Time Must Have a Stop

“Elegy for the Departure” is a sadly appropriate title for the new book of poems by one of the most extraordinary voices of postwar Central Europe. Zbigniew Herbert, born in 1924, died last year in Warsaw. Although this was not his last volume, its valedictory tone is unmistakable. His health had been deteriorating for some time, and when in 1996 the Nobel Prize was awarded to Wislawa Szymborska (only 17 years after another Pole, and adopted Californian, Czeslaw Milosz), the joy of this deserved distinction was mixed with a touch of regret. For many, Herbert’s achievements equaled those of his two honored compatriots, and there were those who considered him superior to both.

In the summit regions of poetry such comparisons are always a bit absurd. There is little doubt, however, that Herbert’s impact on the postwar literature of his country and region was unmatched by anybody else. At the time when Milosz was still a distant, albeit powerful star, and Szymborska, an occasional eruption of brilliance, Herbert, almost single-handedly, introduced a whole new poetic idiom and changed the literary sensibility of those who matured in Poland in the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s. For those younger Poles, who were spared the experience of world war and the worst excesses of the Stalinist years, yet were growing restless under the onus of official lies, his, and only his, writing became--to borrow former Polish dissident Adam Michnik’s phrase--”a prayer of my generation.”

Herbert’s significance for those who would soon be known as “the generation of Solidarity,” and who would produce their own poets of note, such as Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw Baranczak, was the result of both literary and social factors. First of all, there was his exemplary life that made the dignity of his verse so much more convincing and credible. His refusal to make even conditional concessions to the Communist regime was as absolute as it was simple. By contrast, before his emigration to the West, Milosz served briefly and (one is pleased to say) without distinction in the diplomatic service of Communist Poland. Szymborska managed to produce two rather embarrassing books of socialist twaddle. Herbert chose silence rather than compromise. His delayed book debut, “Chord of Light,” was published in 1956, when Communist cultural policy thawed enough to allow a degree of authenticity.

As for the poetry itself, “the generation” was captivated by Herbert’s voice--reticent, poised, almost disembodied. It was a voice of stoic courage shaped by millenniums of culture and seemingly impervious to any anxiety or doubt. In one of his most famous poems, “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” Herbert wrote:

Go where those others went to the dark boundary

for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have very little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important

His was a disenchanted and ironic voice, but one that seemed to restore hope just as it seemed to be disappearing beyond the “dark boundary” of modern nihilism. Such is the world we have been given, declared the poet, yet within this world we are not without a moral choice, even if it were, as Herbert’s poetic persona, Mr. Cogito, says in another poem, “the choice of a gesture / choice of a last word.”

It was easy to read such poems as parables about more immediate, political realities familiar to Herbert’s readers. In the biographical note in “Elegy for the Departure” and the companion volume of prose, “The King of the Ants,” the publishers present Herbert as “a spiritual leader of the anti-Communist movement in Poland,” a description most true poets would be loath to claim. It is true, however, that among the general public, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Herbert was best known for his poems alluding to public issues and current political events, many of them circulating in samizdat and collected in the volume “Report From the Besieged City.” Some of them do not shun evoking simple pathos, like the title poem, which ends with those well-known lines:

and if the City falls but a single man escapes

he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile

he will be the City

It was Herbert’s irony, however, and not his pathos, that made him the favorite of the younger generation. When in the late ‘70s the opposition movement in Poland started to gain momentum, one of his most frequently quoted poems was “The Power of Taste,” also from “Report From the Besieged City,” in which the poet assumes the mask of a dandy for whom the intellectual poverty of an ideology is most evident in its aesthetics:

Before we declare our consent we must carefully examine

the shape of the architecture the rhythm of the drums and pipes

official colors the despicable ritual of funerals

Our eyes and ears refused obedience

the princes of our senses proudly chose exile

This was the Herbert of the “prayer of the generation”--a poet of stoic fortitude, rationalist clarity and moral authority made palatable by the admixture of irony. That is also how he was first introduced to Western readers. “We feel that Herbert’s poetry is eminently sane,” wrote Milosz and Peter Dale Scott in the introduction to “Selected Poems,” the first book presentation of Herbert’s poetry in English, in 1968. “Control, conscience, honesty, and soberness are not always to be condemned, least of all when these are qualities of a poet who received a proper European initiation into horror and chaos.”

