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Wit is an indispensable poetic means. It allows us, like in the already cited "Sto pociech" ["One hundred comforts"], to consider human nature without pomposity. It enables paradox, which Szymborska mentioned in the poem "Pod jedną gwiazdką" ["Under one star"] in the volume "Wszelki wypadek" ["Just in case"] (1972):

Speech, don't hold it against me that I borrow grandiloquent words
And then undertake the difficulty of making them seem light.

In all of this poetry, humour alleviates suffering, anxiety in the face of death, which "doesn't know a lot about jokes" (the poem "O śmierci bez przesady" ["Don't exaggerate about death"] from "Ludzie na moście" ["People on the bridge"], 1986). But she unmasks also absurdity and terror, for example in "Pierwsza fotografia Hitlera" ["Hitler's first photograph"], where "little Adolf, son of Mr and Mrs Hitler" is "booboo, angel, poppet, sunbeam" and nobody knows "where your funny little legs will take you, oh where?"

A separate group consists of works parodying defined conventions in art, such as "Kobiety Rubensa" ["Rubens's women"], "Koloratura" ["Coloratura"] from "Sól" ["Salt"] (1962), "Mozaika Bizantyjska" ["Byzantine mosaic"] from "Sto pociech" ["One hundred comforts"] and "Miniatura Średniowieczna" ["Medieval miniature"] from "Wielka liczba" ["A large number"]. They were interestingly analysed by Artur Sandauer in his study "Pogodzona z historią" ["Reconciled with history"] (1968). The poet, showing the limitations of the styles of bygone epochs, knows that her superiority is merely ostensible:

In writing my poems
I wonder
What in them and in how many years
Will appear funny.
("Pisane w hotelu") ["Written in a hotel"]

Anna Kamieńska, in her essay "Heroizm racjonalizmu" ["The heroism of rationalism"] (1974) remarked:

"Szymborska's wit incessantly balances notions and values, but dependably and wisely there ensues from this a very defined scale of values. Maybe she is trying to put these real values to the test of jokes and irony. Pure gold does not fear acid."

Kamieńska wrote that through humorous contrasts and "lightning changes of the point of view (...) this poetry in a way maintains these values in a state of life, upheaval, internal dynamism".

In 2003 there appeared the collection entitled "Rymowanki dla dużych dzieci" ["Nursery rhymes for big children"] with limericks, "fromvodkas", "betters" and other humorous verses by Wisława Szymborska. But the real treasury of wit and perverse imagination is the series of columns about books entitled "Lektury nadobowiązkowe" ["Non-required Reading"], which the poet published successively in "Życie Literackie" (1967-1981), "Pismo" (1983), "Odra" (1984-1985) and "Gazeta Wyborcza" (since 1993). These succinct reviews of books of various descriptions, from "Antologia Palatyńska" ["Palatine Anthology"] through "Vademecum turysty pieszego" ["The vademecum for tourists on foot"] to "Mały atlas róż" ["The small Atlas of roses"] are linked in many ways with Szymborska's poetry: the free mixing of inspirations from the world of science, high and popular culture, the aphoristic language, the original treatment of apparently trivial matters and the lightness concealing philosophical profundity.

Just as Szymborska's feature articles contained an enormous amount of poetry, so her poems often refer to the form of a feature article, essay or short dissertation. There is place in them for discourse and anecdote; for everything that Julian Przyboś regarded as the "descriptiveness and narrativeness" that is superfluous in poetry, which should be "cleansed to lyric poetry". It is characteristic that, in his review of the "Sól" ["Salt"] volume in 1962 in "Nowa Kultura" (no. 39), Przyboś praised Szymborska's talent but he regarded the splendid "Rozmowa z kamieniem" ["Conversation with a stone"] as one of the "least convincing" poems and counted it among "arch-feature articles rather than lyric poems". However, a few years later, when discussing the volume "Sto pociech" ["One hundred comforts"], he had a more merciful approach to the discursive and reflective poetry which, in his opinion, Szymborska had resurrected. He wrote:

"It was only Szymborska who convinced me that it is possible to revive this dead genre and that, perhaps, not only reflectiveness but also narrative quality, and not just lyricism can be the substance of contemporary poetry" ("Nowe książki" no. 5, 1968).

