Poetry Activity Due Tuesday December 18
Link to document: Poems by Szymborska (six poems, including "The Kindness of the Blind") The document also includes links to information on the poet and to five more poems.
Blog Activity:
Choose one of the poems (one you like for whatever reason).
Identify the poem by title in a comment. Write a short paragraph (150-200 words) that explains why you like the poem chosen. You may comment on poetic elements, on theme, on images or whatever else you notice.
10 comments:
The Power of the Breath
Wislawa Szymborska’s, “The Three Oddest Words,” is a personal favourite of mine, a poem of simplicity and power. Her repeated, “When I pronounce the word,” emphasizes the breath of the speaker and strongly accents her line-ending words, “Future,” “Silence” and “Nothing.” The poem speaks of “the first syllable” that “already belongs to the past,” something so obviously true that it delights the reader. Szymborska’s paradoxes, above all, teach us that there are truths we rarely think about: that the “Future” has arrived even as we speak a word; that our voice destroys “Silence.” She challenges us even more in the third stanza. The most important of the “Oddest Words,” is “Nothing.” She contrasts this “Nothing” with a powerful verb, “make,” then leaves you wondering, ending on “something no non-being can hold.” Reading the poem for the first time, after finding the first two stanzas delightfully amusing, the reader is engaged by a final puzzle. “When I pronounce the word,” is the opposite of non-being, and so the breath we speak is life itself. Her theme reminds us that it is the speaking voice that defines humanity and that voice is what makes humans different and is all we have between us and “Silence” and “Nothing.” Szymborska's simple, powerful words captivate me, always.
“A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth” by Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska in her poem “A little girl tugs at the tablecloth” describes a little girl’s great desire to explore inanimate things that surround her. I love this poem because it reminds me of my sons when they were little boys. They were eager to examine everything by touching, tasting and taking apart toys and home appliances. The verbs “to be helped along, shoved, shifted, taken and relocated” are carefully selected for sound and meaning to express the child’s imagination and intention to find out why they “don’t move by themselves.” The glasses, plates, creamer spoons, bowl” are personified as if they are able to tremble, roam, fly and hop. My favourite line is “Mr. Newton still has no say in this.
Let him look down from the heavens and wave his hands.”
The poet wants to say in this stanza that it is funny that the great scientist in his laws of motion didn’t mention anything about lifeless things that travel by themselves. He would be puzzled about a new discovery made by a little girl. The poem is written in a cheerful mood, and it shows us that little kids are curious, carefree and thoughtless.
197 words
The Shortness of First Love
In many people’s mind, “the first love’s most important” and “romantic,” but for Wislawa Szymborska, it is not. Szymborska’s viewpoint about first love is understandable; she thinks it is not that valuable for a person’s life. A first love is not important, instead, it is really simple and pure, it “was there and wasn’t between us,” and you don’t even recognize its existence. A first love is the one you get first experience with the feeling of love, but you have no idea how to make it beautiful. You know to write love letters but you “tied [it] with string- not even ribbon.” For Szymborska, first love is childish; it is a first experience with love, and it just “went on and went away.” You will never remember the love as others “still breathe” in your memory. First love is too light; it is just a short time which you don’t even know when it has happened. The length of a first love, is ”too short of breathe even to sigh.” -171 words
The Great Kindness of the Blind
I like the poem “The Kindness of Blind” because of its beautiful elements of nature and warm feeling. The great nature Wislawa Szymborska mentions is so beautiful that I often was touched by it, especially “the dawn, the rainbow, the clouds, neon lights, the moon” and “the fish until now so silver under water, and the hawk so silently high in the sky.” But, for binds, some of them never seen anything but dark, so how could they imagine these beauties? At the beginning of reading such a beautiful poem to a group of blinds, the speaker may not realize that. And later he or she realizes their difficulties and feels sorry but “it is too late to stop.” What surprises the speaker is the blinds “listen, smile, and clap” with their “compassion and generosity.” One of them even approaches with a book “held topsy-turvy” to ask for an “invisible autograph.” What a beautiful and warm poem! I like it very much!
