The Collected Poems (35 page)

(M/S): Notes added by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott to their translations.

Two Drops

The epigraph from Juliusz Slowacki's poem was added by Milosz and Scott.

Farewell to September

One of a group of three poems which mark Herbert's poetic debut, in the journal
Dziśi Jutro
[Today and Tomorrow] in September 1950.

“amaranth”: Poland's national color in the Napoleonic era. (M/S)

“an anachronistic ballad/about Poles and bayonets”: the “Warszawianka,” a Polish adaptation of a French song, from the era of the anti-Russian uprising in 1830–1831.

“live torpedoes” was the name given in 1939 to volunteers for suicidal military missions. (M/S)

“not one button”: On August 6, 1939, the Polish General Edward Smigly-Rydz (1886–1941) declared at the grave of the hero of Polish independence, Józef Pilsudski: “They [the Germans] will not have our coats, not one button.” A few weeks later, on September 1, 1939, Poland was invaded by Hitler's forces.

To the Fallen Poets

A number of gifted young poets of Herbert's generation, notably Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński (1921–1944) and Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–1944), lost their lives in the Warsaw uprising of 1944.

On Troy

“Song escapes whole”: a quotation from “Wajdelota's Song” in
Konrad Wallenrod,
a narrative poem by Poland's great Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855).

To Marcus Aurelius

Henryk Elzenberg (1887–1967): Polish philosopher, author of i.a.
Klopot z Istnieniem
[The Trouble with Existence]; Herbert's professor at the university in Toru? in 1949–1950 and an important mentor, correspondent, and friend in the following decade and a half.

“your Latin”: In a postscript to the 1951 letter to Henryk Elzenberg in which Herbert included this poem, the poet jokingly apologizes for suggesting that Marcus Aurelius wrote
in Latin:
“As
the fragment indicates, the author knows M. Aurelius only from hear-say, as it is well-known that his
Meditations
were written in Greek and bore the title
Eis heauton,
see also T. Sinko,
On the so-called cynical-stoical diatribe
and many others.” In the Polish language, “lacina” rhymes with “zaczyna” (begins), which presumably made it difficult to alter.

Forest of Arden

In Polish the title refers both to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's
As You Like It
and to the Ardennes forest in Belgium and northern France. During World War II, much of the Polish resistance to the Nazi and Soviet occupations took the form of partisan groups based in the wide expanses of forest in what is now the territory of Belorussia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine, where the Herbert family lived until 1944.

Trembles and Heaves

Aquilos: Roman personification of the north wind, counterpart of the Greek Boreas.

Winter Garden

phorminx: Greek seven-stringed instrument, intermediate between lyre and kithara.

Altar

Tellus: Roman goddess of the earth, counterpart of the Greek Gaia and the fertility goddess Ceres. A temple devoted to Tellus was built on the Forum Pacis in Rome in 268 BCE. During the spring festival of Fordicidia, cows—being with young—were sacrificed there.

Wawel

Hill with castle and cathedral in Kraków, the former capital city of Poland; the seat and burial place of Polish kings. In the nineteenth century, when Kraków was on Austro-Hungarian territory, the buildings were used as barracks. The playwright and painter Stanislaw Wyspiaóski (1869–1907) had conceived an idea to transform the site into a modern Acropolis, home for political research and cultural institutions.

Jerzy Turowicz (1912–1999): Prominent intellectual, editor of
Tygodnik Powszechny,
a Catholic weekly based in Kraków in which Herbert published poems and articles from 1950 onward.

A Parable of King Midas

Silenus: father of satyrs and companion to Dionysus. According to myth, King Midas took Silenus into his care when his subjects had got the king drunk.

Fragment of a Greek Vase

Eos: Greek personification of the dawn, sister to Helios and Selene, sun and moon; mother to the four winds. Her most faithful consort, Tithonus, turned into a cricket after having been granted eternal life without eternal youth.

Memnon: king of Ethiopia, son of Eos and Tithonus, killed by Achilles at Troy and made immortal by Zeus for his mother Eos' sake.

Arion

Greek poet-singer, c. 600 BCE. According to myth, he was cast overboard by pirates on his way back to the court of Corinth from a musical contest in Sicily, but he charmed the sea with his singing and was rescued by a dolphin.

HERMES, DOG AND STAR

Akhenaton

Egyptian pharaoh, tenth ruler of the eighteenth dynasty and husband of Nefertiti; converted the Egyptians temporarily from polytheism to monotheistic worship of Aton, the sun god.

“barking divinities”: Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld, was portrayed with the head of a dog or jackal.

“toward scales”: According to Egyptian beliefs, the soul of the deceased was weighed against a feather, representing truth.

Journey to Kraków

The Peasants:
by Reymont, a long description of peasant life at the turn of the century.

(M/S)

The Folk Wedding:
by Wyspiański, a symbolist play of 1901. (M/S)

The Deluge:
the second volume of
The Trilogy
by Sienkiewicz, the author of
Quo Vadis.

