Reflection
Human reason is beautiful and invincible . No bars , no barbed wire , no pulping of books , No sentence of banishment can prevail against it . It establishes the universal ideas in language , And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters , lie and oppression with small . It puts what should be above things as they are , Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope . It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master , Giving us the estate of the world to manage . It saves austere and transparent phrases From the filthy discord of tortured words . It says that everything is new under the sun , Opens the congealed fist of the past . Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia And poetry , her ally in the service of the good . As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth , The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo . Their friendship will be glorious , their time has no limit . Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction .
Czeslaw Milosz , widely considered one of the greatest contemporary Polish poets , was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 .
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