection? Orpheus can only sing of a natural world which exists, so long as it exists, then dies, just as he himself will die. The only thing he saves himself from, it seems, is the thought of Eurydice. He is spared the rest of life to live in love of nature, before his own demise.