A Thank-You Note and The End and the Beginning Essay Example

for all these things and the fact that she is able to exist in a three-dimensional world, the credit goes to those she does not love – in a way saying that they do not upset her objective view of reality. In lines 34-35, Szymborska uses irony in her choice of words succinctly: “They don’t even know / how much they carry in their empty hands.” And finally, the poem ends with an imaginary statement form love as an answer to the poem’s first statement, that the persona owes a lot to the people she does not love because without love she owes them nothing.

It is interesting why Szymborska has chosen “A Thank-You Note” as a title for this poem. There is no question that the persona is sincere in thanking the people she does not love for not having to go through all the agony that love weights in a person’s heart. But she does not really have to thank these people because she does not even care about them, the very reason why she is happy with them. By not caring deeply for these people she is relieved of the burdens of love, and also its rewards. Szymborska depicted the other side of love – of it entailing such responsibility and burden, focusing on the sacrifices that one has to give instead of the rewards that come with it. The final irony of it all is that, love cannot help but give to the people that it owes its love to, and perhaps that is something not to be thankful for, as compared to the traditional notions of love as redeeming.

The second poem,

“The End and the Beginning”, tells what happens after a war. Szymborska describes the details that anybody who has lived during a peaceful time have taken for granted, the fact that after every war someone has to clean up all the mess, someone has to restore order, to pave the way for progress, as she writes in lines 5-17:

Someone has to shove

The rubble to the roadsides

so the carts loaded with corpses

can get by.

Someone has to trudge

through sludge and ashes,

through the sofa springs,

the shards of glass,

the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post

to prop the wall,

someone has to glaze the window,

set the door in its frame.

Intricate details of a war aftermath that is not documented in history books, with nameless faceless people left unthanked for and unthought of, as when in lines 18-21 she expresses that it takes a long time to rebuild with no interested cameras anymore as they used to be when the heat of war was on. Further, while the survivors of the war clean up and rebuild, they will need to move on and push the memory of the war to start their loves anew, and from that it becomes the beginning of forgetting that stretches to generations after, until someone has to leisurely sit back and gawk at the clouds, being so far removed from the war and its immediate consequences that has taken place ages ago.

The way Szymborska writes it, she depicts these people as having functional roles – someone has to tidy up, someone has to shove, someone has to trudge, even someone has to lie there, lending a deterministic tone to all these events, showing that for civilization

to move forward there will be work to be done and it will be done, and in the future there is bound to be someone who is oblivious to everything that has happened in the past, being consumed by his own present moment.

The title, “The End and the Beginning” captures the essence of the poem – it shows the end of war is the beginning of life, also that the beginning of destruction is the end of life. But perhaps the best thing about this title is that it has a deterministic tone also, giving rise to a sense of some unfailing hope as compared to if the title has been, “The Beginning and the End”. The title shows that for every end there is a beginning waiting at its wings, and reading the poem, I cannot help but feel that it is true.

“A Thank-You Note” and “The End and the Beginning” are similar in that Szymborska employs her sense of witty irony to develop the poems. In “A Thank-You Note” Szymborska starts out with an unexpected opening, the persona stating that she owes a lot to those she does not love and ends the poem by saying that she owes a lot because she owes them nothing, thereby giving measure to what owing them nothing actually means, what is its value, and inversely, shows the value of what love can make a person do.

The same with “The End and the Beginning”, she starts off with the seriousness of the war’s aftermath, drawing images of destruction and death, slowly building this war-torn world with images of people working and coping, and ending it with an

image of person who has no hand in getting him the peaceful life he is born in, mindlessly looking at the clouds and passing time. It is ironic in that we are fed with the weight of war and yet we find that we are this character, who has no idea what it took to be here now.

The main difference between the two poems is the scope of their subject matter – both are universal concerns, but “A Thank-You Note” is more personal and intimate whereas “The End and the Beginning” is more social in nature. Also, the former takes on a subjective tone, rendering it a human voice, using “I” as the persona. The latter, in contrast, is told through the eyes of an uninterested viewer, reporting the activities of the people through time.

Szymborska’s poems describe the realities of living – whether coping with love or war, showing the unpleasant details of each, and by doing so, ironically opens the readers’ eyes to what is beautiful beneath all that seemingly grim poetry. In the end, it is Szymborska’s masterful use of irony, both in her approach to her chosen theme and in her distinct writing style.