Zbigniew H. Dies, a Master

ELEGY FOR THE DEPARTURE AND OTHER POEMS

by Zbigniew Herbert

Ecco Press

132 pp., $24

Really, really, I recommend that you read Mr. Zbigniew Herbert. He is a serious poet, full of beauty that does not insult our modern post-atrocity sensibilities. A Polish poet born in 1950 who was active in his country's anti-Communist movement, Herbert died in 1998, leaving behind an oeuvre that begins with spare poems about creation, antiquity and art. He then continues those themes through increasingly pointed and readable poetry while also developing a strong form of the prose poem that mixes fairy tales, images from everyday life and an aphoristic style. The recently published posthumous collection Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems offers a quick presentation of the body of his work, complemented by the simultaneously published King of the Ants, a collection of mythical retellings in which Herbert takes myth so seriously that he comfortable brushes aside loyalty to the specifics of traditional tellings in order to speak with an authentically contemporary voice.

"We fall asleep on words," an earlier poem of Herbert's, hints at the character of his poetry. Herbert begins with "We fall asleep on words / we wake among words," outlining the windows of perception so densely implicit in Herbert's image-heavy poems. Herbert goes on to describe lost words as being "a small prickly pin / that connected / the most beautiful / lost metaphor in the world." His persistence in revamping sentence and idea structure in order to illustrate experience despite the fragility of language is thus made explicit. His method, however, is not so straightforward, relying on intuition and dream("one must dream patiently / hoping the content will become complete").

In the first stanza of one of Herbert's few poems that explicitly confronts twentieth century history, "The Ardennes Forest," he draws on the same notion of dream as a doorway to comprehending experience to also present a picture typical of his understanding of man and nature:

Cup your hands to scoop up sleep as you would draw a grain of water and the forest will come: a green cloud a birch trunk like a chord of light and a thousand eyelids fluttering with forgotten leafy speech then you will recall the white morning when you waited for the opening of the gates

Herbert is underlining the spotty yet rewarding nature of human perception, in which you must drink sleep that the forest may come. The confidence that the "forest will come" is reminiscent of both ancient prophecy and that language of television commercials which somehow capture the religiosity of modern times: this ancient is modern trick is common in Herbert. Note also his lack of punctuation, typical of all the poems in Elegy for the Departure, as well as his readiness to disregard physical categories (e.g. "a grain of water," "a chord of light"). Through such inverted interest in the elements, Herbert recalls the most ancient pre-Socratic philosophers and simultaneously makes his postmodern move, boldly taking language to the brink of obfuscation in order to make the metaphorical point. Herbert's own oblique language is captured in the phrase "forgotten leafy speech," an image which charms with the power of forgotten myth, an alibi against any accusations po-mo linguistic pretension. By recalling sleep, dreams, unrecoverable history (see "About Troy") and the personalities of dumb material objects (see "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp"), Herbert selects the very topics that demand linguistic self-consciousness, save that topic of genocide and terror which Adorno famously said would make "all lyricafter the holocaust...barbaric."

But "The Ardennes Forest" goes on to explicitlyaddress this problem. It contrasts the thousandmagical fluttering eyelids with "a thousand lidspressed/ tightly on motionless eyebrows,"presenting the ancient Ardennes along with itsidentity as the setting for the Battle of theBulge, and in the end Herbert asserts that even"the dead also ask for fairy tales," eschewing thepost-World War II idea that fanciful poetry is nolonger appropriate, associating fairy tales forthe dead with "a handful of herbs," "needles byrustling / and the faint threads of fragrances":concrete instances of the sleepy and fantastic innature that persists in spite of human history.Herbert would honor the dead with his vision, or"our Ardennes forest," the line which closes thepoem.

