SOURCE: Tapscott, Stephen, and Mariusz Przybytek. “Sky, The Sky, A Sky, Heaven, The Heavens, A Heaven, Heavens: Reading Szymborska Whole.” American Poetry Review 29, no. 4 (July 2000): 41-47.

In the following essay, Tapscott and Przybytek analyze Szymborska's Koniec i poczatek, focusing on the poetic collection's thematic structure and tensions between history and memory, limitation and signification.

“In my end is my beginning”: in the aftermath of World War II, T. S. Eliot meditates about the relations among place, collective history, memory, and identity, Placing himself in personal, historical and mystical time, throughout The Four Quartets (1940-2) Eliot finds continuity and psychic permanence in a circling, ritual sense of ends and beginnings. Historical pattern locates, reveals, and affirms personal identity through signification—my ends and my beginnings, made articulate. It's worth recalling Eliot's sense of time and history, his memorializing as an act of personal and cultural ritual, in part because...