To Yvor Winters, 1955

I leave you in your garden. In the yard Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared With boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour: Dog-generations you have trained the vigour That few can breed to train and fewer still Control with the deliberate human will. And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf, The accumulations that compose the self— Poem and history: for if we use Words to maintain the actions that we choose, Our words, with slow defining influence, Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments. Continual temptation waits on each To renounce his empire over thought and speech, Till he submit his passive faculties To evening, come where no resistance is; The unmotivated sadness of the air Filling the human with his own despair. Where now lies power to hold the evening back? Implicit in the grey is total black: Denial of the discriminating brain Brings the neurotic vision, and the vein Of necromancy. All as relative For mind as for the sense, we have to live In a half-world, not ours nor history’s, And learn the false from half-true premisses. But sitting in the dusk—though shapes combine, Vague mass replacing edge and flickering line, You keep both Rule and Energy in view, Much power in each, most in the balanced two: Ferocity existing in the fence Built by an exercised intelligence. Though night is always close, complete negation Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion, Night from the air or the carnivorous breath, Still it is right to know the force of death, And, as you do, persistent, tough in will, Raise from the excellent the better still.