That which for Przyboś was a cleansing of poetry to lyric poetry for Szymborska meant a taking away of its space. She rebels against this in her poem "Trema" ["Nerves"] from the volume "Ludzie na moście" ["People on the bridge"]:

Poets and writers.
That's what they say.
So poets not writers, so who -
(...)
In prose there can be everything, even poetry,
But in poetry there can only be poetry -

In the interview granted to Krystyna Nastulanka, "Powrót do źródeł" ["Return to the sources"] ("Polityka" no. 52, 1973), Szymborska said:

A great many things interest me. If I think in terms of fable, then I write one, if I think in terms of a feature article, then I write a poem-feature. (...) It would probably be good to regain some of the territory from which poetry has retreated or from which it has been driven out."

The poet's standpoint was praised by Czesław Miłosz, writing in "Poezja jako świadomość" ["Poetry as awareness"] (1991), a text devoted to Szymborska:

"And so poetry has earned an existential meditation, which demands a break away from pure lyricism and the courage to engage in a discourse which is constantly accused of mundaneness. At the end of the last century, Asnyk used to philosophise in verse, but he is not very convincing for us today. (...) A great deal had to happen for the tools to be acquired that would allow a poet such as Szymborska to answer the challenge and the clearly felt need for an intelligent discussion about our wistful dance. Among the new and necessary seasonings are various shades of humour and irony. Szymborska delights us because she is so sharp-witted, because she takes pleasure in juggling with the props of our common heritage (e.g. when she writes about Rubens's women and the Baroque), because she has a great sense of the comic. And she probably consciously undertakes the risk of playing her magic tricks on the border between poem and essay."

What are the subjects of the existential meditation in Szymborska's works? The problem of the influence of history on the fate of the individual, so important in this poetry from the very beginning, leads to deliberations about time, memory, the temporary nature of human existence and the ensuing limitations of our perception. When our consciousness tries to overcome these limitations, there arises a conflict between immersion in life and a distancing viewpoint from outside, "from above life". In "Monolog dla Kasandry" ["A monologue for Cassandra"], the ancient prophetess talks about people without the gift of prophecy:

I loved them.
But I loved them from on high.
From above life.
From the future. Where it is always empty
And from where nothing is easier than to see death.
(...)
Look at yourself from the stars - I called -
(...)
They heard and lowered their eyes.

They lived in life.
Lined with a great wind.
Their fate sealed.
From birth in farewell bodies.
But there was in them some damp hope,
A flame savouring its own glimmer.
They knew what kind of thing a moment is,
Just one, of whatever kind
Before -

It turned out I was right.
It's just that nothing comes from this.

Distance to the world is in conflict with the desire to experience the world. Perceptiveness is the source of solitude and despair; seeing the future clearly and not being able to change it turns out to be useless. Similarly, knowledge of the past gives us only an illusory advantage over it, since "we read the letters of the dead like helpless gods" and we have to face up to the expectations of our forefathers:

The most eager look trustfully into our eyes,
Because it ensued from their reckoning that they will see perfection there. ("Lista umarłych") ["The letters of the dead"]

Meditations on time are connected with the question about the role of necessity and chance in life. Did that which happened to us "have to happen" and something else "might have happened"? We are made most clearly aware of this puzzle by the situations of danger in the titular work of the volume "Wszelki wypadek" ["Just in case"]:

It might have happened.
It had to happen
(...)
It didn't happen to you.

You survived, because you were the first.
You survived, because you were the last.
Because alone. Because people.
Because left. Because right.

We do not know why someone survived and no "as a result of, because, after all, despite" will provide an explanation. Just as we do not know why we are born "in my skin not in scales? With a face not a leaf?" ("Zdumienie") ["Amazement"], why we occupy this and no other place in the evolution of species. Consciousness constantly oscillates between that which is and that which might be. The wealth of possibilities overawes and enraptures us, at times it seems to be liberation "a reprieve from universal necessity" ("Tomasz Mann") ["Thomas Mann"] and at others it becomes torment. In "Wywiad z dzieckiem" ["An interview with a child"]:

The master rejects with distaste the absurd thought
That a table left unwatched must be a table continuously,
(...)
In order for everything, whatever exists,
To have to exist in only one way,
In a dreadful situation, for without egress from itself,
Without pause or change? In a humble from here to there?
A fly in a fly-trap? A mouse in a mouse-trap?

