A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth

In Wisława Szymborska’s “A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth,” the poet portrays a toddler doing what toddlers do: transgressing. From her 2006 collection Monologue of a Dog: New Poems, the poem’s title explains all the action of the poem, in which a little girl clutches the edge of a tablecloth and pulls. Point-of-view takes a pivotal role in this poem’s narrative. While the speaker’s voice originates external to the little girl of the title, the voice speaks alongside and for the little girl. Because the little girl is “over a year” (Line 1) but not yet two years old, this indicates she might not speak in full sentences. However, the speaker’s narrative delivers a proposal: that critical thinking can precede speech and argument, and that children harbor a capacity for curiosity, judgment, and imagination as great as, if not at times greater than, an adult’s range. In a broad sense, the poem asks readers to question their understanding of motive, intent, and control in the world.

Poet Biography

Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, the highest international award for a writer. Born in 1923, she lived almost all of her life in Kraków, Poland, where she worked as an illustrator for textbooks during World War II while finishing her education.