Word: herbert
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...