This dignified poetry avoids personal topicsand instead speaks to the "you" and the "we," asif the poet effaced himself in order to write foreveryone, a symptom of Herbert's interest inpolitics. Yet it does possess a strong strain ofhumor, even if it's found mainly on the backsidesof more depressing themes. In "What Our Dead Do,"Herbert hazards that the dead "hunt for jobs /whisper the numbers of lottery tickets," thensomberly notes that we imagine them "snug as theburrow of a mouse." Surely that comparison makesthe daily grind of errands and ambition seem likedeath. In one of his most priceless prose poems,"The Wolf and the Sheep," Herbert has the wolfexplain to the sheep that he is about to devourthat, "You have no idea how silly it is to be abad wolf. Were it not for Aesop, we would sit onour hind legs and gaze at the sunset. I like to dothis very much." After this irony, Herbertcompounds the effect with a ladder which we allought to climb and then kick out from beneath us:"Don't follow the wolf, dear children. Don'tsacrifice yourselves to the moral."

Herbert is a rare find in 1998: he is old andwise, having lived through the turmoil of EasternEurope under communism, yet he is a storytellerpoet more concerned with the forests than withpeople. He does not run from his own historicalcontext; but he, in a move that will perhaps beincreasingly repeated, bravely attends to himselfand many of the old cares of poetry in their turn.He certainly does not flee his time, carelesslyrutting in transcendentalism or other naiveaesthetics. In fact, his language and reliance onoblique image is, if anything, a testament to thecomplexities of the present and the wisdom ofcontemporary poetry not to state naively what hasbeen disproved by the last century. But moreimportantly, upon even a first reading of Herbert,you will find much that you know but couldn't saybefore.

But "The Ardennes Forest" goes on to explicitlyaddress this problem. It contrasts the thousandmagical fluttering eyelids with "a thousand lidspressed/ tightly on motionless eyebrows,"presenting the ancient Ardennes along with itsidentity as the setting for the Battle of theBulge, and in the end Herbert asserts that even"the dead also ask for fairy tales," eschewing thepost-World War II idea that fanciful poetry is nolonger appropriate, associating fairy tales forthe dead with "a handful of herbs," "needles byrustling / and the faint threads of fragrances":concrete instances of the sleepy and fantastic innature that persists in spite of human history.Herbert would honor the dead with his vision, or"our Ardennes forest," the line which closes thepoem.

This dignified poetry avoids personal topicsand instead speaks to the "you" and the "we," asif the poet effaced himself in order to write foreveryone, a symptom of Herbert's interest inpolitics. Yet it does possess a strong strain ofhumor, even if it's found mainly on the backsidesof more depressing themes. In "What Our Dead Do,"Herbert hazards that the dead "hunt for jobs /whisper the numbers of lottery tickets," thensomberly notes that we imagine them "snug as theburrow of a mouse." Surely that comparison makesthe daily grind of errands and ambition seem likedeath. In one of his most priceless prose poems,"The Wolf and the Sheep," Herbert has the wolfexplain to the sheep that he is about to devourthat, "You have no idea how silly it is to be abad wolf. Were it not for Aesop, we would sit onour hind legs and gaze at the sunset. I like to dothis very much." After this irony, Herbertcompounds the effect with a ladder which we allought to climb and then kick out from beneath us:"Don't follow the wolf, dear children. Don'tsacrifice yourselves to the moral."

Herbert is a rare find in 1998: he is old andwise, having lived through the turmoil of EasternEurope under communism, yet he is a storytellerpoet more concerned with the forests than withpeople. He does not run from his own historicalcontext; but he, in a move that will perhaps beincreasingly repeated, bravely attends to himselfand many of the old cares of poetry in their turn.He certainly does not flee his time, carelesslyrutting in transcendentalism or other naiveaesthetics. In fact, his language and reliance onoblique image is, if anything, a testament to thecomplexities of the present and the wisdom ofcontemporary poetry not to state naively what hasbeen disproved by the last century. But moreimportantly, upon even a first reading of Herbert,you will find much that you know but couldn't saybefore.