Herbert stayed faithful to his mission, and the necessity that drove him. But towards the end of his life, living in Poland again after it regained its freedom, in some poems he sounds a note that I find particularly touching. It is a note of weariness and regret, rendered with delicacy and humour, as in the poem "Request", where he says he forgot to ask the father of the gods for a "sublime gift":

for flighty empty mornings afternoons evenings
for little soul
little conscience
for a light head
and dancing step

One must hope that this brave, committed man sometimes experienced those.

Since his death in 1998, he has become a revered figure in Poland; the year 2008 was an official Year of Zbigniew Herbert. He might have mused ironically, like the English war poet Keith Douglas, "Simplify me when I'm dead."

But I think he would have been glad that at the funeral last year of one of the other great Polish dissidents, Jacek Kuron, his "Envoy of Mr Cogito", with its open emotion, was read:

be courageous when reason fails you be courageous
in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts...
and your helpless Anger - may it be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten...
go for only thus will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your forefathers Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without bounds and the city of ashes.