Barbarian in the Garden was first published in Polish in 1962 and is consequently the work of a much younger man (Herbert was born in 1924) than the one who wrote the poems of Report from the Besieged City. But the grave, laconic, instructive prose, translated with such fine regard for cadence and concision by Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders, is recognizably the work of the same writer. It would be wrong to say that in the meantime Herbert has matured, since from the beginning the look he turned upon experience was penetrating, judicial and absolutely in earnest; but it could be said that he has grown even more secure in his self-possession and now begins to resemble an old judge who
FINDERS KEEPERS / 1 7 2
has developed the benevolent aspect of a daydreamer while retaining all the readiness and spring of a crouched lion. Where the poems of the reissued Selected Poems carry within themselves the battened-down energy and enforced caution of the situation from which they arose in Poland in the 1950s, the poems of Report from the Besieged City allow themselves a much greater latitude of voice. They are physically longer, less impacted, more social and genial in tone. They occur within a certain spaciousness, in an atmosphere of winnowed comprehension. One thinks again of the lucidus ordo, of that 'golden sun of geometry'; yet because of the body heat of the new poetry, its warm breath which keeps stirring the feather of our instinctive nature, one thinks also of Herbert's eloquent valediction to the prehistoric caves of the Dordogne:
I returned from Lascaux by the same road I arrived. Though I had stared into the abyss of history, I did not emerge from an alien world. Never before had I felt a stronger or more reassuring conviction: I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity . . .
The road opened to the Greek temples and the Gothic cathedrals. I walked towards them feeling the warm touch of the Lascaux painter on my palm.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Mr Cogito, the poet's alibi/ alias/persona/ventriloquist's doll/permissive correlative, should be so stubbornly attached to the senses of sight and touch. In the second section of 'Eschatological Forebodings of Mr Cogito', after Herbert's several musings about his ultimate fate—'probably he will sweep/the great square of Purgatory'—he imagines him taking courses in the eradication of earthly habits. And yet, in spite of these angelic debriefing sessions, Mr Cogito
continues to see a pine on a mountain slope dawn's seven candlesticks a blue-veined stone
he will yield to all tortures gentle persuasions but to the end he will defend the magnificent sensation of pain
and a few weathered images
on the bottom of the burned-out eye
who knows
perhaps he will manage
to convince the angels
he is incapable
of heavenly
service
and they will permit him to return
by an overgrown path
at the shore of a white sea
to the cave of the beginning
The poles of the beginning and the end are crossing, and at the very moment when he strains to imagine himself at the shimmering circumference of the imaginable, Mr Cogito finds himself collapsing back into the palpable centre. Yet all this is lightened of its possible portentousness because it is happening not to 'humanity' or 'mankind' but to Mr Cogito. Mr Cogito operates sometimes like a cartoon character, a cosmic Don Quixote or matchstick Sisyphus; sometimes like a discreet convention whereby the full frontal of the autobiographical T is veiled. It is in this latter role that he is responsible for one of the book's most unforgettable poems, 'Mr Cogito—The Return', which, along with 'The Abandoned', 'Mr Cogito's Soul 1 and the title poem, strikes an unusually intimate and elegiac note.
Mostly, however, Mr Cogito figures as a stand-in for experimental, undaunted Homo sapiens, or, to be more exact, as a representative of the most courageous, well-disposed and unremittinglv
intelligent members of the species. The poems where he fulfils this function are no less truly pitched and sure of their step than the ones I have just mentioned; in fact, they are more brilliant as intellectual reconnaissance and more deadly as political resistance; they are on the offensive, and to read them is to put oneself through the mill of Herbert's own personal selection process, to be tested for one's comprehension of the necessity of refusal, one's ultimate gumption and awareness. This poetry is far more than 'dissident'; it gives no consolation to papmongers or propagandists of whatever stripe. Its whole intent is to devastate those arrangements which are offered as truth by power's window-dressers everywhere. It can hear the screech of the fighter-bomber behind the righteous huffing of the official spokesman, yet it is not content with just an expose or an indictment. Herbert always wants to probe past official versions of collective experience into the final ring of the individual's perception and endurance. He does so in order to discover whether that inner citadel of human being is a selfish bolt-hole or an attentive listening-post. To put it another way, he would not be all that interested in discovering the black box after the crash, since he would far prefer to be able to monitor the courage and conscience of each passenger during the minutes before it. Thus, in their introduction, John and Bogdana Carpenter quote him as follows:
You understand I had words in abundance to express my rebellion and protest. I might have written something of this sort: 'O you cursed, damned people, so and sos, you kill innocent people, wait and a just punishment will fall on you.' I didn't say this because I wanted to bestow a broader dimension on the specific, individual, experienced situation, or rather, to show its deeper, general human perspectives.
