His poems acquired a more precise, earthly target after the crushing of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981. He had managed to live and travel abroad from time to time before this, but he had returned to Poland that year and given his support, and with it the respect and authority he had by now achieved, to Solidarity. Now in his volume Report From A Besieged City, published in Paris in 1983 (though some of the poems had already been printed by dissident inmates of a Warsaw prison), he gave vent to his hatred of communism.

His poem "The Divine Claudius" is one of his most powerful and impassioned. The image of Stalin and his apologists is clearly visible behind Claudius's words:

it seems
I ordered the execution of 35 senators
and three centurions on horseback
so what
a little less purple
a few gold rings less
but also - no small thing -
more room in the theatre...
I remember with pride
a liberal decree
which sanctioned the release of stomach sounds
during banquets.

But a poem called "The Power of Taste" employs obliquity in a different way. He is talking of the defenders of the "Besieged City", which is many cities, but most of all is Gdansk, where Solidarity threw down its challenge to the communist regime:

we had a scrap of necessary courage
but essentially it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
which has fibres of soul and the gristle of conscience...

That, in its high disdain and its understatement, has a particular Herbertian, withering sting.

On his travels in Europe, Herbert was able to see some of the great art and architecture of which he was only able to dream as a young man. He made the most of his opportunity and wrote two unusual, very personal books, Barbarian in the Garden and Still Life with A Bridle, which aimed to introduce Poles to something of what had been so long denied them. It is notable that among the places he most loved were the simple Doric temples of southern Italy - what might be called the letter "A" of European architecture.