Mr. Cogito Looks at His Face in the Mirror by Zbigniew Herbert

First published: 1974, as “Pan Cogito obserwuje w lustrze swojąá twarz” in Pan Cogito; English translation collected in Mr. Cogito, 1993

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

The title of this brief six-stanza, twenty-eight-line poem in free verse recalls the seventeenth century Dutch paintings that Zbigniew Herbert greatly admires and strikes a note at once contemplative and pictorial. Narrated in the first person, it takes an unusual approach to a commonplace occurrence: a person looking at himself in the mirror. Instead of remarking how much he has changed over the years, Cogito questions who “wrote” his face. The question suggests that Cogito conceives of himself less in individual terms than in collective or historical terms—which is to say, less as a unique person and more as a cultural product, even a text (the one written rather than the one writing).

Contemplating himself synecdochically in the mirror, Cogito comes to see his face as a mirror reflecting the ways that history, including heredity, has shaped or misshaped him. He begins with the chicken pox, which wrote “its o’ with calligraphic pen” upon his skin, and moves on to the ancestors from whom he inherited the protruding ears and close-set eyes that worked to their advantage in the age of mastodons and marauders but that now make Cogito look comical. In the third stanza, this line of thought swerves in a more troubling direction as Cogito contemplates his low forehead filled with “very few thoughts,” the result of centuries of subservience to aristocratic rule during which “the prince” did the thinking for Cogito’s ancestors.

In the fourth stanza, the poem returns to the trope introduced in the first stanza: Cogito as a failed, or at least an imperfect, work of art. The “powders ointments mixtures” he has purchased “in salons” and applied to improve himself “for nobility” are not unlike the art he has seen, the music he has heard, and the “old books” he has read. Instead of being paths to enlightenment and understanding, Cogito implies that they have been little more than ornaments or mere ointments as he contemplates a face, a self, in ruins. In a startling and characteristically self-deprecating turn of phrase (made all the more effective by its unusualness in a poem of otherwise surprising simplicity), Cogito compares “the inherited face” he observes in the mirror to “old meats fermenting in a bag.” Gluttonous ancestors, with their “medieval sins” and “paleolithic hunger and fear,” are the ones responsible for his double chin, the outward and visible sign of the thwarted hopes of his soul, which “yearned for asceticism.” According to the poem’s final line, “this is how [Cogito] lost the tournament with [his] face.”

Forms and Devices

The question Herbert and other Polish poets of his generation face is how to find a language and a syntax that can adequately reflect recent experience. Herbert’s answer is to strip his poetry of virtually all punctuation (“Mr. Cogito Looks at His Face in the Mirror” contains only one dash and one pair of inverted commas) and all signs of poetic convention and ornamentation. Herbert does not begin new lines with uppercase letters; he eschews rhythm, rhyme, and regular stanzaic structure; and he prefers the synecdoches and metonymies of realist writing to the metaphors upon which poetry, particularly Romantic poetry, usually depends. As Herbert writes in “Mr. Cogito on the Imagination,”

Mr. Cogito never trustedtricks of the imaginationthe piano at the top of the Alpsplayed false concerts for him…he loved the flat horizona straight linethe gravity of the earth.

Cogito prefers “to remain faithful to uncertain clarity” and to use the imagination as an “instrument of compassion.” The prosaic quality of Herbert’s poetry is deceptive (as are the clean lines stripped of punctuation, which require more, not less, effort and involvement on the reader’s part), as is proven by comparison with Herbert’s numerous prose poems and essays.

The seeming simplicity of Herbert’s Cogito poems (many of his other works are more openly allusive in their treatment of myth and history) contrasts sharply with the more lyrical (and somewhat more conventional) work of Poland’s best-known postwar poet, Czesław Miłosz. They also differ from the poems of Wisława Szymborska (like Miłosz, a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature), which, though usually even briefer, are equally modest in appearance but much less ascetic in their pursuit of what Herbert calls “the nonheroic subject.” Herbert’s terseness, his crystalline and austere style, his modest expression and subdued, level voice play their parts in creating the poetic equivalent of the portraits and still lifes of the seventeenth century Dutch painters, practitioners of a sober, somber art devoid of the tricks of the imagination. Like their paintings, Herbert’s poems are both pictorial and narrative, little vignettes to which he adds a wryly ironic and, at times, sardonic note. Equally important, Herbert, like the Dutch painters, also positions his art in public terms rather than narrowly personal terms. As a result, what may prove most startling to American readers of Herbert’s poetry is the absence of the highly personal, confessional style of his transatlantic contemporaries such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.