This was always his impulse, and it is a pleasure to watch his strategies for showing 'deeper, general human perspectives' develop. In the Selected Po^ms, dramatic monologues and adaptations of Greek myth were" among his preferred approaches. There can be no more beautiful expression of necessity simultaneously recog-
nized and lamented than the early 'Elegy of Fortinbras', just as there can be no poem more aghast at those who have power to hurt and who then do hurt than 'Apollo and Marsyas'. Both works deserve to be quoted in full, but here is the latter, in the translation of Czeslaw Milosz:
The real duel of Apollo
with Marsyas
(absolute ear
versus immense range)
takes place in the evening
when as we already know
the judges
have awarded victory to the god
bound tight to a tree
meticulously stripped of his skin
Marsyas
howls
before the howl reaches his tall ears
he reposes in the shadow of that howl
only seemingly
is the voice of Marsyas
monotonous
and composed of a single vowel
Aaa
in reality
Marsyas relates
the inexhaustible wealth
of his body
bald mountains of liver white ravines of aliment rustling forests of lung sweet hillocks of muscle
joints bile blood and shudders the wintry wind of bone over the salt of memory shaken by a shudder of disgust Apollo is cleaning his instrument
now to the chorus
is joined the backbone of Marsyas
in principle the same A
only deeper with the addition of rust
this is already beyond the endurance of the god with nerves of artificial fibre
along a gravel path
hedged with box
the victor departs
wondering
whether out of Marsyas' howling
there will not some day arise
a new kind
of art—let us say—concrete
suddenly
at his feet
falls a petrified nightingale
he looks back
and sees
that the hair of the tree to which Marsyas was fastened
is white completely
About suffering he was never wrong, this young master. The Polish experience of cruelty lies behind the poem, and when it first appeared it would have had the extra jangle of anti-poetry about it. There is the affront of the subject-matter, the flirtation with horror-movie violence and the conscious avoidance of anything 'tender-minded'. Yet the triumph of the thing is that while it re-
mains set upon an emotional collision course, it still manages to keep faith with 'whatever shares/The eternal reciprocity of tears'. Indeed, this is just the poetry which Yeats would have needed to convince him of the complacency of his objection to Wilfred Owen's work (passive suffering is not a subject for poetry), although, in fact, it is probably only Wilfred Owen (tender-minded) and Yeats (tough-minded) who brought into poetry in English a 'vision of reality' the equal of this one . . . The petrified nightingale, the tree with white hair, the monotonous Aaa of the new art, each of these inventions is as terrible as it is artful; each is uttered from the dry well of an objective voice. The demon of perspective rules while the supra-individual principle reads history through a pane of Francescan ice, tranquilly, impassively, as if the story were chiselled into stone.
The most celebrated instance of Herbert's capacity to outface what the stone ordains occurs in his poem 'Pebble'. Once again, this is an ars poetica, but the world implied by the poem would exclude any discourse that was so fancied-up as to admit a term like ars poetica in the first place. Yet 'Pebble' is several steps ahead of satire and even one or two steps beyond the tragic gesture. It is written by a poet who grew up, as it were, under the white-haired tree but who possessed no sense of either the oddity or the election of his birthright. In so far as it accepts the universe with a sort of disappointed relief—as though at the last minute faith were to renege on its boast that it could move mountains and settle back into stoicism—it demonstrates the truth of Patrick Kavanagh's contention that tragedy is half-born comedy. The poem's force certainly resides in its impersonality, yet its tone is almost ready to play itself on through into the altogether more lenient weather of personality itself.
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent which does not remind one of anything does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse when I hold it in my hand and its noble body is permeated by false warmth
—Pebbles cannot be tamed to the end they will look at us with a calm and very clear eye
This has about it all the triumph and completion of the 'finished man among his enemies'. You wonder where else an art that is so contained and self-verifying can possibly go—until you open Report from the Besieged City. There you discover that the perfect moral health of the earlier poetry was like the hard pure green of the ripening apple: now the core of the thing is less packed with tartness, and the whole oeuvre seems to mellow and sway on the bough of some tree of unforbidden knowledge.
