The enduring poetic genius of Hubert van Herreweghen (1920-2016) reveals a distinct consistency around what are essentially contrasts, namely darkness, desolation, the imminency of death and mortality, along with the burden of sin and guilt, juxtaposed against lightness, a sense of wonder about the small things in life and the feeling of being absorbed into a vast timeless whole. Even though his Christian mindset fed both ends of the spectrum, there was a remarkable shift in Van Herreweghen’s coherent oeuvre. Whereas the poet first composed mainly dark and very formal verses, his work gradually grew to reveal more light-heartedness, more self-irony, more joyful stillness and also more experiments with form. In this contribution, the coherence and shift within his poetry are illustrated by the poem ‘Toestand’ (from the collection Webben en wargaren, published in 2009), where he draws on a dramatic war experience in 1940. Only in 2002 did a first five-line version see the light of day, which was subsequently kept in his poetic archives until 2004, when the poem acquired its definitive (seven-line) form. The genesis of ‘Toestand’ shows how the biographical context of 1940 was abstracted, allowing several levels of meaning to materialise, not least the existential-religious, cosmic and poetic one. The poem also showcases the linguistic delight and the play on words that have come to epitomise Van Herreweghen’s poetry. ‘Toestand’, written in the latter half of his poetic career, is at the same time a textbook example of what at the start of his career the poet described as his poetic motto: ‘modern unrest poured into a traditional metered verse’ (1950).