One of the life-giving paradoxes of comparative influence is that looking outward for inspiration often results in a keener gaze inward: introspection directly benefits from extroversion. Thomas Docherty notes that Irish writers often look outward when they seem to be most introspective, adducing Yeats's fascination with Byzantium, Joyce's enthrallment with the Mediterranean, and, more recently, Paul Durcan's interest in seeing “home” from “elsewhere.”1 It is almost truistic to find parallels between poets based on political situation, cultural context, literary movement, or simply thematics; yet what happens when a writer consciously reaches for influence from one whose life situation is not parallel, whose literary aims are entirely different, whose thematics may prove alienating, and whose poetic language is largely inaccessible? Extroversion need not result in the discovery of similitude. Seamus Heaney looked to the work of contemporary Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert in an effort to effect change in his own poetic; most saliently, he sought to deploy a metaphorical language of moral absolutes that is secular, abstracted from the childhood Catholicism that underlay his sense of right and wrong. Herbert's “dry form” allowed for a particular kind of ethical engagement that Heaney founnd difficult and yet salubrious. This allowed him to effect a serious reorientation in his work.The influence of Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert was most prevalent after North (1975), when Heaney stepped away from the grand metaphor of bog burial and quasi-mythic Iron Age violence and searched for fresh means of metaphorizing what I am calling the “moral imperative,” the command to engage the moral character of one's times. This is a time when Heaney cast in new waters for a new voice, a contemporary idiom that he could place beside the penitential voice of Dante. Herbert's influence on Heaney was strongest in the 1970s and 1980s. Interestingly, Heaney read Herbert long before his verse begins to show Herbert's impress; only in the 1983 Station Island and the 1987 The Haw Lantern can we discern Herbertian echoes. We know from Heaney's interviews (especially the compendious Stepping Stones), though, that he was reading Herbert in the 1970s, precisely as he was vowing to address the Northern Irish “predicament” more directly than he had in his first two volumes. This fact is of crucial importance for understanding the manner in which Heaney naturalizes Herbert's motifs: he is looking for serious engagement and for “tough-minded” morality, even while “Atlas of Civilization” welcomes what Heaney sees as a “mellowing” in Herbert's Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems (1985).Herbert is, both inside and outside Poland, best known as the author of the hortatory lines “you have little time you must give testimony /… / repeat great words repeat them stubbornly” (from “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito”). Yet curiously in his essays, Heaney seems to want to view Herbert as a fundamentally “mellow” poet, allying him with the Mediterranean sun and cultural bounty that Herbert describes in his prose work The Barbarian in the Garden and not with the altogether different imagistic field of his poems. In his poetry, however, Heaney summons a different Herbert. The famous poems “The Pebble” and “The Knocker” prove most influential for Heaney, who adapts Herbert's study of objects as moral barometers in his own poems entitled “The Haw Lantern,” “Sandstone Keepsake” and “The Stone Verdict.” The substance of this transnational encounter is both inspirational and frustrating, represented by poetic images of stricture and objectified judgment.This rather far-flung influence permits us to see how the experience of reading—and taking influence from—a clearly dissimilar poet allows Heaney to reconsider the relationship of ethics and aesthetics. Heaney grappled with Herbert's poetry during his most political decades, the 1970s and 1980s, which stand as the time he felt the need to address the civil violence of his native Northern Ireland most directly; this is also when Herbert's work first found voice in English translation (the first Selected Poems appeared in 1968, the second in 1977). Herbert has been translated by several hands, yet Heaney's most powerful experience of reading him is his initial one. The volume's introduction by Al Alvarez helped to contextualize Herbert and assert the hard-edged quality of his gift; the initial translations, by Peter Dale Scott and Czesław Miłosz, helped to establish Miłosz's own name in the English-speaking world. For now, however, our focus is upon the hard, tart poetic fruit—to adapt Heaney's metaphor—that Herbert offers him and that provokes both fascination and unease, as Heaney realized he must grapple with this poetry. After the publication of North, Heaney reached for non-Irish exemplars to negotiate his way through sociopolitical