I love when poets speak to one another in their poems and how one poet will write in response to a line or poem by another poet, sometimes speaking to each other across centuries, across languages.
I recently heard Ed Hirsch read this poem and he said he got the idea from a line in a poem by Czeslaw Milosz in which he says that the “history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”
A Partial History of My Stupidity
Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.
Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.
I couldn't relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.
The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.
I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn't have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.
Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.
I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.
So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.
Forgive me, faith, for never having any.
I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.
--Edward Hirsch
Here is that Milosz poem:
Account
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.
Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.
But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own -- but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.
The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.
--Czeslaw Milosz
(Trans. Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky)
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