To My Wife

By J. V. Cunningham 1911–1985

And does the heart grow old? You know

In the indiscriminate green

Of summer or in earliest snow

A landscape is another scene,

Inchoate and anonymous,

And every rock and bush and drift

As our affections alter us

Will alter with the season’s shift.

So love by love we come at last,

As through the exclusions of a rhyme,

Or the exactions of a past,

To the simplicity of time,

The antiquity of grace, where yet

We live in terror and delight

With love as quiet as regret

And love like anger in the night.

J. V. Cunningham, “To My Wife” from The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams. Copyright © 1960 by J. V. Cunningham. Reprinted with the permission of Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, Athens, Ohio.

Source: The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)

Biography

J. V. Cunningham, poet, critic, editor, and general man of letters, gained the high regard of his literary colleagues for his concise, witty, epigrammatic poetry. In a 1961 study, The Poetry of J. V. Cunningham, his mentor Yvor Winters called him "the most consistently distinguished poet writing in English today, and one of the finest in the language." About the same time, Thom Gunn wrote in a Yale Review article on The . . .

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