Review of poem “Sentence,” by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

 Review of poem “Sentence,” by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

(pl see poem number 11 in the link.)

I request readers to read the poem in the above link and then my review. Thanks.

The word sentence has two meanings and both meanings are fitting for the content. The poem puts forth a hypothetical situation to make the reader understand subtly what it drives home. You are locked up in a cell. But you don’t have any knowledge of the cell and the life confined to the cell and the one outside. Hypothetically again, you get a lead in a slip of paper, in a message which you are not able to decipher, because the language is unfamiliar to you. After spending years, you might first understand it wrongly. Later in some other way and then the sentence starts reading differently each time and there are so many sentences.

I think the poem’s content opens up only by the visualization of the poet, that is, the confined person gets to look at the cell and the lock and the life inside and outside and all that only when a written message is given. Something in writing. Something to read, ponder and understand. In other words, something that begins only after reading a crucial write up, may be too tiny. In my understanding the poem celebrates literature and free thinking that is soundly based on thought provoking writings. ‘You would have created a new language,‘ the ending note opens one more window. It calls for exploring beyond what we read, and inquiring the genuineness of what we read. The final impression it leaves on the reader is the need to break loose and develop original ideas of the situation that we chose to get into without any idea and the world outside the square. And what is in store even as an alternative of whatever is outside the square too. The poem is modern, multilayered and powerful.