Opposition essay - Szymborska

Opposition poetry analysis - Wislaw Szymborska: Theatre Impressions (1972)

The story portrayed by Wislawa Szymborska in the poem Theatre impression is about the ending of a theatre play, one about presumably war due to the fact she said the scene was a battleground. She might have written about war due to the time it was written and knowing what she has gone through in her earlier years. The story is quite depressing and horrific. "Taking nooses from lifeless necks" "Chopped-off head." "removing knives". The title and the first line saying "act is the sixth" makes it clear it is about a theatre play. She turns the acted out horror into what really happened, which she does when describing the actors come back on stage, the ones who just died on the battleground on stage.

Szymborska uses a sophisticated language, and a dramatic and amazed tone. After the first line, she makes the reader perceive the battlefield as real, until the last line of the first stanza, where she turns back to theatre. In the second stanza we see a similar pattern. While the first line of the second stanza is again about the stage and the actors, the rest of the stanza is realistically about a battlefield and death. There are multiple enjambments. She does not seem to care much about full stops after every line or the structure of the stops. the stanza lengths are 7 4 4 3 7 7. We see similar stanza lengths, but there is no pattern. The importance and the focus of the poem lies within the words and the story she tells, not the structure of her writing. The central opposition of this poem is real and fake. This is because the whole poem is centered around the idea of acting out death which is perceived as death by the audience while seconds or minutes later they are back on stage alive. The poem builds up from perceiving the characters played out having died, to seeing the cast who is acting out the characters alive, which can mess with the story told by the play and break the realism of the acting.

The beginning of the poem focussed on the dead and on the characters, not the cast. Szymborska wrote it so that in the first 2 stanzas it is not sure what her meaning and idea is. It is like Szymborska herself still believes that the characters are dead. Like she is puzzled of why the dead are back alive. We can see in the lines "[...] lining up among the living to face the audience." that she is talking about the men who died on stage, and whom are now back up and facing the audience. Szymborska tells it as if it breaks the story of the play for her. She finds this the most important act which we know from the first line "For me the tragedy's most important act is the sixth:" Because multiple of the main characters have died in a gruesome way, for them to walk again, but as actors, not the character they are acting out, it can break the story and the death of the characters. The importance is that she changes from seeing them as characters in a story to people acting on a stage.

After the first stanza it becomes more clear what her purpose is of the poem. She now describes her realisation of the characters. When she says "The miraculous return of all those lost without a trace." Shows her change from believing their death to realising it is just a play. For Szymborska it possibly could break the story to see them alive again. "Moves me more than all the tragedy's tirades.", for her the idea of the characters coming back on stage is more interesting than the characters tragedy's tirades, which is the moment after the violent deaths.

She has now built up to the full change from believing in the tragedies, to analysing the stage and the cast around her. She goes from fake to real, which is the central opposition. She described the moment before the curtains are fully closed. Many actors in this short moment get ready to walk off or grab their props and leave, which the audience can see. Szymborska saw this, and found that it broke the realistic feeling of the play. It brings you to the realisation that this is a production with people that are not in the war, but are acting it out. She finds this moment the most uplifting part, as she described in the first line of the last stanza.