terrain (we may recall Seamus Deane's 1977 warning against becoming “deliberately minor” by shirking political engagement, which made Heaney uncomfortable but cast a long shadow). Herbert's renunciatory “The Knocker” steps beyond the limit that Heaney was willing to face in his own mid-career self-assessments, but such work is valuable precisely for the difficulty of its self-questioning, the stringency of its terms, and the absolute seriousness with which it contemplates the poet's obligation. Heaney did not look to Herbert for confirmation or extension of his own poetic views; he read Herbert to be challenged.Heaney could have looked closer to home to find an agonized questioner of ethical and poetic antinomies, one who contrived a dilemma between life and work in which he did not truly believe; Heaney is famous, however, for not drawing primarily on Yeats for inspiration. He instead proclaimed his early sympathies with Wordsworth, Kavanagh, Hughes, Lowell, and then the Eastern Europeans Miłosz, Herbert, and Osip Mandelstam. One could draw parallels between the bardic voices of Yeats and Miłosz or a general parallel between poets of “public history,” a label that would apply to Yeats and Herbert, and poets of private history, yet Herbert's voice remains recalcitrantly unique.2 Heaney's turn to the Eastern Europeans did not simply represent a turn toward public history—Yeats could have furnished that—but a turn toward a different vocal register that, à propos of Herbert, he calls impersonal. This difference in register corresponds to a greater difference, one of the type of public function that the poetry can perform.Gerald Dawe strongly criticizes Heaney's turn to Eastern Europe for inspiration, focusing on his essays: “in terms of ‘the North,’ with which The Government of the Tongue (1988) begins, are not imaginative contexts more readily available closer to home, in Scotland, for example, rather than in Zbigniew Herbert's Poland?” The point is apt and gains in complexity when Dawe reminds us that Herbert is a cultural dissident writing against Polish “orthodoxies and beliefs” and that Heaney, in contrast, is essentially a cultural “insider,” or at least more of one than Herbert (or Miłosz or Mandelstam, for that matter). Dawe concludes that “the only effective comparisons are the important imaginative ones: of style, diction, technique. Yet how do we work these out across the borders of languages that have so little in common?”3 These are important questions even if their tone is lamentably discouraging. “Imaginative comparisons” lead into deep comparisons of authorial intent, cultural context, and lyrical voice.Herbert correlates form with ethics, yet he is continuously forced to recognize the limits of his actual creative freedom as he explores how poetry can maintain ethical vigilance in a time of political stress and censorship. As a poet who made his debut during the so-called thaw of 1956, when cultural censorship was significantly relaxed, his ability to publish was directly tied to the current Polish political situation in a way that exceeded the constraints put on Heaney by the Northern Irish Troubles. He admits that he devised his parabolic style largely to deceive cultural censors.4 At the same time, however, it would be wrong to label him a purely political poet, if such an animal even exists: although Herbert insists (in a manner reminiscent of Auden) that art is always grounded by particular spatiotemporal coordinates—which necessarily limit its autonomy—he yearns for epiphanic release from these coordinates.5 The issue, however, is convoluted: these political constraints and Herbert's belief that art has a responsibility to strive for the illumination of ethical problems (or, at least, the accurate portrayal of dilemmas and situations awakening our ethical mind) lead him to develop his signature form of the parable, frequently reliant on mythology—not an uncommon strategy for Eastern European verse of the Communist period—or elemental images and abstract situations. “The Pebble” and “The Knocker” are famously representative of Herbert's bare, abstract minimalism.Heaney is not a minimalist, and his reading of Herbert is hardly a meeting of like-minded poets. The Polish poet's definitively foreign idiom, however, allows for especially keen moments of introversion concerning the poet's relation to the language of moral judgment. When Heaney refers to him as “a finished writer,” he registers an implicit sense of frustration at his inability to naturalize Herbert's particular idiom, even while his admiration of Herbert's absolute honesty is clearly relevant to the forceful self-castigations of Station Island (such as the charge of “timid circumspect involvement,” or that he “confused evasion and artistic tact” and “whitewashed ugliness”); Station Island's aim is to restore the colors of actuality (“Sandstone Keepsake”).6 Heaney reproduces “The Knocker” in The Government of the Tongue, but he appears