Saved or Depraved? Czesław Miłosz: On Salvation

Abstract

The article is an interpretation of Czesław Miłosz's poem On Salvation. The basic observation on the level of text analysis is concerned with the phenomenon of its ambiguity. It is discussed both in the semantic and in the strictly artistic order, that is in the order of poetic language. Miłosz's poems and essays, in which the problem of the existential quality of “depravation” appears, the tradition of Japanese Zen poetry, and Adam Mickiewicz's Zdania i uwagi (Opinions and Remarks) are a historical-literary context referred to in the article. The center of the meaning of the poem is identified in the article not with the questions of faith or lack thereof, but with the question about man's cognitive possibilities, about the limitations of imagination confronted with the problem of salvation.