Made numb and nihilistic by his bloody century, Różewicz was as tempted by silence as his great inspiration, Samuel Beckett.
Like Beckett, he relied on a set of vestigial but hardy lungs to cough out his art. He was like the drowning man in Dulce et Decorum Est: He plunged at you, guttering.
This would have to be anti-poetry, since beauty and meaning and compassion were lies, jokes, traps. So a lot of his poems are like this one, which is just an elaborate shield against the onslaught of verse, against the ever-present, degrading temptation toward higher things, toward – as with the philosopher’s stone – the possibility of transforming shit into diamonds.
we need to put
this poem to sleep
before it starts
philosophizing
before it starts
fishing
for compliments
called to life
in a moment of forgetting
sensitive to words
glances
it looks to
a philosopher’s
stone for help
o passerby hasten your step
do not lift up the stone
there a blank verse
naked
turns
to ashes
********************
Puts one in mind of the Yeats lines:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Yet Yeats spent all his years futzing with metaphysical solutions, while Różewicz was always Beckettian, always disgusted by life-blandishments. Poetry of his sort risks – as Beckett risked – redundancy, since the variety and intensity of simple natural life —
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights…
— isn’t available. What’s available are the stripped hard edges of unredeemed actuality. As Jaroslaw Anders points out, Różewicz tried for a sort of Camusian humanism:
Rozewicz’s humanism, his attempt to find a counterbalance to pessimism in “commonplace feelings,” is often strained and unconvincing. It is clear that he does not really like his heroes, or his heroines, of gray existence. He seems to realize that “eat and give birth” is hardly a moral program. It is interesting to observe how Rozewicz tries to resolve the metaphysical implications of his pessimistic vision. In some poems, he seems to come close to nihilism. In “Unde malum?” he calls human existence a “work-related/accident/of nature/an error.”
His poetry is a principled archive of the phobic distrustful forms of being generated by atrocity.