nearly afraid of what such a poem may represent, stating that it stands guard over all poems of self-denial.7 It is a bare ars poetica though, as Heaney realizes, the discourse of the poem refuses the indulgence of poetic self-fashioning in the first place: Są tacy którzy w głowie(There are those who growhodują ogrodygardens in their headsa włosy ich są ścieżkamipaths lead from their hairdo miast słonecznych i białychto sunny and white citiesłatwo im pisaćit's easy for them to writezamykają oczythey close their eyesa już z czoła spływająimmediately schools of imagesławice obrazówstream down their foreheadsmoja wyobraźniamy imaginationto kawałek deskiis a piece of boarda za cały instrumentmy sole instrumentmam drewniany patyka wooden stickuderzam w deskęI strike the boarda ona mi odpowiadait answers metak-takyes—yesnie-nieno—noinnym zielony dzwon drzewafor others the green bell of a treeniebieski dzwon wodythe blue bell of waterja mam kołatkęI have a knockerod nie strzeżonych ogrodówfrom unprotected gardensuderzam w deskęI thump on the boarda ona podpowiadaand it prompts mesuchy poemat moralistywith the moralist's dry poemtak-takyes—yesnie-nie8no—no) The poem's central assertion depends for its force on the imagery that it rejects: by conveying the aesthetic surfeit of “gardens,” “sunny … cities,” and streaming “schools of images,” the break between the second and third stanzas, between third and first person, becomes charged with the implicit necessity of refusal. This necessity is not explained. It is barely justified. Heaney is right in asserting that the imagery of the first two stanzas “carries its truth alive into the heart—exactly as the Romantics said it should” (The Government of the Tongue, 199–200), but he does not note the relative lack of imagistic detail expended on this “truth.” Nor is the truth made clear. Is it the truth of aestheticism? Of sensory pleasure? Of psychological assent to the beautiful? It is quickly taken over—and nearly invalidated—by the truth of the moralist-poet's materials (board, stick) and his unchosen calling.The mind cannot dwell on these images because they are notations, not evocations. They do not approach the level of exactitude with which the flaying of Marsyas is described in “Apollo and Marsyas.” “Gardens in their heads,” “paths from their hair,” and “schools of images”—can these phrases “[carry their] truth alive into the heart” as Heaney clearly wishes them to? The emphasis of the first stanza is split between “gardens” and “paths” on the one hand, and the deictic “those” and its correspondent “their,” on the other. The stanza itself splits neatly between first and third lines—“those,” “head,” “hair”—and second and fourth lines—“gardens,” “cities.” The match between physical body and utopian imagery is too neat for a reader of Herbert's poetry to credit without irony. The second stanza, in Polish, is chiasmatic in structure: its first and last lines end with “write” and “images,” so that writing and creating images bookend the easy spill of overly “poetic” material. But this is not how we are accustomed to viewing poetry: twentieth-century poetry does not pour forth unbidden; contemporary Polish poetry is not a matter of closing one's eyes but of holding them painfully open. Sunny white cities and secret gardens are not emblems befitting Herbert's poetry, or Heaney's either, for that matter. It is surprising that a reader as sensitive as Heaney does not feel this misfit. Instead, he locates this stanza under the aegis of romanticism, not of modern irony. He does not choose to make much of the poem's tacit critique of solipsism: the bell echoes itself, turning the voice of external objects (trees, water) into its own noise, whereas the knocker communicates a truth that is “unprotected” and unsolipsistic: it does not reflect or echo but speaks in its own dry language. This dry language enters the moralist's poem. Heaney does, to be sure, go some distance toward this interpretation by asserting that the poem “is a lyric about a knocker which claims that lyric is inadmissible” (200).Herbert is trying to rid himself of precisely the sort of natural romantic communion with the material world for which Heaney retains sympathy: “I am fond of things. I am almost sensually attracted to them…. When I was a boy I used to look out of the window at the street outside. I saw people passing by, a brick wall and the setting sun. And in my mind's eye, I was [the] people in the street and also the wall that was soaking up the sun.”9 The adult poet eschews this all-inclusive sympathy in order to make stark divisions: “yes—yes, no—no.” Such divisions add clarity as they lessen sympathy. Heaney's character is similarly sympathetic in nature, and the process he undergoes in assimilating Herbert's example is also, to some extent, an unnatural one, establishing boundaries in place of inclusive unities, the language of moral absolutes (“the moralist's dry poem”) in place of blurry