(M/S)

Thorns and Roses

Saint Ignatius: Ignatius of Antioch, called the father of orthodoxy, who died a martyr around AD 115.

Balconies

eheu:
Latin for “alas,” as in Horace's fourteenth ode:
eheu fugaces labuntur anni,
“alas, the fleeting years pass away.”

Ornament Makers

“Bach's
Air on the G-string”:
from J. S. Bach's Orchestral Suite no.3.

Answer

On its first publication in 1956, this poem was given the title ‘Answer 53.”

To the Hungarians

In November 1956 Soviet troops invaded communist Hungary in response to an uprising led by Prime Minister Imre Nagy. This poem was published in
Hermes, Dog and Star
in 1957 without title or date. Herbert said later that this had been his only concession to censorship.

Ballad of Old Bachelors

“Rachel, when he …” is a quotation from the opera
La Juive
(“The Jewess”), 1835, by the composer Jacques Fromental Halévy and librettist Augustin-Eugène Scribe.

Classic

Diocletian: Roman emperor (284–304). Known among other things for his avid persecution of Christians.

Gauguin—The End

“avec le premier barbouilleur venu”:
“with the first dabbler to come along.”

Apollo and Marsyas

According to myth, Marsyas, a silene or satyr, challenged Apollo to a musical competition, in which the winner would be allowed to do with the loser what he liked. Apollo won and flayed the silene in punishment. In Ovid's
Metamorphoses
(c. 382–400), the tears of wood and water deities and local spectators form a clear river thereafter named Marsyas.

Elegy of Fortinbras

for C.M.: Czeslaw Milosz, whose name could not be printed in the Poland of 1961.

First the Dog

Laika: the dog, a Moscow stray sent into space in 1957 on the Soviet spacecraft
Sputnik 2.
In 2002 a Russian scientist revealed that Laika did not die peacefully after several days in orbit, as the Soviet government had claimed, but died of overheating and stress hours after the launch.

Attempt at a Description

In Herbert's 1960 radio play
Reconstruction of the Poet,
which portrays Homer, the poet recites this poem, as well as “Pebble” and “Tamarisk.”

Pebble

See note to ‘Attempt at a Description.”

Prologue

“Griffin” “Wolf” “Bullet”: pseudonyms of Polish resistance fighters.

Common Death

Tadeusz Żebrowski: Herbert's brother-in-law

In the Margin of a Trial

Sanhedrin: council of seventy-one Jewish sages constituting the supreme court and legislative body in Judea during the Roman period.

Episode from Saint-Benoît

Max Jacob: French-Jewish poet (1876–1944). Jacob was living in an abandoned monastery at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire when he was seized by French police; he died in the transit camp of Drancy.

Malachowski's Ravine

Count Juliusz Malachowski (1801–1831), a poet as well as a general, fell in the November uprising against Russia in 1830–1831 in Kazimierz Dolny in eastern Poland, where a stone was erected in his memory.

Tusculum

Ancient city of Latium, fifteen miles from Rome, where Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) had a residence and wrote a series of books, the
Tusculanae Quaestiones,
in 45 BCE.

Cernunnos

Horned god of British Gaul, associated with fertility.

Mr Cogito Studies His Face in the Mirror

Veneds: a proto-Slavic people mentioned by Tacitus, Ptolemy, and Pliny

Sequoia

Mount Tamalpais: mountain in northern California near the Muir Woods, a national park populated by sequoia. drakkars: Viking longships.

Georg Heym—An Almost Metaphysical Adventure

Georg Heym (1887–1912): a poet, prose writer, and dramatist of early German expressionism. He drowned while skating on the frozen Havel River near Berlin on January 16, 1912.

Mr Cogito Seeks Advice

Rabbi Nachman of Braclaw: a famous tzaddik, born in 1772 in Międzyboż. He settled in Braclaw (now Breslov, Ukraine) in 1802, and died in 1812 in Huma? (Uman), where forty years previously a massacre of thousands of Jews had taken place. His gravesite, on which a building was erected during the Soviet period, is now a place of pilgrimage for Hasidic Jews.

Mr Cogito on Upright Attitudes

Cato the Younger Uticensis (95–46 BCE) rebelled against Caesar and committed suicide after the defeat of his party at Utica, despite Caesar's offer of reconciliation.

What I Saw

Kazimierz Moczarski (1907–1975): Polish resistance fighter, accused by communists after the Second World War of collaboration with the Nazis; for several years he shared a prison cell with the German war criminal Jürgen Stroop, an experience described in his
Conversations with an Executioner.

“distortions”: in the post-Stalinist period in Poland, communists accused the Stalinist regime of “errors and distortions” resulting from an incorrect interpretation of socialist doctrine.

Old Masters

“di città sul mare”:
of cities on the sea.

“della Beata Umiltà”:
of Blessed Humility