Yvor Winters

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.

Achilles Holt, Stanford, 1930 Here for a few short years Strengthen affections; meet, Later, the dull arrears Of age, and be discreet. The angry blood burns low. Some friend of lesser mind Discerns you not; but so Your solitude’s defined. Write little; do it well. Your knowledge will be such, At last, as to dispel What moves you overmuch.

The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like a tranquil dwelling-place. And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: I long to crowd the little garden, gain Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small And taste it in a moment, time and all! These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years, I would expand to greatness. No one hears, And I am still retarded in duress! And this is like that other restlessness To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned, One which the tougher poets have discerned— Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne, Poets who wrote great poems, one by one, And spaced by many years, each line an act Through which few labor, which no men retract. This passion is the scholar’s heritage, The imposition of a busy age, The passion to condense from book to book Unbroken wisdom in a single look, Though we know well that when this fix the head, The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.

Far out of sight forever stands the sea, Bounding the land with pale tranquillity. When a small child, I watched it from a hill At thirty miles or more. The vision still Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away: The rain has washed the dust from April day; Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground; The wind above the hill-top has the sound Of distant water in unbroken sky; Dark and precise the little steamers ply- Firm in direction they seem not to stir. That is illusion. The artificer Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise And holds the ocean steady to my eyes. Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull; Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair. Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare. I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. That was the ocean. From the ship we saw Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw, The blunt head plunging clean above the wave. And one rose in a tent of sea and gave A darkening shudder; water fell away; The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray. A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound. I would be near it on a sandy mound, And hear the steady rushing of the deep While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep. I have lived inland long. The land is numb. It stands beneath the feet, and one may come Walking securely, till the sea extends Its limber margin, and precision ends. By night a chaos of commingling power, The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour. The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand, Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land, Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind; Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.

Reptilian green the wrinkled throat, Green as a bough of yew the beard; He bent his head, and so I smote; Then for a thought my vision cleared. The head dropped clean; he rose and walked; He fixed his fingers in the hair; The head was unabashed and talked; I understood what I must dare. His flesh, cut down, arose and grew. He bade me wait the season’s round, And then, when he had strength anew, To meet him on his native ground. The year declined; and in his keep I passed in joy a thriving yule; And whether waking or in sleep, I lived in riot like a fool. He beat the woods to bring me meat. His lady, like a forest vine, Grew in my arms; the growth was sweet; And yet what thoughtless force was mine! By practice and conviction formed, With ancient stubbornness ingrained, Although her body clung and swarmed, My own identity remained. Her beauty, lithe, unholy, pure, Took shapes that I had never known; And had I once been insecure, Had grafted laurel in my bone. And then, since I had kept the trust, Had loved the lady, yet was true, The knight withheld his giant thrust And let me go with what I knew. I left the green bark and the shade, Where growth was rapid, thick, and still; I found a road that men had made And rested on a drying hill.

The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands When imperceptive hands, Feeling, have gone astray. It is what one should say. Few minds will come to this. The poet’s only bliss Is in cold certitude— Laurel, archaic, rude.

From the high terrace porch I watch the dawn. No light appears, though dark has mostly gone, Sunk from the cold and monstrous stone. The hills Lie naked but not light. The darkness spills Down the remoter gulleys; pooled, will stay Too low to melt, not yet alive with day. Below the windows, the lawn, matted deep Under its close-cropped tips with dewy sleep, Gives off a faint hush, all its plushy swarm Alive with coolness reaching to be warm. Gray windows at my back, the massy frame Dull with the blackness that has not a name; But down below, the garden is still young, Of five years’ growth, perhaps, and terrace-hung, Drop by slow drop of seeping concrete walls. Such are the bastions of our pastorals! Here are no palms! They once lined country ways, Where old white houses glared down dusty days, With small round towers, blunt-headed through small trees. Those towers are now the hiving place of bees. The palms were coarse; their leaves hung thick with dust; The roads were muffled deep. But now deep rust Has fastened on the wheels that labored then. Peace to all such, and to all sleeping men! I lived my childhood there, a passive dream In the expanse of that recessive scheme. Slow air, slow fire! O deep delay of Time! That summer crater smoked like slaking lime, The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, That where I pushed my way the giant hush Was changed to soft explosion as the sage Broke down to powdered ash, the sift of age, And fell along my path, a shadowy rift. On these rocks now no burning ashes drift; Mowed lawn has crept along the granite bench; The yellow blossoms of acacia drench The dawn with pollen; and, with waxen green, The long leaves of the eucalypti screen The closer hills from view—lithe, tall, and fine, And nobly clad with youth, they bend and shine. The small dark pool, jutting with living rock, Trembles at every atmospheric shock, Blurred to its depth with the cold living ooze. From cloudy caves, heavy with summer dews, The shyest and most tremulous beings stir, The pulsing of their fins a lucent blur, That, like illusion, glances off the view. The pulsing mouths, like metronomes, are true, This is my father’s house, no homestead here That I shall live in, but a shining sphere Of glass and glassy moments, frail surprise, My father’s phantasy of Paradise; Which melts upon his death, which he attained With loss of heart for every step he gained. Too firmly gentle to displace the great, He crystallized this vision somewhat late; Forbidden now to climb the garden stair, He views the terrace from a window chair. His friends, hard shaken by some twenty years, Tremble with palsy and with senile fears, In their late middle age gone cold and gray. Fine men, now broken. That the vision stay, They spend astutely their depleted breath, With tired ironic faces wait for death. Below the garden the hills fold away. Deep in the valley, a mist fine as spray, Ready to shatter into spinning light, Conceals the city at the edge of night. The city, on the tremendous valley floor, Draws its dream deeper for an instant more, Superb on solid loam, and breathing deep, Poised for a moment at the edge of sleep. Cement roads mark the hills, wide, bending free Of cliff and headland. Dropping toward the sea, Through suburb after suburb, vast ravines Swell to the summer drone of fine machines. The driver, melting down the distance here, May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer Or pass the faint head set perplexedly. And man-made stone outgrows the living tree, And at its rising, air is shaken, men Are shattered, and the tremor swells again, Extending to the naked salty shore, Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.

Europe: 1944 as regarded from a great distance Impersonal the aim Where giant movements tend; Each man appears the same; Friend vanishes from friend. In the long path of lead That changes place like light No shape of hand or head Means anything tonight. Only the common will For which explosion spoke; And stiff on field and hill The dark blood of the folk.

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 Interrate, the pervasive ire Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.

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.