Between Poetics and Theology: “The Second space” by Czesław Miłosz

Abstract

The artistic structure of Czesław Miłosz’s book “The Second Space” is analyzed in the context of the poet’s religious and philosophical worldview. It is argued that the dialectics of the “first” and “second space” is revealed in the book through a special “language” of analogies between the spiritual and bodily, heavenly and earthly, male and female, so the theory of Swedenborg and the ideas of Oskar Miłosz have a conceptual significance for the worldview context. The system of analogies is a symbolic “code”, in which the central role is played by the biblical story of human origin. The image of “first” space is shown through a combination of rituals and object realities. The concept of “second space” is associated with the phenomenon of light therefore the author refers to Oscar Miłosz’s hypothesis of the origin of the universe through a flash. The image of the “second space” is not wholly speculative, it has to do with the sensory – visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and gustatory. The dialectic of analogies between the earthly and the heavenly is revealed through the poetics of epiphanies, understood as “privileged moments” and destined to comprehend “essential reality”. Genre elements of prayer are connected to the concepts of “first” and “second space”, to the poetics of analogies and epiphanies. However, “prayer” poems often become a manifestation of the poet’s contradictory nature, in the consciousness of which the thesis of the necessity of the “second space” collides with doubts about its reality.