sentimentality.Herbert allows ingress to this “dry” realm even if he remains somewhat “other” for Heaney. Their unlikeness is primarily a matter of voice and of the ontology of the lyric speaker, a matter not just of his origin but of how he comes into being and how his being, as a voice, engages with the world outside of his self. Herbert's orientation toward the self is not psychological, and this is why Heaney, influenced primarily by English and American lyric traditions, finds it hard to assimilate this new way of writing the self. After his 1979 Field Work under the influence of Robert Lowell, the Herbertian poems of Station Island come as a surprise. He recollects that “it takes a while for new work to enter you deeply enough so that you can talk and be convincing to yourself about it. That historically aware, hard-bitten eastern European aesthetic meant more to me in the 1980s, as a precaution against the ahistorical, hedonistic aesthetic that I was encountering in America.”10 Heaney implicitly contrasts the “ahistorical, hedonistic” American aesthetic with the eminently historical and self-abnegating early Herbert. By the 1980s, he asserts, certain of Herbert's anthologized poems were “as familiar as anything in Hughes or Larkin.”11 The poems that Heaney encounters by Herbert are those of his early and middle period—Herbert had published four volumes by the mid-1960s—and they are marked primarily by unrelenting moral engagement with particular manifestations of cruelty and secondarily by a special interest in the physical object as instrument of judgment, a trope that proves inspirational for Heaney. They are animated by ethical injunctions, sometimes latent and sometimes patently incorporated into the poem itself. Written during the early years of Communist rule, they are read by Heaney during the escalation of the Irish Troubles. Unlike Heaney's work, however, Herbert's is marked by a fundamentally outward-directed focus toward reader and historical coparticipant rather than by an inward gaze and is uninterested in concrete detail for its own sake. Herbert's poems, like Heaney's, are spoken by an individual, yet unlike Heaney's, they often take individuality as a problem to be thought through rather than as a natural, given condition.12 Their familiarity and their similarity to Heaney are, thus, two different issues.The matter of problematizing the lyric poet's individuality—when it subsumes itself into collective endeavor (Heaney's “Our pioneers keep striking / Inwards and downwards” in “Bogland”), when it chooses to subsume its particularity of thought into simple decision (Herbert's “yes—yes, no—no”), and when it evades our attempts to give it what we call personality—provides the basic matter of Heaney's engagement with Herbert.13 His essays on the Polish “moralist” (The Government of the Tongue, 172) take on several of Herbert's canonical poems in a grand attempt to “personalize” the poet. My semi-neologism attempts to explicate Heaney's ambivalence toward the notion of impersonality, which he understands in a way that is not derived from Eliot as much as from an implicit correlation he makes between personality and emotion. Personality is not, I hold, synonymous with individuality but is the presence of a feeling psychology in the work that we can discern if we follow Heaney's sensitivities. Herbert's poetry is almost always spoken by an individual. It is not voiced by a collective. Yet it is not, most of the time, personal. In an early interview, Herbert clearly states a desire to craft “statements” that are directed to the many and that would hence be suprapersonal: “We ought to seek general statements, messages that can be addressed to everybody instead of just digging into our own unique experience.”14 The essay in which Heaney most directly addresses this desire is “Atlas of Civilization,” on Herbert's Report from the Besieged City; in particular, Heaney mentions those poems ventriloquized by the persona of “Mr. Cogito,” who, he explains, serves as “the poet's alibi / alias / persona / ventriloquist's doll / permissive correlative.” This figure, Heaney claims, lightens the “possible portentousness” of Herbert's dark, intellectual poetry because the poems' events are “happening not to ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’ but to Mr Cogito” (The Government of the Tongue, 172–73). The claim appears almost deliberately simplistic. Yet this is not a matter of authorial haste but part of a carefully orchestrated attempt to personalize Herbert, and personalization begins with individuation.Heaney's claim is even more significant for its implicit valuation of the concrete and unportentous. On the one hand, it hearkens back to a certain “portentous” strain in Heaney's own poetry: “I rhyme to see myself, / To set the darkness echoing,” he writes in the early “Personal Helicon,” and such lines often recur in his first poems on homeland and poetic vocation.15 Yet for Heaney, Herbert's portentousness