Yvor Winters 102

Thom Gunn on Yvor Winters: "He aimed, evidently, for a seriousness, a dignified tone, and the danger of that tone is that it may topple over into pomposity. It is remarkable that it does so very seldom."

And it did not do so here, a poem elevating a simple story of a lost dog to mythic proportions:

Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost
Some Years Since in the Salt-Marsh

Low to the water's edge
You plunged; the tangled herb
Locked feet and mouth, a curb
Tough with the salty sedge.

Half dog and half a child,
Sprung from that roaming bitch,
You flung through dike and ditch,
Betrayed by what is wild.

The old dogs now are dead,
Tired with the hunt and cold,
Sunk in the earth and old.
But your bewildered head,

Led by what heron cry,
Lies by what tidal stream?--
Drenched with ancestral dream,
And cast ashore to dry.