The Fragile Season / Yvor Winters

The Fragile Season

The scent of summer thins,
The air grows cold.

One walks alone
And chafes one’s hands.

The fainter aspen
Thin to air.
          The dawn
Is frost on roads.

This ending of the year
Is like the lacy ending
    of a last year’s leaf
Turned up in silence.

Air gives way to cold.

~~

Yvor Winters (1900-1968)

from Poetry, September 1922

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Yvor Winters biography

An October Nocturne / Yvor Winters

An October Nocturne

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,
Hung in the lunar fire!
Spun wire and brittle veil!
And tremblingly slowly higher!

Pure in each proven line!
The balance and the aim,
Half empty, half divine!
I saw how true you came.

Dissevered from your cause,
Your function was your goal.
Oblivious of my laws,
You made your calm patrol.

~~

Yvor Winters (1900-1968)

from Poetry, March 1938

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Yvor Winters biography

Much in Little / Yvor Winters

Much in Little 

Amid the iris and the rose,
The honeysuckle and the bay,
The wild earth for a moment goes
In dust or weed another way.

Small though its corner be, the weed
Will yet intrude its creeping beard;
The harsh blade and the hairy seed
Recall the brutal earth we feared.

And if no water touch the dust
In some far corner, and one dare
To breathe upon it, one may trust
The spectre on the summer air:

The risen dust alive with fire,
The fire made visible, a blur
Interrate, the pervasive ire
Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.

~~
Yvor Winters (1900-1968)
from The Giant Weapon, 1943

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Yvor Winters biography

Moonlight Alert / Yvor Winters

Moonlight Alert

(Los Altos, California, June 1943)

The Sirens, rising, woke me; and the night
Lay cold and windless; and the moon was bright,
Moonlight from sky to earth, untaught, unclaimed,
An icy nightmare of the brute unnamed.
This was hallucination. Scarlet flower
And yellow fruit hung colorless. That hour
No scent lay on the air. The siren scream
Took on the fixity of shallow dream.
In the dead sweetness I could see the fall,
Like petals sifting from a quiet wall,
of yellow soldiers through indifferent air,
Falling to die in solitude. With care
I held this vision, thinking of young men
Whom I had known, and should not see again,
Fixed in reality, as I in thought.
And I stood waiting, and encountered naught.

~~

Yvor Winters (1900-1968)

from Poetry, November 1944

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Yvor Winters biography

"Moonlight Alert" read by Brad Craft. Courtesy usedbuyer.