Happy Winter Solstice

[rejectomorph]

Very late, the stars come out. The clouds have retreated to the high mountains to feed the snowfields. As the sky clears, it grows colder, but not cold enough to freeze the captive rain that yet drips from the pines, splashing in the lingering puddles that reflect trembling starlight. Deep darkness prevails between sky and water. The sliver of waning moon must have risen by now, but it is lost in the mountain's clouds, like one of those hermit sages in a Japanese poem. Eventually, it will clear the foggy rampart and bring those rumpled turrets a foretaste of the swiftly following day. Should the sky remain clear, I might wake to see the trees dried, and the remnant of leaves scattered on the freshly nourished lawn. A sunny afternoon would please me now; a bright winter solstice to remind me of the turn toward summer, and mark the passage of this longest night.

A BLACK BIRCH IN WINTER

by Richard Wilbur


You might not know this old tree by its bark,
Which once was striate, smooth, and glossy-dark,
So deep now are the rifts which separate
Its roughened surface into flake and plate.

Fancy might less remind you of a birch
Than of mosaic columns in a church
Like Ara Coeli or the Lateran,
Or the trenched features of an aged man.

Still, do not be too much persuaded by
These knotty furrows and these tesserae
To think of patterns made from outside-in
Or finished wisdom in a shriveled skin.

Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth,
New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth,
And this is all their wisdom and their art --
To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.

---

Comments

Re: <b>A Summer Commentary</b>

[mistermerlin.livejournal.com]

I am delighted to hear back from you, sir.

Winters is a special favorite of mine. He is still something of a legend among old Stanford grads, having taught English there from approximately 1930-1967. My Shakespeare teacher in high school used to do a rather cruel imitation of him reading his own poetry:

"O living pine be still!"

The "Complete Poems of Yvor Winters" which Swallow put out in hardback is well worth having. The short "collected poems" contains most of his crucial stuff, but I suspect you would enjoy a glance through his complete oeuvre. I also recommend the hard-to-find anthology QUEST FOR REALITY, which he compiled with Ken Fields. It is a superb, erudite, quite obscure collection. I read it several times, and am still looking for a copy of my own.

Where in California are you located? I live in San Jose. If you're keen, I would be happy to play for you, or perhaps make a tape of the rare and most enjoyable 2-LP set of Yvor Winters reading poetry live, his own and others'. His dramatic-yet-antihistrionic delivery is unique and difficult to describe.

I was very fortunate to know his wife Janet Lewis (1899-1998) in the last few years of her life. She was a fine poet in her own right and a wonderful human being. I spent some time living at her small estate in Los Altos, staying in the guest room which Auden and Nabokov would always use, and spending some late nights in the cottage where Winters did much of his writing and reflection. The portraits which he elegized in several poems still hung above the 1920s royal typewriter, which I (rather cheekily) used to churn out some of my own mediocre juvenilia.

Winters is perhaps best remembered now for his prodigious and influential output in the field of Literary Criticism. "Poetry as moral exercise" now seems an almost reactionary critical view, but I find it compelling. I think the first page of "Anatomy of Nonsense" is particularly strong.

Winters argues that if we cannot devise a system whereby we are able to determine that poem A is superior to poem B, and poem B is superior to poem C, then all poetry is equally worthless.

A pretty strong opinion, but a healthy respite from the all-too-common modern view of cultural relativism, the "alice walker is as good as shakespeare" school which makes me a bit ill.

Re: <b>A Summer Commentary</b>

[rejectomorph]

You are clearly more closely acquainted with Winters' work than I. In fact, in addition to the hardback book of his collected poems, I do have one volume called The Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Yvor Winters which contains some of his critical pieces, but I've only ever dipped into it from time to time rather than reading it through. But I've read enough of it to know that he was indeed demanding, even with (or perhaps especially with) writers he admired.

I had no idea that there were recordings of Winters reading. I would like to hear them. The town in which I live is a bit of a backwater, located north of Sacramento in the Sierra foothills a dozen or so miles east of the college town (and burgeoning mini-metropolis) of Chico. My current situation doesn't give me the chance to get away, as I am looking after my aged parents, who require daily attention. I would greatly appreciate a tape of the recordings.

I don't recall ever reading anything by Janet Lewis, though I have a couple of anthologies of modern American poetry in which some of her work might be lurking. I'll have to dig them out (most of my books being stored in boxes these days) and see. I'm actually less familiar with poetry than I'd like to be, having devoted so many years to other pursuits. Of course, the advantage to this is that now I get to discover as new many works I would undoubtedly have appreciated less had I read them when I was younger.