Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Wis?awa Szymborska's poem "Experiment," translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, confronts us with ethical and existential questions in the guise of a scientific experiment involving a decapitated dog's head. The poem opens like a piece of visual culture-a "short subject before the main feature"-and it is this nonchalant juxtaposition of an "interesting experiment" with the emotions elicited by the movie that follows that immediately unsettles us.

The poem describes an actual scientific experiment where a dog's head is severed from its body and then kept "alive" through artificial means. The gruesomeness of the act is conveyed with sterile language, focusing on how the "tubes dangling from the neck hooked it up to a machine." There's an almost clinical detachment in the lines that describe how the head "followed a moving flashlight with its eyes," or how its "moist nose could tell the smell of bacon from odorless oblivion."

Szymborska's primary genius lies in her ability to draw out the philosophical implications of everyday or, in this case, extraordinary occurrences. In "Experiment," she prompts us to ask: What constitutes happiness? What makes a life meaningful? It is in the closing lines, "I thought about happiness and was frightened. / For if that's all life is about, / the head / was happy," where the poem's ethical and existential queries come to a climax. If happiness is purely physiological-responsive to external stimuli like light, sound, and smell-then this detached head was "happy," for it responded to these stimuli in the same way it would have if it were attached to its body.

But is that all there is to happiness? The head is described as "convinced that it was still part of a whole," suggesting that it lacks the awareness of its severed state and the complete life it has lost. It hints at the incompleteness of a life reduced to mere sensory responses, challenging a purely physiological or materialist understanding of happiness and well-being. Moreover, the head's "happiness" comes at an unspeakable ethical cost, raising questions about the sacrifice and suffering that often underlie scientific and technological "progress."

The poem thus invites us to confront uncomfortable realities about what we, as a society, might be willing to accept in the pursuit of knowledge or the illusion of happiness. It questions the reductionism that often accompanies both scientific understanding and our modern notions of well-being. Most chillingly, it forces us to contemplate what it means to be "happy," and at what cost such happiness comes. Whether you view this poem through an ethical, existential, or philosophical lens, it is clear that Szymborska has crafted a haunting meditation on the complexities of life, happiness, and the moral implications of human endeavor.