Week #6—Sign Inventory

Reality Demands

            by Wislawa Szymborska

Narrative monologue in first person plural voice

Abstractions in “Reality,” “Life,” “Everything,” “Nothing,” “Good Humor man,” “terrifying world,” “times of crisis,” and “moral.”

Eight stanzas with lines of five/eleven/five/nine/seven/nine/three/four

Rich in place names

Specificity in landmarks and details of a location, but also in sixth stanza with Nature references

Seventeen lines of enjambment out of fifty-three.

No rhyme scheme, but similar rhythmic sounds in Borodino, Kosovo, and Jericho, Bilá Hora and Chaeronea, Verdun and Actium, Hiroshima and Maciejowice’s, battlefields and battlegrounds.

Philosophical tone

Internal rhymes in “moving” and “blooming,” “eye” and “lion,” “Everything…Nothing”; “quite nicely,” “pours” and “moored,” “stands” and “man,” “hats” and “that.”

Repetition in “going on…going on,” “Hiroshima…Hiroshima,” “those…those,” “all…all,” “flows…flows,” “a few…a few.”

Alliteration in “continues at Cannae”; “station…square”; “paint on park…Pearl…passes”; “approaching atmospheric”; “dance on their sunlit decks”; “stone still stands”; “producing many products”; “waking up worthwhile”; “grass is green”; “those we remember and those that”; “fir forests”; “gray gravel”; “crisis, you can cower”; “the wind rips hats from unwitting heads, and we.”

Assonance in “world” and “devoid”; “case” and “grass”; “tragic” and “passes”;