1. All mod cons this morning. Ergo, tomato canning and cabbage brining.

2. According to Wikipedia, "[Zbigniew Herbert] was a distant relative of the 17th century poet George Herbert." Can this be true? Because later in the article, the anonymous claimant merely asserts that "the [Polish] Herberts probably had some English roots."

3. Whatever the ancestral facts might be, a study of the poetry of G. Herbert versus Z. Herbert would make a bizarre compare-and-contrast essay.

4. If Z's poems weren't still under copyright, I would share one with you. Since they are, however, I can only give you a single stanza. Here's the ending of "Tale of a Nail":

a leaf and a stone fall so do all things real

but ghosts live a long time stubbornly despite

sunrise and sunset revolutions of celestial bodies

on the disgraced earth tears and things fall

5. G's poems are fair game for reproduction, but their wacky formatting makes them hard to replicate on this blog. Anyway, to be fair to Z, I should give you only a stanza. Here's the opening of "The bunch of grapes":

Joy, I did lock thee up: but some bad man

Hath let thee out again:

And now, me thinks, I am where I began

Sev'n yeares ago: one vogue and vein,

One aire of thoughts usurps my brain.

I did toward Canaan draw; but now I am

Brought back to the Red sea, the sea of shame.

6. Moralizing without punctuation versus moralizing with it. See what I mean about the odd potentials of that hypothetical Herbert versus Herbert essay? It's possible, however, that someone else has already written it.