BOOKS
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shades his eyes / with his feathered hand / he no longer dreams of flight /
but of a fall / that draws like lightning / a profile of infinity." In Herbert's
world ambiguity is suspect, a condition advantageous to politicians and–
at least in Eastern Europe-to their later incarnation as dictators. Although
Herbert was an enemy of easy moral imperatives, for him ambiguity
inspired more fear than clarity did, no matter how difficult the truth was
to bear. Herbert wanted "to remain faithful / to uncertain clarity," an
apparent incongruity best resolved by his poems that draw into their fold
the unknown and the beauty of chance, but where there is no room for
distortion or imprecision.
Herbert's poems translate remarkably well; the English critic A. Alvarez
wrote in 1968 that "even in English, [they] seem finer to me than anything
currently being wri tten by any English or American poet." His sharp lan–
guage, lacking in fussy lyricism, and what Milosz has called the poems'
"intellectual structure" account, in part, for this facility of translation, fur–
ther aided by the brilliant work of his longtime translators John and
Bogdana Carpenter.
In the poems in
ElegyJor the Departure,
as always, Herbert takes comfort
in the impartiality of the inanimate. There are poems about a button, a
fragment of a Greek vase, a clock, Chinese wallpaper, a fable about a nail.
In the world of objects Herbert found a means of writing about loss and
suffering without melodrama. The final and title poem of the book,
"Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp," is at once a beautiful
lament for the lost keepsakes of childhood and, more deeply, a farewell to
writing-for Herbert, indistinguishable from life:
pen with an ancient nib forgive my unfaithfulness
and you inkwell- there are still so many good thoughts in you
forgive me kerosene lamp-you are dying in my memory like a
I paid for the betrayal
but I did not know then
you were leaving forever
and that it will be
dark
deserted campsi te
Pen, ink, and the illumination of a small lamp were the tools Herbert used
throughout his lifetime to, like Prometheus, "express his disagreement
wi th the world."
