Wisława Szymborska’s Synecdoches

The apothegms and lyric observations in the poetry of Wisława Szymborska have the nature of literal statements referring to the objective reality existing independently of the subject experiencing it. The literality understood in this way is a condition, and at the same time a consequence, of metaphorical transformation in numerous poems of Szymborska which use metonymy, synecdoche and antonomasia. Synecdoche, understood as part of a whole lending meaning to the whole, or the whole lending meaning to its part (according to Jerzy Ziomek) has the most prominence here – not only as a literary trope among other tropes within a poem, but also as an organizing principle of a poem as a whole, e.g. through frequent enumeration, characteristic of Szymborska. This constitutes a monistic image of the world, being a unity in plurality, in which enmity between different forms of being and territories of the world – people and animals, animals and plants, stones and thoughts, live and dead matter – is arbitrary and ideological, and – if specifically human, then in an ironic way.
 

The apothegms and lyric observations in the poetry of Wisława Szymborska have the nature of literal statements referring to the objective reality existing independently of the subject experiencing it. The literality understood in this way is a condition, and at the same time a consequence, of metaphorical transformation in numerous poems of Szymborska which use metonymy, synecdoche and antonomasia. Synecdoche, understood as part of a whole lending meaning to the whole, or the whole lending meaning to its part (according to Jerzy Ziomek) has the most prominence here – not only as a literary trope among other tropes within a poem, but also as an organizing principle of a poem as a whole, e.g. through frequent enumeration, characteristic of Szymborska. This constitutes a monistic image of the world, being a unity in plurality, in which enmity between different forms of being and territories of the world – people and animals, animals and plants, stones and thoughts, live and dead matter – is arbitrary and ideological, and – if specifically human, then in an ironic way.