Life & Wisdom Quote by Wislawa Szymborska

She apologizes to language the way a stage magician apologizes to the audience: not for the trick, but for how expertly it will be disguised. Szymborska’s “O speech” is mock-ceremonial, almost Biblical in its address, then immediately undercut by the sly admission that she’ll “borrow weighty words” only to make them “seem light.” That tension is the engine of her style. She traffics in big subjects - history, death, ethics, love - yet refuses the costume of Great Poetry that demands solemnity at all costs.

The key verb is “borrow.” These “weighty words” aren’t owned; they’re inherited, circulating, already freighted with ideology, trauma, and tradition. A poet, in this view, is a careful thief: taking language that arrives preloaded, then rebalancing it so it can move again. “Try hard” adds a wink of craft humility. Lightness isn’t ignorance or levity; it’s labor. Making gravity readable, even airy, is a technical achievement and an ethical stance.

There’s subtexted suspicion of rhetorical grandstanding. After the 20th century’s propaganda machines and moral catastrophes - Szymborska lived through war and authoritarianism - “weighty words” can feel contaminated by certainty. Her solution isn’t to abandon them, but to detox them through wit, compression, and understatement. She asks speech not to take offense because she’s about to do what her poems often do: smuggle the unbearable into the familiar, so the reader lowers their defenses and then feels the full force a beat later.