Dark spring
My mother
Foresaw deaths
And walked among
Chrysanthemums,
Winecolored,
Withe red rose,
The earthy blossoms.
My very breath
Disowned
In nights of study,
And page by page
I came on spring.
The rats run on the roof,
These words come hard---
Sadder than cockcrow
In a dreamless, earthen sleep.
The Christ, eternal
In the scented cold; my love,
[...] Read more
poem by Yvor Winters
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An October Nocturne
The night was faint and sheer;
Immobile, road and dune.
Then, for a moment, clear,
A plane moved past the moon.
O spirit cool and frail,
Hung in the lunar fire!
Spun wire and brittle veil!
And tremblingly slowly higher!
Pure in each proven line!
The balance and the aim,
Half empty, half divine!
I saw how true you came.
Dissevered from your cause,
Your function was your goal.
Oblivious of my laws,
You made your calm patrol.
poem by Yvor Winters
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By the Road to the Air Base
The calloused grass lies hard
Against the cracking plain:
Life is a grayish stain;
The salt-marsh hems my yard.
Dry dikes rise hill on hill;
In sloughs of tidal slime
Shellfish deposit lime,
Wild seafowl creep at will.
The highway, like a beach,
Turns whiter, shadowy, dry:
Loud, pale against the sky,
The bombing planes hold speech.
Yet fruit grows on the trees;
Here scholars pause to speak;
Through gardens bare and Greek
I hear my neighbor's bees.
poem by Yvor Winters
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The Fable
Beyond the steady rock the steady sea,
In movement more immovable than station,
Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes,
A slow obscure metonymy of motion,
Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain.
But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes
A steady quiet of the steady music,
Massive with peace.
And listen, now:
The foam receding down the sand silvers
Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words,
Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering.
poem by Yvor Winters
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Much In Little
Amid the iris and the rose,
The honeysuckle and the bay,
The wild earth for a moment goes
In dust or weed another way.
Small though its corner be, the weed
Will yet intrude its creeping beard;
The harsh blade and the hairy seed
Recall the brutal earth we feared.
And if no water touch the dust
In some far corner, and one dare
To breathe upon it, one may trust
The spectre on the summer air:
The risen dust alive with fire,
The fire made visible, a blur
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poem by Yvor Winters
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The Empty Hills
The grandeur of deep afternoons,
The pomp of haze on marble hills,
Where every white-walled villa swoons
Through violence that heat fulfills,
Pass tirelessly and more alone
Than kings that time has laid aside.
Safe on their massive sea of stone
The empty tufted gardens ride.
Here is no music, where the air
Drives slowly through the airy leaves.
Meaning is aimless motion where
The sinking humming bird conceives.
No book nor picture has inlaid
This life with darkened gold, but here
Men passionless and dumb invade
A quiet that entrances fear.
poem by Yvor Winters
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The Precision
God spoke once in the dark: dead sound
in the dead silence. I turned
in my sleep.
I slept and sank away.
Then breath by breath I rose
a rigid skeleton
of thought spread over all the
night maintained by faith alone afraid
to waken, nay, afraid to stir
in sleep.
;I, face to face
with my own image.
;Mine, Rock, thought, and
rock. Concrete the flesh - it lay
within me, turned, cold
in the living sheets.
Suspended on cold iron, branded on air.
poem by Yvor Winters
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The Moralists
You would extend the mind beyond the act,
Furious, bending, suffering in thin
And unpoetic dicta; you have been
Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fact.
As metal singing hard, with firmness racked,
You formulate our passion; and behind
In some harsh moment nowise of the mind
Lie the old meanings your advance has packed.
No man can hold existence in the head.
I, too, have known the anguish of the right
Amid this net of mathematic dearth,
And the brain throbbing like a ship at night:
Have faced with old unmitigated dread
The hard familiar wrinkles of the earth.
poem by Yvor Winters
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Sonnet to the Moon
Now every leaf, though colorless, burns bright
With disembodied and celestial light,
And drops without a movement or a sound
A pillar of darkness to the shifting ground.
The lucent, thin, and alcoholic flame
Runs in the stubble with a nervous aim,
But, when the eye pursues, will point with fire
Each single stubble-tip and strain no higher.
O triple goddess! Contemplate my plight!
Opacity, my fate! Change, my delight!
The yellow tom-cat, sunk in shifting fur,
Changes and dreams, a phosphorescent blur.
Sullen I wait, but still the vision shun.
Bodiless thoughts and thoughtless bodies run.
poem by Yvor Winters
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To Emily Dickinson
Dear Emily, my tears would burn your page,
But for the fire-dry line that makes them burn—
Burning my eyes, my fingers, while I turn
Singly the words that crease my heart with age.
If I could make some tortured pilgrimage
Through words or Time. or the blank pain of Doom
And kneel before you as you found your tomb,
Then I might rise to face my heritage.
Yours was an empty upland solitude
Bleached to the powder of a dying name;
The mind, lost in a word’s lost certitude
That faded as the fading footsteps came
To trace an epilogue to words grown odd
In that hard argument which led to God.
poem by Yvor Winters
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