At the San Francisco Airport

By Yvor Winters 1900–1968 Yvor Winters

To my daughter, 1954

This is the terminal: the light

Gives perfect vision, false and hard;

The metal glitters, deep and bright.

Great planes are waiting in the yard—

They are already in the night.

And you are here beside me, small,

Contained and fragile, and intent

On things that I but half recall—

Yet going whither you are bent.

I am the past, and that is all.

But you and I in part are one:

The frightened brain, the nervous will,

The knowledge of what must be done,

The passion to acquire the skill

To face that which you dare not shun.

The rain of matter upon sense

Destroys me momently. The score:

There comes what will come. The expense

Is what one thought, and something more—

One’s being and intelligence.

This is the terminal, the break.

Beyond this point, on lines of air,

You take the way that you must take;

And I remain in light and stare—

In light, and nothing else, awake.

Yvor Winters, “At the San Francisco Airport” 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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