To Yvor Winters, 1955

By Thom Gunn 1929–2004 Thom Gunn

I leave you in your garden.

In the yard

Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared

With boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour:

Dog-generations you have trained the vigour

That few can breed to train and fewer still

Control with the deliberate human will.

And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,

The accumulations that compose the self—

Poem and history: for if we use

Words to maintain the actions that we choose,

Our words, with slow defining influence,

Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments.

Continual temptation waits on each

To renounce his empire over thought and speech,

Till he submit his passive faculties

To evening, come where no resistance is;

The unmotivated sadness of the air

Filling the human with his own despair.

Where now lies power to hold the evening back?

Implicit in the grey is total black:

Denial of the discriminating brain

Brings the neurotic vision, and the vein

Of necromancy. All as relative

For mind as for the sense, we have to live

In a half-world, not ours nor history’s,

And learn the false from half-true premisses.

But sitting in the dusk—though shapes combine,

Vague mass replacing edge and flickering line,

You keep both Rule and Energy in view,

Much power in each, most in the balanced two:

Ferocity existing in the fence

Built by an exercised intelligence.

Though night is always close, complete negation

Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,

Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,

Still it is right to know the force of death,

And, as you do, persistent, tough in will,

Raise from the excellent the better still.

Thom Gunn, “To Yvor Winters, 1955” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Thom Gunn. Used by permission of Noonday Press, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1994)

Biography

An English poet who has been a long-time resident of California, Thom Gunn combines a respect for traditional poetic forms with an interest in popular topics, such as the Hell's Angels, LSD, and homosexuality. While Gunn wrote most of his early verses in iambic pentameter—a phase when his ambition was "to be the John Donne of the twentieth century"—his more recent works assume a variety of forms, including syllabic stanzas and . . .

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