The first paragraph captures the feeling of the importance of day to day events that are not recorded in history books. Sitting under a tree beside a river is not the kind of thing recorded in history books alongside noteworthy events like tyrannicides. There is a sensibility here, which is stated more explicitly in the last stanza. It is the feeling that the “unimportant” might be as important as the “important.” This feeling appeals to me in how it makes all moments charged with meaning and significance though they be moments that are overlooked in history. I share this sensibility with Szymborska and will attempt in this paper to tease it out as she expresses it, argues for it and seeks to evoke it in her poem, No title required.
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She pictures the landscape as a tapestry and sees even the ants stitching in the grass as significant in the marking of the whole. History seen as a tapestry necessitates the valuing of all of its constituent parts just as a tapestry is a product of the interweaving of the small in various combinations. In the same way, each moment however insignificant gains significance by its relation to the whole. Even those moments in history that are not highlighted and rehearsed in the retelling of it in history books are significant in the making of the whole. This is the same feeling that she evokes by her attention to details in her surroundings, details which observes and calls out, details being the things of which the whole surrounding is comprised. In the fifth stanza she explicitly makes mention of “details” in the lines, “though nothing much is going on nearby, the world is no poorer in details for that.” This statement to the effect that details are the wealth of which the world is made of brings out this argument of the small gaining their significance by their relation to the whole, indeed by comprising the whole. With such a view, one gets the feeling that nothing is really small and unimportant, given its relation to the whole. It is a feeling that makes you want to be alert, to observe, to not let things pass, to draw out from the details. It’s almost a call to feel everything, to consider it all, to not let it all pass unnoticed though which is how history as it is recorded will likely treat
She pictures the landscape as a tapestry and sees even the ants stitching in the grass as significant in the marking of the whole. History seen as a tapestry necessitates the valuing of all of its constituent parts just as a tapestry is a product of the interweaving of the small in various combinations. In the same way, each moment however insignificant gains significance by its relation to the whole. Even those moments in history that are not highlighted and rehearsed in the retelling of it in history books are significant in the making of the whole. This is the same feeling that she evokes by her attention to details in her surroundings, details which observes and calls out, details being the things of which the whole surrounding is comprised. In the fifth stanza she explicitly makes mention of “details” in the lines, “though nothing much is going on nearby, the world is no poorer in details for that.” This statement to the effect that details are the wealth of which the world is made of brings out this argument of the small gaining their significance by their relation to the whole, indeed by comprising the whole. With such a view, one gets the feeling that nothing is really small and unimportant, given its relation to the whole. It is a feeling that makes you want to be alert, to observe, to not let things pass, to draw out from the details. It’s almost a call to feel everything, to consider it all, to not let it all pass unnoticed though which is how history as it is recorded will likely treat