After the disappointment I experienced from receiving the results of my second CAT, I realised that the source of my failure was the very beginning of my passage. The intro was poorly worded and wasn’t that definitive, it also didn’t go fully into depth on the topic of “so what”. This lead to the rest of my work being without aim, and overall didn’t have a cohesive message. So from this learning, I thought to try redo my intro, with a bit more of an objective that would pave a clear path for the -hypothetical coming paragraphs.

The free verse poem “Museum” by WIslawa Szymborska, is a highly technical piece of literature. It dictates the journey of a woman, most likely Szymborska, walking through a museum and noting the relics of the past that lay before her. Through this poem Szymborska uses a long running metaphor alongside heavy personification of these items, expressing them to have once held these grand human traits: Love, rage and joy. This metonymic personification is used in tandem with a constantly repeating diction and tone to convey the loss of these traits, and therefore the loss of humanity through time. Even though for the majority of the poem, Szymborska conveys a sense of existential dread due to time’s inevitable conquering of humanity, in the last stanza, through her use of a joyish waltz like metre and expressive tone, she celebrates human’s paradoxical ability to blissfully continue struggling.