From War to Acceptance: Body of Work Essay on 'Ocalenie' by Czesław Miłosz Anonymous 11th Grade

Conflicts and wars are never the solution to any problem, yet it is a worldwide concern today with many organizations working to prevent the doom of mankind. How many wars is it going to take to convince what unity and peace could bring? Having witnessed the horrors of the Word War Two, Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel Prize winning author, put his thoughts and experience into and produced the collection of poems ‘Ocalenie’, in which he addresses hardships during the war and its aftermath, power and politics, faith, remorse, survivor's guilt and death while preaching acceptance and hope for the future all throughout his poems.

Keeping war as the central theme, Milosz has talked about the destruction that it brings. In the poem, ‘A Poor Christian Looks At The Ghetto’ Milosz has depicted horrendous sights after a ghetto is demolished in the war. As the poem progresses, we see how the dead bodies are decaying and fed on by bees and ants and how the roofs and the walls all collapse in fire which engulfed everything. Later in the poem, a ‘guardian mole’, who appears to be a personification of a survivor is seen finding his way through the dead bodies. Likewise in the poem, ‘Song of a Citizen’, mass destruction of the world is depicted with...