Yvor Winters 302

On Rereading a Passage from John Muir

Seeking in vain to find the heroic brow,
The subject fitting for a native ode,
I turn from thinking, for there haunts me now
A wrinkled figure on a dusty road:
Climbing from path to path, from path to rock,
From rock to live oak, thence to mountain bay,
Through unmoved twilight, where the rifle’s shock
Was half absorbed by leaves and drawn away,
Through mountain lilac, where the brown deer lay.

This was my childhood’s revery: to be
Not one who seeks in nature his release,
But one forever by the dripping tree,
Paradisaic in his pristine peace.
I might have been this man: a knowing eye
Moving on leaf and bark, a quiet gauge
Of growing timber and of climbing fly,
A quiet hand to fix them on the page—
A gentle figure from a simpler age.


What a grand first stanza. In one sentence we turn from the the bookish to a shot deer in nine masterful lines (of coures I love that final couplet), turned by that suggestive fourth: “A wrinkled figure on a dusty road”. The 5th and 6th look almost prosaic except for their use of repetition (path) and sound (rock, rock, oak); they never slacken the journey to that sixth line where out of the “unmoved twilight” a rifle shocks. Then it echoes softly to the spot where the “deer lay”. I could read this stanza all night.

The next stanza speaks paragraphs about Winters: “to be / Not one who seeks in nature his release.” The irony of his paradisaic peace reverberates into an elegiac tone that plays with the violence preceding it back to the written page using such invocative language: “knowing eye”, “quiet gauge”, “quiet hand”, “fix them”. To end with “a gentler figure” would be prize enough, but to turn it upside-down with “a simpler age” is a master stroke.

For me Winters is best when treating the natural with his classical touch, and here he does that and more. It’s a confessional poem of the best breeding. There’s psychological depth, formal distancing, and ironic understanding. Not to mention its circular integrity. There's an honesty that uses the setting and the form in more ways than one can understand in one reading. I've come back to this one among all the ones in the American Poets Project selected poems not just to understand the poem, but to understand the poet.

previous Yvor Winters posts:
Yvor Winters 301
Yvor Winters 202
Yvor Winters 201
Yvor Winters 102
Yvor Winters 101