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Some discoveries that certain scientists would want to destroy are potential biological weapons or bombs, as even though they can benefit one country, it will lead to mass destruction and death.

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It’s like she’s uncovering and telling the truth to all, about how many can hide their discoveries for their or others’ own good.

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I liked how the tone shifted from when she used question marks and to when she used exclamation marks at the end.

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I like this comment from Emma:

Sydney Pearson

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Throughout her poems, Szymborska makes passing mentions of birds. It's always in a list or in reference to something else. I think she uses the birds as something that's ever present in the world. It's part of nature

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I thought the poem was about the people chasing life or death, stranding one's self in the abyss as fragments of their life lives.

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Scientists often lack the foresight to see what could happen because of a discovery that they make, this can lead to them regretting the work they did. It also brought my attention to the fact that that some people believe in science blindly without checking any other sources or the credibility.

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I am especially interested in the use of the word "abyss" in autotomy to describe the space in between the sacrificing and surviving parts of both sea cucumbers and humans with their poetry. However, the abyss between humans and poetry also surrounds us instead of dividing us because it allows us to connect with our feelings and share them with others. This is a celebration of poetry and the words living on even after the human is separated from it by the abyss.

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I think the poem Autotomy is at least partially about poetry and how it can outlast the poet. The lines about splitting into flesh and poetry and the fact that its in memoriam of another poet led me down that path. The idea that people and artists in particular cannot fully die because they leave half of themselves behind in their work. This poem is perhaps more interesting since we are reading it after Szymborska's passing.

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I feel like Szymborska was explaining that like sea cucumbers humans last even after death because “We, too, can divide ourselves”. In a sense, “Into flesh and poetry”  we divide and take off a part of ourselves as well as our thoughts and embed them into poetry and what we write.

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It is frightening how science is primarily funded by higher authorities, with power and control. This dependence that we have on them makes us live in uncertainty.

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I find it truly odd that religious and scientific faith are not treated similarly. Regardless of what we believe is fact, it is just that we believe. Almost nothing is certain in the world.

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For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,

and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches

turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave

and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life

Aside from this, a part I like about Utopia is the fact that it opens up with certainty, with it being as solid as the ground beneath your feet, and ends with uncertainty, being unfathomable like the sea

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I think this is wrong, but I thought she was trying to say that the Utopia seems so attainable when we are young, but we all inevitably go off the shores and see that it's unattainable.

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Something that I took away from this poem is that everything is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and some of us really need to keep this in mind. The whole world does not revolve around certain people.

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you choose your own reality and influence yourself on what you see. I feel like if I were to be in this world that everyone would feel so artificial and everything is layed out no matter what I say or do; the level of individuality and having secrets that make us, us would be challenged.

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"Capable of happiness:

twenty-some-odd at most."
"Doubled over in pain

and without a flashlight in the dark:

eighty-three, sooner or later."
I wonder if she meant for these two to basically add up to 100, like there's only pain, or happiness.
Also, I don't agree with the capable of happiness. I would say that everyone is capable of happiness, it's just that some aren't happy.

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My favorite lines from the poem are, "For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea". Its shows that a "perfect place" can still be miserable.

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Favorite Line from A Word About Statistics

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Favorite Line from A Word About Statistics

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Doubled over in pain

and without a flashlight in the dark:

eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:

quite a few at thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:

three.

Worthy of empathy:

ninety-nine.

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My favorite line from "Pi" is probably "how frail is a ray of starlight, bending in any old space". I love how she compares starlight, which seems pretty eternal, to pi, which is even more eternal.

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I liked all the symbolism that Szymborska had to offer with the poem. I feel like the poem is optimistic for the first 3/4 of the poem, but then suddenly turns pessimistic at the end.

