Who are we? What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to be human? These questions, asked since the dawn of time, testify to the universal difficulty we experience in understanding our nature and our purpose in this world. Fortunately for us, we have also developed an ideal medium for exploring this historical dilemma: poetry. Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska deftly undertook this difficult exploration in their poems “Incantation” and “A Word About Statistics,” respectively. Interestingly, they reach similar, but not identical, conclusions because the former is much more optimistic. In "Incantation", Milosz uses the language of an idealized manifestation of human reason, not because it is true in his current reality, but because he believes he has the mystical potential to be truly "good ". This becomes evident from the first two sentences of Milosz’s poem: “Human reason is beautiful and invincible. / No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, / No sentence of banishment can prevail against her” (1-3). Immediately the reader sees that he has a high opinion of human reason and that he believes it to be above anyone's attempts to subjugate or stifle it. We know this to be false, however, because our history is marked by instances of oppression that have eclipsed reason and morality. For example, this becomes clear when we consider the Nazi book burnings. Additionally, in class we learned that the Soviet Union and its form of communism were frequent targets of criticism from Milosz because he perceived it as an affront to human reason. The following sentence introduces the next key element of my understanding of this poem. Here Milosz says that human reason “establishes the universal ideas in the middle of paper…I believe this will be true one day.” Reason, aided by poetry and philosophy, will bring enlightenment, you just have to learn to accept it. Szymborska does not foresee such a future. She came to the conclusion that to be human is to be incomplete, and in general, that's okay. After all, we all deserve empathy, and the beauty of our nature is that it is unpredictable. It seems to me that, on her view, humans are not completely doomed as long as some of us, however few, are redeemable in some sense, and it seems that most of us are. So yes, we are fragile, and yes, we can be horrible. However, we are all “Mortals: / a hundred out of a hundred-- / a number which has never yet varied” (46-48). In the latter sense, we are all equal, and ultimately, does it matter how we get there? Works CitedIncantation- Czeslaw MiloszA word about statistics- Wislawa Szymborska