A child does not agree to a world which is "a forbidden possibility", it wants the reality of free transformations, the reality of dreams. In turn, the poem "Pamięć nareszcie" ["Memory at last"] shows how demeaning these metamorphoses, these other methods of existence realising themselves in dreams, can be. The female protagonist dreams about her dead parents but before they show themselves to her as they were, as she knew them, before "they shine with two lamps of faces", they take on ghostly grotesque shapes and wander around in nightmarish visions, "absurdity forces them into a masquerade". Until, "on some ordinary night":

They suddenly came to me as I had wished them
I dreamed of them as though they were free of dreams,
Obedient only to themselves and nothing else.
In the depth of the image all possibilities were extinguished,
Accidents lost their necessary shape.
Only they shone beautifully, for they were similar.

In "Wywiad z dzieckiem" ["An interview with a child"], existence "in only one way" arouses opposition. In the poem "Pamięć nareszcie" ["Memory at last"] we seek just that one necessary shape, the image of our nearest whom we have lost.

But is there some kind of superior force in the face of necessity and chance, is someone steering our destiny? Szymborska does not give any answers. We can only wonder, for example, who the narrator is in the poem "Sto pociech" ["One hundred comforts"], talking about human beings from a cosmic perspective. It is not until the collection "Koniec i początek" ["End and Beginning"] (1993) that we find a direct question about the "Boss" ("Może to wszystko" ["Maybe all this"], 1993), who, even if he does not intervene in what is going on in the laboratory of the universe, maybe sometimes looks at us? In the latest volume, "Dwukropek" ["Colon"] (2005), the poet conducts "Wywiad z Atropos" ["An interview with Atropos"]. She tries to find out:

Do you have a superior?

... Next question, please.

"So there will not be an answer from the Pair cutting the thread of life," writes Jacek Łukasiewicz.

"There is no such answer in this excellent poetic world, constructed with distance - it is accepted as an opening. (...) We live as if on moving ice-floes, but this is better than hellish order, in which 'the conditional mood rules' ('Okropny sen poety') ['The poet's horrible dream']. ("Jeden dzień w socrealizmie i inne szkice" ["One day in the life of socialist realism and other sketches"], 2006)

Szymborska's imagination moves in the conditional mood, which, as Iwona Smolka notices in the sketch "Byt ma swoją rację" ["Existence has its own reasons"]: "In the blink of an eye she moves from the world of thought to a reality that is painfully real." Artur Sandauer called Szymborska the poet of the borderland because

"The action of her poems takes places 'on the border' - between the gaze of the author and the world beyond that gaze; reality is always escaping anew in the poetry from the gaze penetrating it, it is the target towards which we are constantly reaching anew." ("Pogodzona z historią" ["Reconciled with history"], 1979).

The action takes place between life and art, between wakefulness and sleep, between the theatre stage and the wings and the auditorium, between the world of the living and the world of the dead, between the individual and the terrifying, abstract "large number"; finally, between existence and non-existence. Sandauer drew attention to the negative poetics making itself heard in these poems, for example in "Dworzec" ["Railway station"], where an event is described which did not in fact take place:

My non-arrival in the town of N.
Took place punctually.

I had forewarned you
In an unsent letter.

You managed not to come
At the appointed hour.

