Yvor Winters 301

Overall there’s something that doesn’t move me in most Yvor Winters poems; they’re over-rational. The ones that do move me usually touch on nature in some manner (although I think I may be on the other side of Winters' fence.) These particular poems like “By the Road to the Air-Base” and “Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost Some Years Since in the Salt-Marsh” touch upon a world not ordered. Even if the poet will insist it is.

It might be a problem I have with much formal poetry. I sometimes think that meter for many is more than a means with which to paint the world. It becomes a metaphor as well. Robert Frost called poetry a “momentary stay against confusion”. But it is one thing to use our reason to try to make order in the world; it is entirely another to insist that order is anything but man-made.

John Day, Frontiersman

Among the first and farthest! Elk and deer
Fell as your rifle rang in rocky caves;
There your lean shadow swept the still frontier,
Your eyes regarded the Columbia’s waves.

Amid the stony winter, gray with care,
Haunted by savages from sleep to sleep
--Those patriots of darkness and despair!—
You climbed in solitude what rigid steep!

Broken at last by very force of frame,
By wintry hunger like a warrior’s brand,
You died a madman. And now bears your name
A gentle river in a fertile land.

The eminence is gone that met your eye;
The winding savage, too, has sunk away.
Now, like a summer myth, the meadows lie,
Deep in the calm of sylvan slow decay.


The first thing to notice in this wonderfully-written poem is its take on Indians: “patriots of darkness and despair.” Interesting choice of description. Wendell Berry has theorized that there’s always a new Indian to take the place of the old. I won’t venture too far into politics here and mention that the American middle class working-man is now one (while unions are marginalized, jobs move off shores, and the tax burden is shifted upon them) but this poem ends with a new one. Nature is always the enemy. No wonder he detested Emerson.