The End and the Beginning

Szymborska subverts the standard conventions of war poetry—a genre that primarily focuses on the immediate violence of armed combat—by placing “The End” before “the Beginning” in the title of the poem. Szymborska uses this juxtaposition to emphasize the effects, or aftermath, of the war, suggesting from the onset of the piece that the ramifications of war are much more concerning than the physical conflict itself. The first two lines of “The End and the Beginning” state that: “After the war / someone has to clean up,” situating readers in a future “after” the direct combat has ended (Lines 1-2). However, “the Beginning” marks a period of post-war reconstruction and healing in which the resultant devastation must be reckoned with. Szymborska expands the poetic discourse of war poetry to include the lasting impacts of violent, human conflict, revealing that the process of rebuilding a war-torn community is just as traumatic as the war itself.

The speaker of “The End and the Beginning” bears witness to the recovery efforts of the affected community, sarcastically acknowledging that “things won’t / straighten themselves up, after all” (Lines 3-4). Szymborska characterizes the members of this unspecified region as commonplace through her repeated descriptions of physical labor. The speaker observes that: “someone has to push the rubble / to the side of the road” (Lines 5-6) and “get mired / in scum and ashes” (Lines 9-10). Later, she states:

[someone] has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door (Lines 14-17).

Typically, the types of jobs described here (and the diction used) signal low pay, reduced educational requirements, manual labor, and a general “othering.” Szymborska uses these connotations however to underscore just how routine and commonplace reconstruction is in the lives of everyman individuals affected by war. Not only must individuals endure war, but they must also return to work afterward and even work to pick up the pieces after the fighting ends, reconstructing public life long after the last shot is fired (Line 2). Szymborska’s illustrations of manual labor tasks, all of which appear one right after the other, inundating readers with new and worsening problems from line to line, stanza to stanza, also help to highlight the routine, businesslike nature of life after war.

Post-war reconstruction efforts require emotional labor and fortitude as well as just manual labor. In Stanza 3, Szymborska evokes the image of a home by listing items like “sofa springs” and “splintered glass” as notable parts of the wreckage (Lines 11-12). The inclusion of the “sofa springs” reveals that the decimated walls and windows were not merely shelters but homes: places of comfort in which their residents once relaxed before they were destroyed (Line 11). Szymborska’s ironic tone, reinforced by her repeated use of the phrase “someone has to,” creates an emotional distance between the physical act of rebuilding a community, and the intense personal loss the members of that community face as they reckon with the lasting damage done to their intimate, domestic lives (Line 14). Szymborska argues that this intense, emotional trauma lasts longer and cuts deeper than any physical altercations of war because trauma does not have a clear start or end point.

In the subsequent stanzas, Szymborska continues to use the language of the home to demystify the experience of war. The speaker talks about rebuilding a community from the ground up as if it is a household chore: things need to be “straighten[ed] up” (Line 4), “sleeves will go ragged / from rolling them up” so often to scrub and clean and reconstruct the community (Lines 24-25). Szymborska does not glorify war as an act of bravery; instead, she designates it as the cause of moroseness and fatigue. The aftermath of war is a chore: dull and laborious and seemingly unending as the poem stretches across 10 stanzas (47 lines in total). Szymborska focuses on the domesticity of war to make the experience more accessible (and therefore more frightening) to her audience. The battlefields and gunpowder of traditional war poetry are replaced by “sofa springs” (Line 11) and “garbage pile[s]” (Line 36), emphasizing the startling reality of failing infrastructure through these out of place, everyday items.

Stanza 5 stands apart, both in content and tone, from the rest of the poem: The speaker introduces the news media as yet another harmful consequence of war. The introduction of this new subject is sudden, and Szymborska uses inversion, or the syntactic reversal of the normal order of words and phrases in a sentence, to further disorient readers, stating that: “Photogenic it’s not” (Line 18). This literary technique forces readers to reconstruct Line 18, mentally rearranging the sentence so the adjective, “[not] photogenic,” describes the subject of war (Line 18). These mental gymnastics are chaotic, counter to what readers expect of a traditional sentence, and mimic the emotions of the affected populace in the poem.

The speaker is significantly more detached and sardonic in Stanza 5, stating that: “all of the cameras have left / for another war” just as soon as they arrive (Lines 20-21). The news media capitalizes on the public fascination with violence, exploiting large-scale trauma and carnage for the sale of a gripping story (see: Themes “Sensationalism in the News Media”). However, when the news media determines that there is little to no shock value in a story (such as war recovery efforts), they move on, erasing the traumas faced by war-torn communities by silencing them in the media. The speaker of “The End and the Beginning” is not innocent either. The speaker, just like the reporters behind the cameras, observes the carnage of war, but does nothing to intervene. Szymborska purposefully makes the speaker a passive bystander to show how complicit other members of society are in continuing the cycle of harm.

Szymborska makes readers hyperaware of the locals that are left out of the news coverage by centering them and their stories throughout much of “The End and the Beginning.” However, these locals, the people that “recall the way it was” before the war, are only ever named as “someone” (Lines 27-28). Szymborska’s repeated use of the pronoun “someone” (see: Literary Devices “Anaphora”) strips the population of any humanizing features—first names, job titles, and even their gender identities—using an ironic slant to critique the erasure of personhood in contemporary discourse (Line 28). By enumerating the amount of tasks needing completion against the backdrop of war, Szymborska reveals the human element of war, the everyday tasks of people who must strive and rebuild despite dehumanizing elements like the news media and war itself.

The speaker acknowledges that life must continue (“we’ll need the bridges back, / and new railway stations”), but is horrified by the speed at which the world forgets the traumas of war once infrastructure and comfort are reestablished (Lines 22-23). In Stanzas 7-10, the scars of war begin to fade. Despite how much others previously labored to right the wrongs of war, the speaker reveals that there are always those who begin forgetting the past, “those who know little. / And less than little. / And finally as little as nothing” about the war (Lines 40-42). In the final stanza of the poem, Stanza 10, Szymborska ends with an image of someone “stretched out / blade of grass in his mouth / gazing at the clouds” (Lines 45-47). This image is one of leisure and blissful ignorance, and it serves as the foundation to Szymborska’s final critique: newer generations often forget the toll of war that older generations not only endured but endured while rebuilding the world from which newer generations now benefit. The newer generations, “those nearby / […] who will find it [the war efforts] dull” (Lines 30-32), are not only unaffected by war and its resultant traumas, but they also reap the rewards of reconstruction without so much as lifting a finger. “The End and the Beginning” represents all that the world fails to notice in the aftermath of war, exposing how the gruesome consequences of human conflict affect many but are also forgotten by many.