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Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters

Night of Battle

Europe: 1944
as regarded from a great distance
 
 
Impersonal the aim
Where giant movements tend;
Each man appears the same;
Friend vanishes from friend.
 
 
In the long path of lead
That changes place like light
No shape of hand or head
Means anything tonight.
 
 
Only the common will
For which explosion spoke;
And stiff on field and hill
The dark blood of the folk.

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Other works by Yvor Winters...
The Fable

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The night was faint and sheer; Immobile, road and dune. Then, for a moment, clear, A plane moved past the moon. O spirit cool and frail,
Sonnet to the Moon

Now every leaf, though colorless,… With disembodied and celestial lig… And drops without a movement or a… A pillar of darkness to the shifti… The lucent, thin, and alcoholic fl…
On Teaching the Young

The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands
A Song in Passing

Where am I now? And what Am I to say portends? Death is but death, and not The most obtuse of ends. No matter how one leans
John Sutter

I was the patriarch of the shining… Of the blond summer and metallic g… Men vanished at the motion of my h… And when I beckoned they would co… The earth grew dense with grain at…
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The branches, jointed, pointing up and out, shine out like brass. Upon the heavy
Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight

Reptilian green the wrinkled throa… Green as a bough of yew the beard; He bent his head, and so I smote; Then for a thought my vision clear… The head dropped clean; he rose an…
Time and the Garden

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At the San Francisco Airport

This is the terminal: the light Gives perfect vision, false and ha… The metal glitters, deep and brigh… Great planes are waiting in the ya… They are already in the night.
To Emily Dickinson

Dear Emily, my tears would burn y… But for the fire-dry line that mak… Burning my eyes, my fingers, while… Singly the words that crease my he… If I could make some tortured pil…
Two Songs of Advent

On the desert, between pale mounta… Far whispers creeping through an a… Coyote, on delicate mocking feet, Hovers down the canyon, among the… His voice running wild in the wind…
To the Holy Spirit

Immeasurable haze: The desert valley spreads Up golden river-beds As if in other days. Trees rise and thin away,
 1
On a View of Pasadena From the Hills

From the high terrace porch I wat… No light appears, though dark has… Sunk from the cold and monstrous s… Lie naked but not light. The dark… Down the remoter gulleys; pooled,…
The Slow Pacific Swell

Far out of sight forever stands th… Bounding the land with pale tranqu… When a small child, I watched it… At thirty miles or more. The visi… Lies in the eye, soft blue and far…



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