On Prayer by Czesław Miłosz

First published: 1984; as “O Modlitwie,” in Nieobjęta ziemia; English translation collected in Unattainable Earth, 1986

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“On Prayer” is a short poem, twelve lines long, written in free verse. The title suggests a meditation on the nature of the act of prayer, which immediately signals the presence of a number of potential issues: the question of God’s existence, the nature of one’s relationship to God, and explorations of the ideas of faith and belief.

The poet adopts a first-person voice in this short lyric, written in the form of a direct response to a problem: “how to pray to someone who is not.” The first line, in effect, announces the problem by restating a question asked by an implied listener, here assumed to be the reader. Czesław Miłosz’s concise poem retains the immediacy of a personal response to the query, even to the point of a brief schoolmasterly aside in line 9 to make sure readers are paying attention. Without relying on the language of doctrine, Miłosz establishes his own quietly authoritative tone.

The first line raises the question of reconciling prayer, a desire for belief, with the contemporary context of disbelief or skepticism. How does one describe the act of prayer in such circumstances, and what function can it perform? Immediately, Miłosz has focused his readers’ attention on a central paradox of spiritual expression in the twentieth century.

The next four lines make up the initial stage of the speaker’s response: a description of what prayer does in his experience. The act of prayer builds a “velvet bridge,” establishes a connection, and this bridge elevates people in some sense, creating a new perspective on reality. The image—softness capable of sustaining strength—touches on both the ephemeral and the substantive nature of the act. Miłosz’s use of the simile of a “springboard” quickly following underscores this as a point of departure—an image that highlights both the act of prayer itself and his own poetic, imaginative foray into its description. The next two lines complete the idea by providing an image of this higher perspective in the form of magically transformed landscapes. It is worthwhile to note that the viewpoint remains materially focused. The image of light, traditionally indicating illumination and greater consciousness, is linked to a suspension of time and an epiphanic vision of richness and fecundity.

Line 6, beginning the second stage of the speaker’s response, provides readers with the destination of the bridge: “the shore of Reversal.” The capitalization of the noun gives the name a heightened significance, investing it with the kind of abstract quality found in allegorical representations. The formal placement of the naming appropriately marks the middle of the poem and suggests a shift in direction, an alteration in the nature of the vision or a limitation of its scope. Miłosz, by highlighting the quasi-allegorical nature of the place, suggests a complication of the simple correspondence between prayer and bridge established in the first half of the poem. Reversal implies an inversion as in a mirror or turning back in direction. The onset of abstraction immediately is linked to ambiguity of interpretation, re-creating in the poem the same limitation of verification to which all belief is subject. Miłosz takes his readers to the edge of belief but refuses to push the vision into a fixed depiction of the other.

The final section of “On Prayer” begins with the speaker’s admonition “Notice: I say we.” The scope of the explanation has moved now from abstraction to a very immediate personal relevance. The effect of reversal implicates everyone, changes the focus from the singular to the plural, and moves the altered vision back into the human sphere. With this plurality comes a consciousness of corporeal existence, a compassion and empathy with “others entangled in the flesh.” The poem embodies the process it describes: prayer being the individual means toward faith, hence incomplete in a generic sense, yet offering a validation of the endeavor on moral and imaginative grounds.

Forms and Devices

One of the most striking features of Miłosz’s exposition on the nature of prayer is his elaboration of the image of the bridge. Miłosz’s use of metonymy (the substitution of one term for another), in this case prayer and the bridge, fixes in very concrete terms an extremely intangible subject. The description admits no merely linguistic connection, but functions as an element of fact; thus, the poet maintains the materiality of the image while using it to describe an extremely abstract and metaphysical religious concept. By this means, Miłosz retains a balance between his sense of human desire (goodness) and human limitations (the existence of evil). To leave aside the material nature of humans would be to invalidate the process, to render an untrue vision.

In an early section of Unattainable Earth, Miłosz remarks, “The language of literature in the twentieth century has been steeped in unbelief. Making use of that language, I was able to show only a small bit of my believing temperament.” His use of the concrete reality to balance the metaphysical in “On Prayer” reflects this ongoing difficulty and incorporates the thematic material of the poem into its formal presentation. The deliberate simplicity of the diction and the generally proselike syntax is another way to keep his concerns firmly grounded in this world.

Another representative element of this short lyric is the studied, balanced tone. More extended lyrics in this volume give an indication of Miłosz’s tendency toward a polyphonic voice to render the rich textures and variety of experience. Even in this short lyric, however, one gets an indication of the balances created by juxtaposing images of great poetic power (the illumination, for example) and his more prosaic, earthbound, and directive tones.