Much in Little

By Yvor Winters 1900–1968 Yvor Winters

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, “Much in Little” from The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters, edited by R. L. Barth. Used by permission of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio.

Source: The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters (1960)

Biography

Allen Tate once commented on Yvor Winters the poet thus: "If he has been neglected—when he has not been ignored—the reasons are not hard to find. He has conducted a poetic revolution all his own that owes little or nothing to the earlier revolution of Pound and Eliot, and that goes back to certain great, likewise neglected Tudor poets for metrical and stylistic models." Winters commented to Contemporary Authors: "Tate is wrong . . .

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