A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth

Like many of Szymborska’s narrators, this speaker charms without revealing a full picture of character or nature. Readers might be suspicious of this voice describing the unfolding of domestic disaster with mild glee, without any interest or motivation to preserve the safety of objects or child. The speaker portrays a courageous girl coming into a sense of power and identity, issues central to Eastern European literature of the 20th century, as writers grappled with the loss of cultural identity and agency. Little girls in literature traditionally represent innocence, and in this case, that innocence frees her from societal expectations and even the rules of physics, as “Mr. Newton still has no say in this” (Line 23). Intellectual and cultural taboos have not yet raised “unyielding walls” (Line 10) in this world. Her freedom cannot be sidelined, and her intention to complete her investigation must not be thwarted.

In one reading of the speaker’s voice, this story depicts human potential for anarchic joy and abandon before definitions, politics, and rules intervene. However, the child in the poem might as easily represent a kind of mindless, brutal tyranny exacted on innocent bystanders, swept into a pointless experiment benefitting nothing and no one. The child possesses the physical strength to move enough items to cause things to break; therefore, she must exert that force and break things. At first, the inanimate objects are “shaking with desire” (Line 16), but by the time they cling to the table’s edge, they are “trembling” (Line 19); they are at the mercy of a blind mission. Considered within the political struggles experienced in Szymborska’s lifetime, from Poland’s harrowing survival through World War II to her own disillusionment with the Communist party in Poland, this kind of childish, clumsy destruction acquires a grim futility as the speaker confirms the necessity of the experiment’s unfolding.