Time and the Garden

By Yvor Winters 1900–1968 Yvor Winters

The spring has darkened with activity.

The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:

Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,

Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.

These will advance in their due series, space

The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.

And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein:

I long to crowd the little garden, gain

Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small

And taste it in a moment, time and all!

These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years,

I would expand to greatness. No one hears,

And I am still retarded in duress!

And this is like that other restlessness

To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,

One which the tougher poets have discerned—

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,

Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,

And spaced by many years, each line an act

Through which few labor, which no men retract.

This passion is the scholar’s heritage,

The imposition of a busy age,

The passion to condense from book to book

Unbroken wisdom in a single look,

Though we know well that when this fix the head,

The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.

Yvor Winters, “Time and the Garden” 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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