First Love
Wislawa Szymborska’s First Love touches my first sight right away, because its ideas are very close to my feeling and thought that I have often mentioned in my life. I especially, empathize with her first stanza, “the first love’s most important, and very romantic, but, not my experience”. To what I and Wislawa szymborska see is the first love isn’t mature, silly and shallow, so she even mentions more in the second stanza, “something went on and went away”. In comparison, I also see as Wislawa Szymborska’s fifth stanza says, “Other loves still breathe deep inside me.” Her meaning still shows that first love isn’t important and romantic. First love is like a dream, and a flying cloud. It leaves a flimsy memory, because when looking back it wasn’t serious and deep at all to what I thought at for future. First love is an introduction to love, and it just helps to learn and compare to other loves. It is a theory which comes in a brain for a moment, and then it is cleared out, so in hers ending says, “it introduces me to breath”. Overall, this is what I feel and see in my first love’s experience like Wislawa Szymborska’s experience
“Return Baggage” by Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Return Baggage” is a sentimental philosophical reflection of visiting small children graves on the cemetery. I love this sad poem because Szymborska precisely describes the feelings that are very familiar to me. While passing by the small children’s graves at the cemetery, I always wonder: what was the reason for their unfair fate, what age they have reached before the fatal moment and what they managed to do in their short lives. Szymborska greaves about small unknown Zosia, Jacek, Dominic, Malgorzata who “prematurely stripped of the sun, the moon, the clouds, the turning season.” Her poem is full of sorrow for the children’s short life in which “they didn’t stash much in their return bags” which means that they had a very small life experience. Szymborska compares their short lives with something extremely immaterial – “a fistful of air with butterfly flitting.” We notice the sad irony in her description of the possible fatal reasons for the children’s death: ”small-scale naughtiness,’’ such as “gaily chasing the ball across the road,’’ or “the happiness of skating on thin ice.”
With understanding, we follow emotional change when from the sorrow thoughts about the fates of particular children, Szymborska turns to philosophical questions about human life. She describes the short cycle of human life as “darkness, a light bulb’s flash, then dark again?” At the last two stanzas Szymborska shows her helplessness to understand the paradox of time. The poem has written in sentimental-philosophical mood and stimulates us to think about eternal questions of life and death.
262 words
Return Baggage
Wislawa Szyborska’s poem, “Return Baggage,” triggers our pity for those children who die young, and urge the long-lived to consider having a positive attitude to life. Szymborska creates a beautiful sadness in her poem. By misfortunes, the short-lived children froze their breath before they could catch the whole view of life, reaching a doorknob, having a celebration of the first birthday or Christmas, or making some mistakes. In their short lives, their happiness is confined by their poor health. They have only “small-scale naughtiness.” In their return bags, although sights and experiences are “some scraps” and fragments that “scarcely count as plural,” there are still splendid memories filling them such as “a butterfly flitting,” “gaily chasing the ball” and “the happiness of skating on thin ice.” Even “a spoonful of bitter knowledge--the taste of medicine” is an indispensable part of their beautiful lives. Instead of lying in the bed, they lie in the graves, and their flowerlike and innocent faces are perished in darkness. The alive, seldom will we consider the death. All of us want to lengthen our lives rather than change the attitude to life. My favourite stanza is, “and what can you say about one day of life, a minute, a second: darkness, a light bulb’s flash, then dark again?” The answer is:” we must not stay same!” We will cherish life and try to catch momentary wonderfulness. We would appreciate everything we have owned such as health, and would not take it for granted and be insatiably avaricious for more in life.
Tien's comment:
In Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "Return Baggage," I see her frustration and heartache, for she writes "We, the long-lived, pass by furtively," to express her regret at not being able to help after experiencing many young children have died because of a fatal illness. I like this poem because it touchs my heart, and it makes me constantly aware about human mortality. While reading the poem, I thing about the recent study which shows the rate of cancer among children is actually increasing.It is a heartbreaking news. In the poem Wislawa examines the brevity of human life in terms of its pains rather than its pleasure___ it's a thousand pities that many babies and toddles die "before they grew to reach a doorknob." She also has many relevant and touching descriptions that are associated with pain and sorrow, for example, the children "prematurely stripped of the sun, the moon," and their life like "a light bulb's flash." The poet in fact reflects on the human condition. In the poem there is a tension between permanence and impermanence___the eternal, constant patterns of nature and human experience and impermanence of the individual life.
The Kindness of the Blind
The poem has a very interesting concept, a poet reading to the blind. All the images he creates require some vision to fully understand the beauty of them. However a good poet is able to make even a person without sight imagine the beauty, which can be more powerful than actual sight. A bird quietly soaring in the sky, and cathedral ceilings painted with saints, and silver fish swimming underwater are things that someone without sight can not see, only imagine. Poets help with their imaginations and give them things to imagine about that they normally don’t because they can’t see them. The last line of the poem was my favorite, when one of them asks for an “invisible autograph.” It was so endearing that it was important to him to have it, even thought he would never see it. Poetry is necessary to all people and for different reasons.
ABC
Wislawa Szymborska's 'ABC' poem is one that stood out to me when i was looking through all the poems. i like the wording and the creative way she incoriparated letters in to the poem to bring it all together. while i was reading this poem i almost felt like the letter were people and i think that is what she wanted to get across. the first three lines are my favorite part of the poem i think that is the strongest part of them poem that Szymborska it trying to make none human things feel human. from start to finish this poem kept my attention and intreged me like i want to know what F was expecting. over all i really enjoyed this poem and it has made me want to read more of this writters work.
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