“Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski

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“Try to Praise the Mutilated World” (2002) by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski resonates with his characteristic themes of night; dreams; history and time; infinity and eternity; silence and death. By facing the world’s sorrow with clear eyes, yet turning again and again to sources of solace and beauty, this poem teaches us how to recover our broken hearts from life’s hard truths. The poem opens:

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

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In this overture we are immediately saddled with the reality that the world is “mutilated,” yet worthy of praise. The lines that follow illustrate what is easy to praise, inducting the reader into the practice of positive affirmation. However, the line between pleasure and sorrow is quickly complicated with the sad yet enchanting tableaux of nettles overgrowing “abandoned homesteads of exiles.”

The rest of the poem consists of three parts, which repeat this pattern in increasingly beautiful and tragic conflations of imagery. The following lines continue to highlight themes of exile and home, ease and torment:

You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

Adam Zagajewski
(Credit: poetryfoundation.org)

We are all born to different life paths dictated by time, place, race, affluence, ability and the rest. Some people have the potential to sail smoothly through life in well-fortified vessels with every resource at their fingertips, while others are fated to “go nowhere,” surrounded on all sides by an ocean of  “executioners singing joyfully.” Because life is not fair, nor are any of us entitled to comfort, we “must” praise the mutilated world as a means of coming to terms with reality. The alternative is salty oblivion, should we allow ourselves to become paralyzed by the suffering we witness when we truly open or eyes. The suffering and beauty are intertwined, inextricable and intrinsic to understanding the human condition.

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Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

A soft feather is an indicator of loss as much as it is the thread that weaves the sky and earth into a single masterpiece. So too is the “gentle light” that returns us to the will to go on. Though we lose the thread, it finds us again with a life-giving song of praise on our lips.