Yvor Winters 101

I recently purchased the American Poets Project issue of Yvor Winter's Selected Poems. The series, published by the Library of America, is nicely done; this one comes with an introduction by Thom Gunn. Winters is a fascinating study for any poet who has journeyed from free verse to form, for that's exactly what he did. He began writing free verse, in early instances one-line poems. Gunn says Winters came to believe that "accumulated and juxtaposed intensities of image to not amount to thought." Meter and rhyme would come to give him a means to make a more meaningful connection.

Here's a free verse poem:

Dark spring

My mother
Foresaw deaths
And walked among
Chrysanthemums,
Winecolored,
Withered 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,
Her hand on the sill
White, as if out of earth;
And spring, the sleep of the dead.



And then one in meter:

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.
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Enjoy your weekend reading. Yvor Winters 102 to come.