also appears to be a quality linked both to generalization and to abstraction, to speech that is too broadly disseminated among members of “humanity” and to speech that gathers humanity into the singular quantity of “mankind.” Heaney is reacting to a certain type of abstraction in Herbert that goes against the grain of his own background in the British and Irish traditions, which share a certain concreteness of idiom, a tendency not to value abstraction. A frequent correspondent assumption (postromantic, post-Whitmanian) is that the self is something to be celebrated and expressed. Heaney's early exemplars—Wordsworth, Lowell, Hughes, and Kavanagh—are linked by this quality. Even the “messianic” Kavanagh grounds his poems in an expressive self, a personalized self. This vision of the lyric and, indeed, lyricizable self is a postromantic inheritance that is central to most of Heaney's work, and his attempt to emulate Herbert represents a radical departure from this aesthetic.In “Atlas of Civilization,” Heaney, listing specific titles, admires those poems that strike an “unusually intimate and elegiac note” (The Government of the Tongue, 173–74), yet it seems as though he is wishing this intimacy into existence in order to situate Herbert within—or at least, on the periphery of—Heaney's own “home” tradition(s). Let us briefly consider, for example, the following lines from “Report from the Besieged City”: “[A]nd if the City falls but a single man escapes / he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile / he will be the City.”16 There are hardly any more stirring proclamations of deep-rooted collective allegiance than this; the poem may be spoken through the singular persona of an old chronicler, but its emotion is entirely invested in the creation of this human synecdoche by which an individual, a singular self, becomes, by necessity, a part containing the whole. Its speaker is individuated but not personalized. The voice moves between intimacy and hortatory zeal. It is an emotional poem but not a personal poem. Herbert is writing from a tradition that does not develop “unusual intimacy” as readily as the Anglo-American one, which invests private psychology with a good deal of poetic credibility.17 There is no Polish Robert Lowell. Heaney searches for a particular kind of note in Herbert's poetry, yet this is not one that Herbert wishes to hear struck. The individual in Herbert's poetry is frequently a human synecdoche for the collective. In the interest of assimilating Herbert's idiom, Heaney makes a passionate attempt to press Herbert into a more recognizable literary landscape than he actually inhabits.Heaney, however, is an astute critic of his own thought processes and immediately follows his first reaction with what Helen Vendler calls “second thoughts.” He quotes Herbert's own introduction to Report from the Besieged City, in which Herbert writes, “I wanted to bestow a broader dimension on the specific, individual, experienced situation, or rather, to show its deeper, general human perspectives” (The Government of the Tongue, 174). The individual is a terminus a quo, not a terminus ad quem. The “general human perspectives” are implied to be deeper than those of the specific individual. Mr. Cogito is not fashioned to impart intimacies. Tom Paulin views him as a “Cartesian spectre … whose thought processes never lead to the consoling infinite I AM. To call Mr Cogito Herbert's poetic persona is to clothe him in the myth of the individual.”18 The poems in which Mr. Cogito fulfills his function as generic thinking man are not only more numerous than the ones in which he “strikes an unusually intimate and elegiac note,” but, Heaney concedes, more “brilliant as intellectual reconnaissance and more deadly as political resistance, and to read them is to put oneself through the mill of Herbert's own selection process, to be tested for one's comprehension of the necessity of refusal, one's ultimate gumption and awareness” (The Government of the Tongue, 173–74). An interesting dichotomy is created between intimacy and intellect, and between emotional efficacy, as it were, and political efficacy. The poems, however, go beyond the category of dissident poetry to become a testing ground for the deep ethics of writer and reader.Heaney applies this concept of poem as testing ground to the eponymous centerpiece of The Haw Lantern.The wintry haw is burning out of season,crab of the thorn, a small light for small peoplewanting no more from them than that they keepthe wick of self-respect from dying out,not having to blind them with illumination.But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frostit takes the roaming shape of Diogeneswith his lantern, seeking one just man;so you end up scrutinized from behind the hawhe holds up at eye-level on its twig,and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.19The poem calls attention to its own inability to be a sonnet: instead of octave and sestet, we have