Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Wislawa Szymborska's "A Film From the Sixties," the poet grapples with existential despair, questioning the purpose and meaning of life through the lens of a disenchanted adult male. The poem functions as a microcosm of the broader disillusionment that pervaded the era, marked by social upheaval, political turbulence, and deep-rooted skepticism. Szymborska lays bare the dissonance between individual experience and the vastness of time and space, exploring the chasm that often separates our private lives from the external world.

The poem starts with a litany of statistics, "This adult male. This person on earth. / Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood / pumped by ten ounces of heart." These quantifications serve to undermine the uniqueness of the human experience, reducing the complexities of life to mere numbers. The poem emphasizes the evolutionary journey it took for this individual to exist, underscoring how trivial human life can appear when measured against geological time: "This object took three billion years to emerge."

As the poem progresses, it focuses on the transition from childhood to adulthood, lamenting the loss of innocence and the accumulation of disappointments and disillusionments. Szymborska poignantly asks, "Where is that boy. Where are those knees. / The little boy got big. Those were the days." The knees symbolize comfort, perhaps a maternal figure, now lost. The male protagonist is disconnected, not only from his own past but also from the world around him, indicated by the lines, "He has nothing in common with the world. / He feels like a handle broken off a jug."

Despite this existential malaise, the poem acknowledges that life goes on, indifferent to individual suffering: "The house gets built. The doorknob has been carved. / The tree is grafted. The circus will go on." The "whole won't go to pieces, although it's made of them." This segment reflects a deep-seated pessimism combined with reluctant acceptance.

The Latin phrase "sunt lacrimae rerum," roughly translating to "there are tears for things," encapsulates the essence of the poem-the underlying sorrow in existence. But Szymborska suggests that this universal lament is just "background, incidental," because within the protagonist, "there's awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy." It is a private despair that remains locked away, unacknowledged by the larger world, which proceeds unaffected by individual turmoil.

The poem closes with an appeal to the "God of humor," a likely ironic invocation given the somber themes of the poem. It's a cry for divine intervention in a world that appears to have abandoned not just the protagonist but humanity in general.

In "A Film From the Sixties," Szymborska presents a multi-layered exploration of existential despair and the complexities of human existence. With evocative imagery and nuanced emotions, she captures the zeitgeist of an era, making it an everlasting testament to the challenges of grappling with one's place in the world.

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