The critic, in comparing the role of negative poetics in Szymborska's work to that applied by Mallarmé, Valéry, Rilke and Leśmian, wrote that

"In their work reality succumbs to liquidation or erasure; in Szymborska's it retains its own rights and its precise description is teeming with terms from reports, such as 'punctually', 'appointed', 'forewarned' etc. The dry tone, however, contains a shy yearning for a miracle, a desire for something unpredictable to happen, in whose possibility no one believes. Leśmian shows the miracle which he realises in his imagination; Szymborska shows the miracle which cannot be realised even in the imagination." ("Pogodzona z historią" ["Reconciled with history"])

For Szymborska, a human being lives:

Laid open
To his own absence
From all sides
At every moment.
("Urodzony") ["Born"]

And after death he is laid open to his absence from human memory because:

History rounds skeletons off to zero.
A thousand and one is still a thousand.
The one, as if he had never been.
("Obóz głodowy pod Jasłem") ["Hunger camp at Jasło"]

The poet does not agree to such a vision of history which operates exclusively with "A large number" and ignores individual beings. She looks at the fate of the overlooked, slighted by the well-worn hierarchies of importance. In her poem "Pieta" ["Pieta"] she talks not about a killed hero but about his mother, patiently receiving in her home another group of inquisitive tourists. Szymborska treats with the same vigilance cases that are apparently trivial or dull, not included in any of the canons of history, but after all - as we read in the poem "Może być bez tytułu" ["It can be untitled"] - "Even a fleeting moment has a rich past". The gaze of the poet is directed where the teacher of history still does not sense anything and "yawns over his exercise-books" ("Pierwsza fotografia Hitlera" ["Hitler's first photograph"]). There is no binding division into private and universal: the prehistory of feeling in "Miłość od pierwszego wrażenia" ["Love at first sight"] is just as important as the discovery of seven ancient cities ("Spis ludności" ["Census"]).

Tadeusz Nyczek writes descriptively that

"Not only the past but also the present appears to Szymborska as a Great Cheese, in which there are more holes than edible matter; in these holes there is everything that is overlooked, omitted, forgotten" (the sketch "Nieogarnione" ["Unembraced"] in the volume "Radość czytania Szymborskiej" ["The joy of reading Szymborska"], 1996).

The poet sees existence, however, as a temporary "stay outside of eternity" ("Wersja wydarzeń" ["A version of events"]), "a shimmering river which flows out of darkness and in darkness disappears" ("Krótkie życie naszych przodków" ["The short life of our ancestors"]). A human being has too little time to embrace the mass of phenomena; crushed by the surfeit of the world, he is at the same time frightened of the void. "I won't have time to distinguish everything from the void," writes Szymborska in the poem "Urodziny" ["Birthday"]. And she is still amazed that,

Nothingness changed radically also for me.
It really turned itself inside out.
Where have I found myself -
From top to toe among the planets,
Not even remembering what it was like not to be.
"Nicość") ["Nothingness"]

The amazement at the fact that one is alive and at the form in which one exists in large measure stems from a confrontation with the world of nature. On the one hand we feel kinship with other beings, because "the same star keeps us within reach" and "we cast shadows by the same rights" ("Milczenie rośłin" ["The silence of plants"]) but on the other hand we are divided by an impassable otherness. Human disquiet, the desire for contact and dialogue comes up against the indifference of nature (this does not fully refer to animals - Małgorzata Baranowska writes about their role in Szymborska's work in her essay "Poezja istnienia" ["The poetry of existence"]. Awareness in Szymborska, to cite Sandauer once again, is

"inclined outside herself - to the exterior - towards the object. Hence all perceptions are an attempt to identify with the perceived thing. To see a rose is - to want to be a rose. To see a stone is - to try to enter the stone." ("Pogodzona z historią" ["Reconciled with history"], 1979)

But even the language itself, its metaphors and construction, which allow us to think about "a conversation with a stone", turn out at the same time to be misleading:

I knock on the stone's door.
It's me, let me in.

I have no door, says the stone.

Nature offers resistance to understanding but inter-personal relations are also problematical. The poem "Pokój samobójcy" ["The suicide's room"], like "Rozmowa z kamieniem" ["A conversation with a stone"], undertakes the theme of otherness, to which there is no access - here it is the different nature of another person and his secret:

You probably think the room was empty.
But there were three chairs with strong backrests.
There a good lamp against the darkness.
(...) You think there were no books, pictures, records?
(...)
You think that at least a letter explained something.
But if I tell you there was no letter -
And so many of us, friends, and all fitted
Into the empty envelope leaning against a glass.