unrhymed quintet and octave. The meter is a roughly pentametric one, showing a predisposition for iambs, that never quite becomes a solid rhythm, and the lines are not quite isometric. The slant rhyme of “stone” and “on” vaguely approximates the ringing end couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet, yet the poem does not entirely conform to either Petrarchan or Shakespearean forms. The poem refers to form but does not embody it.If we insist on an iambic scheme, though, then the pattern of stress enacts subtle shifts in meaning: “so you” and “and you” would be read with a stress on the subject—“so you”—instead of on the connective “so” and “and,” which, if stressed, would foreground the narrative, paratactic quality of the poem (“so” this happened, “and” this happened). This subject is generic (much like Herbert's subjects), which is rare in Heaney's work, but his or her existence as object of moral testing is emphasized; the eighth line, which falls short of pentameter but is almost entirely composed of stressed syllables, beats the gravity of the test and its desired outcome into the reader with an insistence that iambs would not convey. At times, the meter appears anapestic, a feature that subtly hearkens back to Juvenilian satire and hence gently satirizes the position of the would-be moralist who fails the test he has imagined.“The Haw Lantern” does not actually leave Heaney's beloved home ground: it foregrounds the local haw and its seasonal life, and its linguistic home is Anglo-Saxon. The ostentatiously Latinate “illumination” and “scrutinized” are associated with blinding and scathing judgment, respectively; the “small people” fail to live up to the visionary exigency expressed by the Latin words and, of course, to the gaze of the Greek Diogenes. Heaney's volume North definitively associates northern European culture with brutality and “behind-back” violence; in The Haw Lantern and Station Island, he measures his lyric speakers by means of representatives who confront him with direct accusations, from the autobiographical self-castigations of “Station Island” to the parabolic “Haw Lantern.” “The Haw Lantern” is not abstract or grandly philosophical but incorporates concrete visual and tactile detail in order to move into the realm of ethics. Although this is the realm of moral imperatives, of yes and no, the criteria at work are not elucidated. This is an aspect of the poem's power: it does not say too much. It maintains the sort of utter discipline that Diogenes the Cynic followed in his own life—yet the poem is anything but cynical (in the contemporary sense of the word). On the contrary, it maintains the unstated, unproven yet deeply understood importance—even, perhaps, necessity—of being “scanned” as a necessary trial of conscience.The poem shares the compressed force of Herbert's famous “The Pebble” (“Kamyk”): Kamyk jest stworzeniem(The pebbledoskonałymis a perfect creaturerówny samemu sobieequal to itselfpilnującym swych granicmindful of its limitswypełniony dokładniefilled exactlykamiennym sensemwith a pebbly meaning……czuję ciężki wyrzutI feel a heavy remorsekiedy go trzymam w dłoniwhen I hold it in my handi ciało jego szlachetneand its noble bodyprzenika fałszywe ciepłois permeated by false warmth —Kamyki nie dają się oswoić —Pebbles cannot be tamed do końca będą na nas patrzeć to the end they will look at us okiem spokojnym bardzo jasnym20 with a calm and very clear eye)21 Heaney uses the 1968 translation, yet two minutiae render his version of the poem problematic: although Heaney cites it in full in “Atlas of Civilization,” he does not indent the last stanza (The Government of the Tongue, 177–78). Both Herbert's original and Miłosz's translation—reproduced here—bear the indent (Herbert's 2000 Selected Poems offers a facing-page translation on pages 38–39). The final three lines, therefore, appear to be spoken by a second voice, one that quashes the speaker's attempt, remorseful yet insistent, to “tame” the pebble by imbuing it with the “false warmth” of a tightly closed hand. The second point is etymological: the Polish verb “to tame” is “oswoić,” which has at its roots the adjective “swój,” or “one's own.” To tame something is to make it one's own or even like oneself. The pebble, thus, refuses to be humanized, to be made like something pertaining to us. Moreover, the passive construction “cannot be tamed” is active in Polish (“nie dają sie oswoić”). The point is that Polish allows Herbert to invest the pebble with more power to refuse likeness, to choose alterity, at the same time as he represents it in bodily terms, as well as to incorporate melodic effects (most notably, the insistent recurrence of the “o” vowel and the word-final “m”) that are not, unfortunately, present in the English version, though Miłosz's translation is as literal as possible. In this case, Miłosz may be seen as a mediator, though the substance of Heaney's long-term relationship with Miłosz forms a whole sto