It is quite possible, however, that such interpretations misread Herbert by scrupulously ignoring everything that did not conform with his Apollonian image. In reality his poetic vision was much darker, his dichotomies were more unresolved and unsettling, and his pithy voice carried more uncertainty and pain than was usually assumed. Fortunately, “Elegy for the Departure” and “The King of the Ants,” both skillfully rendered into English by John and Bogdana Carpenter (also the translators of other poems quoted in this review), correct that image by bringing forth a more complex and mostly depoliticized Herbert. “Elegy for the Departure” was published in Polish in 1990. The English volume also contains earlier poems, some of them of exceptional beauty, which have been curiously omitted from previous English selections. “The King of the Ants” is a collection of short prose pieces, called “mythological essays,” in which Herbert discreetly reinterprets ancient myths to uncover new, sometimes quite unexpected layers of meaning.

The essay collection is bracketed by two reflections on the absurdities of history. In the first, called “Securitas,” Herbert invents a new deity who symbolizes the paternalistic idea of the state but inevitably becomes the patron of secret police, spies and informers. The final piece retells the myth of the king of Myrmidons, creatures that were half-human and half-ant, created by the gods to alleviate the loneliness of their ruler. (The author calls him Ajax, although he means Aiakos, or Aeacus, the grandfather of both the Greater Ajax and Achilles). Annoyed by the fact that his subjects seem to be perfectly content with their simple, ant-like existence, he undertakes a series of imaginative and cruel experiments in order to induce among them social discord, ambition and anxiety--in other words, to launch them into history. “Ajax knew that happiness implies movement, striving, climbing upward. But he did not know that progress, to use this ominous word, was only an image, neither better nor worse than other figments of the imagination.”

Both of these stories are obvious allusions to Herbert’s native realm. (One of “the philosophers” employed by Ajax is called Jotvues, which in Polish reads like J. V. S., or Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin.) Heroes of other “myths” in “The King of the Ants,” however, are victims not of history but of their own absurd and incomprehensible fate. The story of Priam’s wife, Hecuba, known from Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” is told here in an almost Beckettian foreshortening. She is thrown into a dungeon, she tries to nurse a dead child, and she changes into a she-wolf and leaps into the sea. Atlas, whose entire existence is reduced to a simple task of supporting heaven and who appears to Herbert as “the catatonic of mythology,” becomes a hero of limitless, if involuntary, endurance, the “patron of those who are terminally ill, patron of those condemned to life in prison, those who are hungry from birth to death, the humiliated, all those who are deprived of rights, whose only virtue is mute, helpless, and immovable--up to a point--anger.” The legendary athlete Cleomedes resembles a hero of another story, a character from a modern existential novel. He accidentally kills a man during a boxing match. Later, in a bout of madness, he slaughters a group of children and spends the rest of his life running from his people and his act. At the end, he dies in the slums of Corinth upon hearing that in his native land he is now worshiped as a god. Myths are created in order to clarify the origins of things, the Polish poet tells us, and to insert meaning into the chaos of existence. But they may also be read as palimpsests with hidden meanings that have been rejected, concealed, as too dark or too disturbing to view in full light.

Is it possible to read Herbert in the same way? Darkness was certainly pouring into Herbert’s poetry, and possibly into his life, around the time when most of the poems from “Elegy” were composed, but it was present in his verse from the beginning, especially in his early poems, in which he bid farewell to the ghosts of his friends fallen during the war. The English volume opens with one such poem, called “Three Poems By Heart,” which originally appeared in “Chord of Light.” The first of its three movements is a search for a person, or rather for a language, in which the memory of that person can be extracted from among horrifying images of wartime destruction:

I can’t find the title

of a memory about you

with a hand torn from darkness

I step on fragments of faces

soft friendly profiles

frozen into a hard contour.

