Assignment 9

Wislawa Szymborska: “First Love” (pp. 804-05)

This lyric plays off the cliched sentimentality that governs certain popular conceptions, here the notion of the importance of first love. The speaker here rejects the views that “first love is most important,” and that it remains a sentimental memory. Her hands do not tremble over “silly” keepsakes. At the only subsequent meeting with her first lover, two chairs conversed at a chilly table–the formerly warm and, presumably, passionate lovers are not emotionally present; the conversation is wooden, like the conversation between pieces of furniture. The tone is chilly.

T Nonetheless, there is one thing special about that “unremembered” first love. By marking the magical transition from innocence to experience, it signifies the end of a childhood characterized, perhaps, by a sense of immortality, and the beginning of responsible adulthood chastened by its awareness of mortality. Thus, paradoxically, one’s first sexual experience is not so much the source of giddy memories as the impetus that requires one to confront the inevitability of death.