This paper is the first part of the research on Wisława Szymborska’s reflections and considerations—in poetic form—on knowledge, science, and the scientific worldview. These aspects of Szymborska’s work are presented on the wide background of the philosophical threads in her poetry.

This paper is the first part of the research on Wisława Szymborska’s reflections and considerations, included in her poetry, on knowledge, science, and the scientific worldview. These aspects of Szymborska’s work are presented the wide background of the philosophical threads in her poetry.

This article takes as its starting point the Greek term μεταξύ, a preposition meaning ‘between’, first turned into a noun in Plato’s Symposium, and in that substantivized form adapted for their own ends by a number of 20th-century philosophers, most notably by Simone Weil. In her Gravity and Grace (French: La Pesanteur et la grâce) she defines le metaxu as in-betweenness, a social and metaphysical category which embraces all that connects and divides (as, for example, a wall that both separates two prisoners and can be used by them to tap messages). In this article Weil’s concept of metaxu is applied to the language and then to various readings of two of Wisława Szymborska’s poems, ‘Funeral’ and ‘Elegiac Calculation’. Pragmalinguistics and semantics, too, play a role in the interpretation of these poems.