Here's Milosz's poem "Merchants".
"In the town where miracle"-- this guy
wrote this in his 90s--
"In a town where a miracle occurred,
merchants install their booths side
by side along a street through which pilgrims proceed.
They display their goods wondering
at the stupidity which compels people
to buy little crosses, tiny medals, rosaries, even
plastic bottles in the shape of the Madonna
for preservation of the healing water.
The sick on their stretchers, the paralyzed
in their wheelchairs, fortified virgins,
in their disdainful belief that religion is self-consolation
based on the understandable need for any kind of rescue.
They rub their hands."
I think that couplet is amazing.
"They rub their hands, reckon, add into their inventory
new supplies of crucifixes or nickel coins
imprinted with the effigies of popes.
The pilgrims, looking into their faces onto
which have crept scarcely noticeable smiles"--
looking into the faces of the merchants--
"feel threatened in their faith, just as children
feel threatened by grown-ups, keepers of a secret guessed at,
but still vague."
So here, this poem is about faith.
And that's part of the good news that I've
been bringing to you or the problematic problem
that I'm talking about.
I find this most astonishing is that this writer manages
to simultaneously point out the precariousness of both
the position of the believers and the position
of the non-believers.
To suggest that anxiety, not truth,
may be the underlying source for their distinct beliefs.
Anxiety may be what is animating the religious seekers
in their belief in God and in a miracle.
And anxiety may be the source for the cynicism
of the merchant.
And yet, the poem shows all of these humans
with compassion and insight.
He doesn't resolve the scene or the human condition for us.
If anything, you might say that he
tilts the balance slightly towards the merchants
is where he ends up.
But he poses it with astonishing precision,
and delicacy, and deliberateness.
He shows us the situation, which is
the-- he shows us the situation in a very particular context,
which is the originating source for so much history
and culture, the wars that are going on right now.
That is a great, great model for what poetry and a poet
can aspire to.
And if you want to look at some of the beautiful delicacies
of the poem, you can consider the word fortify
in that couplet.
And that amazing sentence, the sick on their stretchers,
the paralyzed in their wheelchairs
fortify the merchants-- look how many twists and turns
his sentence takes-- in their disdainful belief.
In their belief.
They have a belief too, a disdainful belief.
They're not really set up as noble models.
Their religion is self-consolation.
But it's based on the understandable.
It's a completely understandable self-consolation,
understandable need for any kind of rescue.
So there's such a complex balance
of contempts and sympathies here, all articulated
in two sentences.
This is what somebody who really knows language, and knows
the world, and has spent a lifetime sort of striving
to be able to formulate its complex pithy ways
and ways that are so intact.
He talks about hierarchies.
And he's set up a very complex system of checks and balances
here, which is full of interesting and not
simplistic or reductive hierarchies.
So tonal complexity is a way that poetry possibly
can be adequate to represent an experience in the world.
And that's my good news.
And so that's it.
That's it.
And so now we can open the --
[APPLAUSE]