Incantation and A Word on Statistics

Who are we? What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to be human? These questions, asked since the beginning of time, speak to the universal difficulty we have in understanding our nature and purpose in this world. Luckily for us, we have also developed a perfect medium for exploring this historic dilemma: poetry. Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska deftly took on this challenging exploration in their poems “Incantation” and “A Word on Statistics,” respectively. Interestingly enough, they reach similar, but not identical, conclusions because the former is much more optimistic.

In “Incantation,” Milosz utilizes the language of an idealized manifestation of human reason, not because it is true in his present reality, but because he believes it has the mystical potential to be truly “good”. This becomes apparent right from the opening two sentences of the poem as Milosz that “Human reason is beautiful and invincible. / No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, / No sentence of banishment can prevail against it” (1-3). Immediately, the reader sees that he holds a high view of human reason and that he believes it to be above any person’s attempts at subduing or stifling it. We know this to be untrue, however, because our history is marred by instances of oppression overpowering reason and morality. For instance, this is readily apparent when one considers the Nazi book burnings. Additionally, in class we learned that the Soviet Union and it’s brand of communism was a frequent target of criticism by Milosz because he perceived it to be an affront to human reason.

The next sentence introduces the next key component of my understanding of this poem. Here, Milosz says that human reason “establishes the universal ideas in l...

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...lieve this will be true someday. Reason, aided by poetry and philosophy, will bring enlightenment, we just need to learn how to accept it. Szymborska foresees no such future. She has reached the conclusion that to be human is to be incomplete, and in general, that is okay. After all, we’re all worthy of empathy, and the beauty of our nature is that it is unpredictable. It seems to me that in her view, humans are not completely doomed as long as some of us, no matter how few, are redeemable in some sense, and it seems that most of us are. So yes, we are fragile, and yes, we can be awful. Still, we’re all “Mortal: / one hundred out of one hundred-- / a figure that has never varied yet” (46-48). In that final sense, we are all equal, and in the end, does it matter how we get there?

Works Cited

Incantation- Czeslaw Milosz

A Word on Statistics- Wislawa Szymborska