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I thought these lines were interesting:
"and heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not pi, that won't happen,
it still has an okay five,
and quite a fine eight,
and all but final seven,
prodding and prodding a plodding eternity
to last."
Does Wislowa believe earth and heaven are not ever going to and why>

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I like how she describes the human world through the use of statistics and bring everyone together at the end, saying "Mortal: one hundred out of one hundred— a figure that has never varied yet."

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Mortal:

one hundred out of one hundred—

a figure that has never varied yet.

I like how the last stanza in the poem ties all of the people in question together. The entire poem is about implied differences and variation. While this last stanza can be viewed as rather pessimistic, I think it forces inclusion on humanity and pushes the concept that we as human beings are more similar than we think.

Emma Wetzel

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A Word on Statistics a stanza I'll continue to question

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A Word on Statistics a stanza I'll continue to question

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"Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it's better not to know,
not even approximately."

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Szymborska's Pi really reminded me of that one Pi song on YouTube. I can't fully remember who it was by but everytime I read Pi, I kept hearing that song echoing in my brain.

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For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,

and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches

turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave

and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

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My favorite part of this poem is the use of capitalization to name the elements in utopia that our world doesn't have. This includes the "Tree of Valid Supposition", the "Tree of Understanding", the "Valley of Obviously", and the "Lake of Deep Conviction". This capitalization emphasizes the things in utopia that our world doesn't have, but would make it a more perfect world if we did. Then the poem ends by saying we are "plunged into unfathomable life", meaning our reality can never be fully understood and never perfect which is why those capitalized elements don't exist.

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Our own human perspectives are too limiting for us to fully understand how non-humans function, and our attempts to understand them through human concepts are only furthering us more and more.

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One stanza that stood out to me was
"Cruel

when forced by circumstances:

it's better not to know,

not even approximately."
This reminded me of what we have been learning in psychology, experiments to discover this statistic are considered unethical to do, even if nobody actually gets hurt because you can't give the participants that knowledge of their capacity for cruelty

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"On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.

Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface"

Szymborska demonstrates how normally, truth is hard to access. It "breaks" from it's habitat instead of always being accessible.

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The statistics used in the poem aren't going to be entirely accurate, they're flawed like humanity.

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Favorite Stanza from A Word on Statistics

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Favorite Stanza from A Word on Statistics

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Cruel

when forced by circumstances:

it's better not to know,

not even approximately.

This stanza intrigues me because it makes me wonder what the statistic would be. It also implies that there is a large number of people who would be cruel, so it is better not to know which makes the reader question what they believe about human nature.

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A Word About Statistics - Statistical Estimate

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A Word About Statistics - Statistical Estimate

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Out of every 100 people, those who like what they see in the mirror:
twenty-five, as long as they don't look for long.

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"As if all you can do here is leave and plunge, never to return, into the depths. Into unfathomable life."
If you understand where the picture is from then you understand how well this summarizes the poem itself. I find it interesting that in a world perfect, we still are unsatisfied.

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Oh how short, all but mouse-like is the comet's tail!

How frail is a ray of starlight, bending in any old space!

I found this interesting because this is the only place in the poem with consecutive exclamation points for punctuation. I think this was significant because she's comparing space to pi, while pi is infinite and space is thought to be one of the few things that could be (or is) infinite as well.

Emma Wetzel

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Favorite phrase: "The caravan of digits that is pi
does not stop at the edge of the page,
but runs off the table and into the air,
over the wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, the clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bloatedness and bottomlessness" -- I love the way Syzmborska uses imagery & personification to describe Pi. The use of these poetic devices helps remind us that Pi is eternal, unlike us who are mortal.

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My favorite line for "pi" is "meanwhile two three fifteen three hundred nineteen -
my phone number your shirt size
the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three sixth floor
number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade and a code". This is my favorite line because it shows how the digits of Pi are so infinite, that any number associated with our lives can be found in the digits of Pi.

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Make a statistical estimate, Szymborska style...

Out of 100, number of students who see the point in school:

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Wait...so we can't ever know anything?