Childhood’s Retreat

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree

out of blue sky the wind

sings loudest surrounding me.

And solitude, a wild solitude

’s reveald, fearfully, high I’d climb

into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing, part daring my self,

part to see that

widening of the world, part

to find my own, my secret

hiding sense and place, where from afar

all voices and scenes come back

—the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings,

far calls, close calls— the boy I was

calls out to me

here the man where I am “Look!

I’ve been where you

most fear to be.”

Robert Duncan, “Childhood’s Retreat” from Ground Work: Before the War. Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1982, 1984 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Ground Work: Before the War (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1984)

Biography

Described by Kenneth Rexroth as “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan was an important part of both the Black Mountain school of poetry, led by Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, whose other members included poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. A distinctive voice in American poetry, Duncan’s idiosyncratic poetics drew on myth, occultism, . . .

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