A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth

"Branch Library" by Edward Hirsch (2005)

This short poem practices extended anthropomorphism through a sly speaker who uses an external perspective to suggest his interior mood. What appears as a superficially simple, playful, almost folktale-like narrative thinly covers absence and loss, uncertainty, and longing.

"At the Galleria Shopping Mall" by Tony Hoagland (2009)

Tony Hoagland documents another child’s very different experiment as she enacts her entry into American consumer culture. Hoagland invokes the witness of higher powers as well, using a speaker with a sense of history and irony. In this case, the narrative voice conveys even more certainty about the eventual outcome.

"Ars Poetica?" by Czesław Miłosz (1968)

This poem from Szymborska’s friend and once mentor, Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, proposes that poetry functions as a reminder of “how difficult it is to remain just one person” (Line 30), evoking Szymborska’s experiments with subjectivity. “[I]nvisible guests” (Line 32), readers, speakers, subjects, the spirits populating poetry, come to use the poet and inhabit his space. In the final stanza, Miłosz’s speaker wryly comments that poetry should only be written rarely (Szymborska reportedly wrote fewer than 400 poems in her lifetime), and only “under unbearable duress” (Line 35), and preferably when the forces of good intervene, and not the other kind.