Close Read Practice Page

The End and the Beginning

by Wisława Szymborska

Sample Answers:
1. The poet juxtaposes a common daily chore— sweeping— with a
startling suggestion of violence. Although the listener’s head is still
attached, the poet places the idea of a severed head in the reader's
mind as something else that may have been considered ordinary
during a darker period. The juxtaposition emphasizes the extreme
luck of those who have survived.
2. The unnamed people in lines 26 and 28 could be anyone, which
makes the poem feel universal. On the other hand, the namelessness
is sad, because it suggests that perhaps these people have been
forgotten as a result of the war.
3. Line 27 may refer to the horrors of war, which are quickly being
forgotten.
4. This image of people idling contrasts with the constant work done by
everyone else in previous sections of the poem. This image seems
important because it shows how people move on and forget the past;
new generations have different memories and find different things
to be important.
5. The phrase might suggest that the arguments have been hidden
away, or that they come out at unexpected times (often when we say
something jumps “out of the bushes” it usually means a startling or
dangerous thing). It might also mean they’ve been forgotten
temporarily and suddenly been found again.
6. These lines express the idea that sometimes people dig up old
disagreements and toss them away. This image might suggest that
people are eager to dispose of the past and forget its horrors. It
might also represent the way in which the end of a war allows people
to see wartime ideologies as creating garbage, or as being garbage.

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