A few years before his death, Zbigniew Herbert, the prominent Polish poet, published a slim volume of nineteen poems titled Elegy for the Departure. Many of the poems had a clearly valedictory theme. The title poem, “Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp,” is particularly significant: it seems to announce the end of Herbert’s lifelong project as a poet. The poet bids farewell to three companions of his childhood that might have set him on his literary path: the pen, the “outlet of the critical mind, messenger of soothing knowledge;” the ink of “wise depths” smelling of “a gentle volcano / the call of the abyss;” and the oil lamp, “a bright allegory / a spirit stubbornly battling / the demons of gnosis,” yet also familiar with ”the surf of passions” and able to call up “landscapes of a savage city repeated in water.”
Farewell to Greatness
