The language of his poetry is, in fact, almost throughout, a kind of "A" - precise, denotative, logical in structure (though always without any punctuation, in the manner he had adopted from the start). This, incidentally, is why his poems are relatively easy to translate without losing too much of the character of the original. It is not a poetry that depends on elusive rhythm and suggestive connotation. Another poem in this volume, "Pebble", shows this distinctive art to perfection. Its subject is precisely how to deal with a world full of cruelty, and it both describes and enacts it:
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits...
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity...
- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye.
In a poem addressed to a former philosophy teacher, Herbert thanks him for teaching him "to weather the world like a thinking stone". Very aptly, Herbert invented for himself an alter ego called "Mr Cogito", and in the volume of that title (1974) we see Cogito pursuing his life in that mode. Herbert was more relaxed by this time, though he was forgetting nothing. Cogito is very aware of the complexity of things - he knows that "so many feelings fit between two heartbeats" - and at the start we learn how his legs are different (the left "given to leaps... too fond of life", the right "nobly rigid") with the result that he goes through the world "staggering slightly".
He reflects on many things, now wittily, now gravely, generally both. "Even dreams are shrinking," he notices - he would like to dream of a hangman's red coat or a queen's necklace but all he gets is an unpaid bill. Then, before the next heartbeat, he finds himself considering the theme of redemption, and decides that God should not have sent his son to die on earth, because it has only encouraged cruelty and bloodshed:
too many nostrils
inhaled with relish
the smell of his fear.
Appositely, Herbert once told a friend he was more of a Roman than a Catholic.
