"The Light of the Blue Ceiling” in the Dark Interior of the Image. Miłosz's Early Poetry

Barbara Stelmaszczyk

Uniwersytet Łódzki

Abstract

The essay deals with Miłosz's early poetic works. The author emphasises the dark tone of his images from this period, suffused with fragments of brutal events and negative associations. She emphasises that the poet's contrastive juxtapositions of beautiful and revolting (or ironical) forms in his descriptions of the world highlights the tragic destruction of harmony in it. This disharmony in young Miłosz's images seems to be a trace of his experience of evil history and times of war, whose memory gives rise to the autobiographical current in his poetry. Simultaneously, besides images dark in tone, the poet also drives towards images which are hymnic in nature, a dream to create in poetry a hymnic praise of beauty, to encapsulate in poetic art the epiphanic entirety of the world's beauty which would erase the earthly stain of transience and obscurity. The author analyses the motif of "the light of the blue ceiling" with its symbolic dimension in Miłosz's poetry and its function as the poet's inspiration and as a revelation by which artistic creation is set in motion.

Keywords:

Czesław Miłosz, poetry, poetic imagery, lyrical persona, epiphany, autothematism