Literary Info on Photographs from September 11

1. The litteral meaning of poem is that people in pictures from September 11 seemed suspended from death. The title Photographs from September 11, meant that literally the poem will examine the photographs of September 11.

2. Colormarking

3. The speaker of the poem is a person looking at pictures from 9/11. The speaker can very well be Szymborska herself. The speaker uses an ironic tone to describe the “flight” of people jumping from the twin towers after the air planes crashed into them. She describes everything within the flight of people jumping, and the emotions they must have felt as from their view they are suspended in the air, but leaves out the ending. The reader experiences dramatic irony as the reader know that the people that jumped from the towers are dead. Szymborska believes that that part should be left out as a sign of paying respect to those who had died.

4. The poem Photograph from September 11, in great respect is told in sequence from the point of jumping to the point of demise. It begins with people jumping from the twin towers both high and low. The second stanza describes how the pictures that people took of the victims immortalized them within the photo forever. Then the poem progresses to how the faces of each person look complete and normal with blood that has yet to be spilled. The next stanza described how the people jumping are stripped bare of their materials leaving them essentially naked and helpless to survive. Szymborska