There remain, however, traces of the acerbic observer; this, for example, in the poem where Damastes (also known as Procrustes) speaks:
I invented a bed with the measurements of a perfect man
I compared the travellers I caught with this bed
it was hard to avoid—I admit—stretching limbs cutting legs
the patients died but the more there were who perished
the more I was certain my research was right
the goal was noble progress demands victims
This voice is stereophonic in that we are listening to it through two speakers, one from the set-up Damastes, the other from the privileged poet, and we always know whose side we are on. We are meant to read the thing exactly as it is laid out for us. We stand
with Signorelli at the side of the picture, observantly. We are still, in other words, in the late spring of impersonality. But when we come to the poem on the emperor Claudius, we are in the summer of fullest personality. It is not that Herbert has grown lax or that any phoney tolerance—understanding all and therefore forgiving all—has infected his attitude. It is more that he has eased his own grimness, as if realizing that the stern brows he turns upon the world merely contribute to the weight of the world's anxiety instead of lightening it; therefore, he can afford to become more genial personally without becoming one whit less impersonal in his judgements and perceptions. So, in his treatment of 'The Divine Claudius', the blood and the executions and the infernal whimsicality are not passed over, yet Herbert ends up speaking for his villain with a less than usually forked tongue:
I expanded the frontiers of the empire
by Brittany Mauretania
and if I recall correctly Thrace
my death was caused by my wife Agrippina and an uncontrollable passion for boletus
mushrooms—the essence of the forest—became the essence of death
descendants—remember with proper respect and honour
at least one merit of the divine Claudius
I added new signs and sounds to our alphabet
expanded the limits of speech that is the limits of freedom
the letters I discovered—beloved daughters—Digamma and
Antisigma led my shadow as I pursued the path with tottering steps to the dark land of
Orkus
There is more of the inward gaze of Fra Angelico here, and indeed, all through Report from the Besieged City, Herbert's mind is fixed constantly on last things. Classical and Christian visions of
the afterlife are drawn upon time and again, and in 'Mr Cogito— Notes from the House of the Dead', we have an opportunity of hearing how the terrible cry of Marsyas sounds in the new acoustic of the later work. Mr Cogito, who lies with his fellows 'in the depths of the temple of the absurd', hears there, at ten o'clock in the evening, 'a voice//masculine/slow/commanding/the rising/ of the dead'. The second section of the poem proceeds:
we called him Adam meaning taken from the earth
at ten in the evening
when the lights were switched off
Adam would begin his concert
to the ears of the profane
it sounded
like the howl of a person in fetters
for us
an epiphany
he was
anointed
the sacrificial animal
author of psalms
he sang
the inconceivable desert the call of the abyss the noose on the heights
Adam's cry
was made
of two or three vowels
stretched out like ribs on the horizon
This new Adam has brought us as far as the old Marsyas took us, but now the older Herbert takes up the burden and, in a third section, brings the poem further still:
Atlas of Civilization
after a few concerts he fell silent
the illumination of his voice lasted a brief time
he didn't redeem his followers
they took Adam away or he retreated into eternity
the source
of the rebellion
was extinguished
and perhaps only I still hear the echo of his voice
more and more slender
quieter
further and further away
like music of the spheres the harmony of the universe
so perfect
it is inaudible.
Mr Cogito's being depends upon such cogitations (one remembers his defence of 'the magnificent sensation of pain'), and unlike Hamlet in Fortinbras's elegy, who 'crunched the air only to vomit', Mr Cogito's digestion of the empty spaces is curiously salutary. Reading these poems is a beneficent experience: they amplify immensely Thomas Hardy's assertion that 'If a way to
the Better
there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.' But by the end of the book, after such undaunted poems as 'The Power of Taste'—'Yes taste/in which there are fibres of soul the cartilage of conscience'—and such tender ones as 'Lament', to the memory of his mother—'she sails on the bottom of a boat through foamy nebulas'—after these and the other poems I have mentioned, and many more which I have not, the reader feels the kind of gratitude the gods of Troy must have felt when they saw Aeneas creep from the lurid fires, bearing ancestry on his shoulders and the sacred objects in his hands.
The book's true subject is survival of the valid self, of the city, of the good and the beautiful; or rather, the subject is the responsibility of each person to ensure that survival. So it is possible in the end to think that a poet who writes so ethically about the res publico, might even be admitted by Plato as first laureate of the ideal republic, though it is also necessary to think that through to the point where this particular poet would be sure to decline the office as a dangerous compromise:
now as I write these words the advocates of conciliation
have won the upper hand over the party of inflexibles
a normal hesitation of moods fate still hangs in the balance
cemeteries grow larger the number of the defenders is smaller
yet the defence continues it will continue to the end
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
we look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death worst of all—the face of betrayal
and only our dreams have not been humiliated
The title poem, to which these lines form the conclusion, is pivoted at the moment of martial law and will always belong in the annals of patriotic Polish ver,se. It witnesses new developments and makes old connections within the native story and is only one of several