Yvor Winters: Selected Poems

edited by thom gunn

Introduction

from The Early Poems of Yvor Winters, 1920-28 (1966)

Two Songs of Advent

One Ran Before

Song for a Small Boy Who Herds Goats

Alone

The Magpie's Shadow

I. In Winter

Myself

Still Morning

Awakening

Winter Echo

The Hunter

No Being

II. In Spring

Spring

May

Spring Rain

Song

III. In Summer and Autumn

Sunrise

Fields

At Evening

Cool Nights

Sleep

The Aspen's Song

The Walker

Blue Mountain

God of Roads

September

A Lady

Alone

A Deer

Man in Desert

Desert

The End

High Valleys

Awaiting Snow

The Bare Hills

I. Upper River Country: Rio Grande

I. Hill Burial

II. The Precincts of February

III. The Resurrection

IV. Tewa Spring

V. Dark Spring

VI. The Crystal Sun

VII. Josý's Country

VIII. The Upper Meadows

IX. The Moonlight

X. October

XI. The Impalpable Void

XII. "The Fragile Season"

II. The Bare Hills

I. Genesis

II. Exodus

III. The Vigil

IV. Moonrise

V. Alba for Hecate

I. The Cold

II. Digue dondaine, digue dondon

III. Nocturne

IV. "Quod Tegit Omnia"

I. March Dusk

II. The Lamplight

III. Flesh of Flowers

IV. Under Rain

V. Midnight Wind

I. Complaint

II. The Muezzin

III. Song

IV. April

V. Song

I. Full Moon

II. Love Song

III. Sleep

I. The Cold Room

II. The Bare Hills

III. The Dead: Mazda Wake

IV. The Barnyard

V. The Grosbeaks

I. The Streets

II. The Rows of Cold Trees

III. Prayer beside a Lamp

IV. Man Regards Eternity in Aging

III. The Passing Night

I. Eternity

II. The Passing Night

The Solitude of Glass

Fire Sequence

1. Coal: Beginning and End

2. Liberation

3. Return of Spring

4. Bill

5. The Vanquished

6. The Victor

7. A Miner

8. Vacant Lot

9. Tragic Love

10. To the Crucified

11. O Sun!

12. November

13. Genesis

14. The Bitter Moon

15. The Deep: A Service for All the Dead

Orange Tree

Song of the Trees

The Goatherds

Bison

Wild Sunflower

Snow-Ghost

The Vigil

Simplex Munditiis

from Collected Poems (1960)

The Moralists

The Realization

To William Dinsmore Briggs Conducting His Seminar

The Invaders

The Castle of Thorns

Apollo and Daphne

The Fable

The Empty Hills

Moonrise

The Fall of Leaves

Inscription for a Graveyard

The Last Visit

For Howard Baker

The Slow Pacific Swell

The Marriage

On a View of Pasadena from the Hills

The Journey

A Vision

To a Young Writer

By the Road to the Air-Base

Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost Some Years

Since in the Salt-Marsh

Midas

Sonnet to the Moon

The Anniversary

Before Disaster

The Prince

Phasellus Ille

Orpheus

On the Death of Senator Thomas J. Walsh

Dedication for a Book of Criticism

A Leave-Taking

On Teaching the Young

Chiron

Heracles

Alcmena

Theseus: A Trilogy

Socrates

To Edwin V. McKenzie

To a Woman on Her Defense of Her Brother Unjustly Convicted of Murder

To David Lamson

John Day, Frontiersman

John Sutter

The California Oaks

On Rereading a Passage from John Muir

The Manzanita

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight

An October Nocturne

A Spring Serpent

Much in Little

The Cremation

An Elegy

Time and the Garden

To a Portrait of Melville in My Library

A Prayer for My Son

In Praise of California Wines

A Summer Commentary

On the Portrait of a Scholar of the Italian

Renaissance

A Dedication in Postscript

A Winter Evening

Summer Noon: 1941

To a Military Rifle 1942

For the Opening of the William Dinsmore Briggs Room

Moonlight Alert

Defense of Empire

Night of Battle

An Ode on the Despoilers of Learning in an American University, 1947

To Herman Melville in 1951

To the Holy Spirit

A Fragment

A Song in Passing

To the Moon

At the San Francisco Airport

Two Old-Fashioned Songs

from Collected Poems (1978)

To Herbert Dean Meritt

Uncollected Poems

"Aere Caliginoso"

A White Spiritual

The Brink of Darkness

Biographical Note

Note on the Texts

Notes

Index of Titles and First Lines