"Pokój samobójcy" ["A suicide's room"] perhaps most forcefully show the brittleness, the unreliability of human bonds which Szymborska writes about in her love poems. It is significant how many of them describe parting - from the famous lyric poem "Na wieży Babel" ["On the Tower of Babel"] to "Cień" ["Shadow"], which is stylised to be vulgar. Ironic stylisation is a frequently used device in these poems - and again: it relieves the pathos and helps to distance pain. The poet dresses emotions in the costume of farce ("Buffo"), compares the history of lovers to a bourgeois drama ("Bez tytułu" ["Untitled"]) and breaks through sentimentalisation by intentionally exaggerating it. In the beautiful erotic poem "Jestem za blisko, żeby mu się śnić" ("I am too close to be in his dreams"), irony gives way to melancholy, a hushed tale about the feeling of limitation and separation that is brought by a love that would seem to be fulfilled. In other places the harmony is disturbed by the awareness of transience or it is broken by death. In the poem "Sen" ["Dream"] from the volume "Sól" ["Salt"], the female protagonist is visited in her dreams by her dead lover; here there appears an elegiac tone, which is very powerful in the first, youthful and later works by Szymborska.

Here is a fragment of "Pożegnanie widoku" ["Farewell to a view"] from "Koniec i początek" ["End and beginning"]:

I take note of the fact -
As if you were still alive -
That the shore of a certain lake
Has remained as beautiful as it was.
(...)
One thing I do not agree to.
To my portrait there.
(...)
I survived you to this extent
And only to this,
To be able to think from afar.

How to cope with the death of someone close, with the passing of others and of yourself, with the knowledge that:

I have a single body, not alternate with anything,
I am a one-time being to the marrow in my bones
("Próba") ["Attempt"]

In "Radość pisania" ["The joy of writing"] the salvation is provided by "the possibility of preserving - the revenge of the mortal hand". A similar praising of art can be found in the poem "Ludzie na moście" ["People on the bridge"]. But can anything really be preserved, can we make "time stumble and fall"? "Autotomia" ["Autotomy"], a poem dedicated to the memory of Halina Poświatowska, seems to doubt it:

When in danger, the sea cucumber divides in two:
One self she gives away for the world to eat,
With the other self she escapes.

She falls suddenly apart into death and rescue,
Into fine and reward, into what was and what will be.
(...)
We can divide, it's true, we also can.
But only into body and unfinished whisper.
Into body and poetry.

On one side the body, on the other laughter,
Light and swiftly silent.

According to Czesław Miłosz, "Autotomia" ["Autotomy"] questions the maxim ars longa, vita brevis, the conviction about the longevity of art:

"In Szymborska's poetry, we divide ourselves not into body and surviving work but into body and unfinished whisper, poetry is no more than an unfinished whisper, laughter that swiftly falls silent." ("Świadectwo poezji", 1990 ["The testimony of poetry"])

Despite everything, the poet seems to believe in the strength of this whisper. Maybe, paradoxically, it is precisely in this form that art has the chance to endure? In the end, this remains a puzzle. In the poem "Niektórzy lubią poezję" ["Some people like poetry"], to the question ' "what is art?", the author, faithful to her scepticism, replies: "I don't know and I will cling to that like to a saving handrail". Saving, because not only is it the source of her creative disquiet but it also defends her from despair.

The attitude of Wisława Szymborska, her approach to writing and to life, is well illustrated by her Nobel Lecture, "The Poet and the World", delivered by her on 7 December 1996. She said in it:

"I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I imagine, for example, in all my audacity, that I have the opportunity to chat with Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavours. I would bow very low before him, because he is, after all, one of the most important poets, for me at least. Then, I would grab his hand. ' "There's nothing new under the sun", that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem which you created is also new under the sun, because no-one had written it before you did. (...) And Ecclesiastes, I would also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you are planning to write now? Something which will complement your thoughts, or maybe you are tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier poem you mentioned also joy - so what if it is fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? (...) I do not suppose you will say, "I have written everything, I have nothing more to add." There is no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself."

Author: Krystyna Dąbrowska, December 2007, English translation: © Tadeusz Z. Wolański