The second part of the poem speaks of the self-reproach of survivors who know that “our hands won’t transmit the shape of your hands / we squander them touching ordinary things.” In the third movement a contrast appears between various images of life before the conflagration,

the children on our street

scourge of cats

the pigeons--

softly gray

a Poet’s statue was in the park

And the unbearable reality of what followed:

the children on our street

had a difficult death

pigeons fell lightly

like shot down air

In the last lines we see the city that “flies to a high star / where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.” (In Polish the final image is more subtle and ambiguous: the fire “has a distant smell / like a page from the Iliad.”) The starkly dispassionate language and the apparent stoic resolution of the poem (yes, it all has happened before) have an unmistakably ironic purpose. How can one reconcile heroic hexameters with the “difficult death” of a child?

Herbert, the worshiper of classical symmetry of form and inner poise, makes his appearance in the poem “Architecture,’,’ in which “movement meets stillness a line meets a shout / trembling uncertainty simple clarity.” But the poem “Oaks” sets a different tone. It starts like a romantic paean to the perfection of nature, but soon changes into a vehement attack on nature’s apparent disregard of suffering: “this Nietzschean spirit on a dune so quiet / it might comfort the suffering of Keats’s nightingale.” Nature seems to be ruled by “a watery-eyed god with the face of an accountant / a demiurge of infamous statistical tables / who plays dice that always come out in his favor.” Herbert’s voice is growing more personal, his irony more astringent. His stoicism seems to falter in the face of very human, and very elemental, fear, as in “Prayer of the Old Men,” that ends on a mournful, pleading note:

but don’t allow us

to be devoured

by the insatiable darkness of your altars

say just one thing

that we will return later

Even the most “public” poem in this volume, “Mass for the Imprisoned,” which, like “Report from the Besieged City” was inspired by the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, has an unusual melancholy and resigned tone. It is built almost exclusively of images of degraded landscapes (“clay pit,” “burned-down sawmill,” “peeling walls”) and of human helplessness (“idle hands,” “awkward elbows and knees,” “mouths open in sleep,” a priest struggling to “tie and untie the knot”). There is no trace of the imperious contempt of the poem “The Power of Taste,” or the granite invulnerability of “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito.” As we learn at the poem’s end, the conspiracy will continue, but this time its only accompaniment will be “the dignified silence of bells / the obstinate barking of keys.”

The book closes with a long poem that lends its title to the whole volume. “Elegy for the Departure of Pen, Ink and Lamp” is a lament for the three objects presented here both as companions of studious childhood and symbols of the three ideas most often associated with “the Herbertian” vision: the critical mind, a “gentle volcano” of imagination and “a spirit stubbornly battling” the darker demons of the soul. The tone of the poem is cryptic, and the nature of the personal catastrophe that seems to lie at its center is hidden from our view. We learn only that the departure of the objects was caused by an unspecified “betrayal” on the part of the speaker and that it leaves him feeling guilty and powerless. The last words of the poem, and of the book (“and that it will be / dark”), sound like a door slammed shut.

This is as far as the poet is willing to go. The final line, that of despair, is probably never crossed. And yet while reading the work of Zbigniew Herbert, one wonders whether the Herbert we knew, or thought we knew, was the real one. Contempt for tyrants, compassion for victims, moral rectitude and “simple clarity” struggling with “trembling uncertainty,” are obviously there, but rather as an echo of a more far-reaching, more ambiguous and eventually more interesting conversation with being. In “Journey,” “another valedictory” poem in this volume, Herbert takes us on a solemn but inspiring tour of an individual life: from the first intellectual and sensual initiations, through “deserted tunnels of myths and religions” and endlessly expanding horizons, until the world begins to contract again, “the clock stops,” and the voyager must “give the air back to another.” The last lines of the poem can serve as a fitting epigraph for the poet:

So if it is to be a journey let it be long

a true journey from which you do not return

the repetition of the world elementary journey

conversation with the elements question without answer

a pact forced after struggle

great reconciliation.*