SOURCE: Blazina, John. “Szymborska's Two Monkeys: The Stammering Poet and the Chain of Signs.” Modern Language Review 96, no. 1 (January 2001): 130-39.

In the following essay, Blazina explicates Szymborska's poem “Bruegel's Two Monkeys,” considering the work's imagery, irony, use of language, and theme of “an identity of opposites.”

Like the hero of folktales, the speaker of ‘Bruegel's Two Monkeys’, by Wisława Szymborska, is confronted by a test, an interrogation. She is taking her graduation exam, experiencing a rite of passage marking the transition from schooling to life, and she is failing. She stammers and falls silent when asked about the history of humanity. Answering a question or writing a poem about human history, in Poland after Auschwitz, cannot be easy. What is there to say if she can no longer parrot the party line of progress toward utopia? But help is at hand. As so often in folk tales...