Home > Poems & Poets > Winter Mask

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Winter Mask

By Allen Tate 1899–1979 Allen Tate

To the memory of W. B. Yeats

Towards nightfall when the wind

Tries the eaves and casements

(A winter wind of the mind

Long gathering its will)

I lay the mind’s contents

Bare, as upon a table,

And ask, in a time of war,

Whether there is still

To a mind frivolously dull

Anything worth living for.

If I am meek and dull

And a poor sacrifice

Of perverse will to cull

The act from the attempt,

Just look into damned eyes

And give the returning glare;

For the damned like it, the more

Damnation is exempt

From what would save its heir

With a thing worth living for.

III

The poisoned rat in the wall

Cuts through the wall like a knife,

Then blind, drying, and small

And driven to cold water,

Dies of the water of life:

Both damned in eternal ice,

The traitor become the boor

Who had led his friend to slaughter,

Now bites his head—not nice,

The food that he lives for.

I supposed two scenes of hell,

Two human bestiaries,

Might uncommonly well

Convey the doom I thought;

But lest the horror freeze

The gentler estimation

I go to the sylvan door

Where nature has been bought

In rational proration

As a thing worth living for.

Should the buyer have been beware?

It is an uneven trade

For man has wet his hair

Under the winter weather

With only fog for shade:

His mouth a bracketed hole

Picked by the crows that bore

Nature to their hanged brother,

Who rattles against the bole

The thing that he lived for.

I asked the master Yeats

Whose great style could not tell

Why it is man hates

His own salvatiòn,

Prefers the way to hell,

And finds his last safety

In the self-made curse that bore

Him towards damnatiòn:

The drowned undrowned by the sea

The sea worth living for.

“Winter Mask” from Poems 1922-1947 by Allen Tate, published by Read Books in 2007. Used by permission of the Estate of Allen Tate.

Source: Poems 1922-1947 (2007)

Biography

Allen Tate was a well-known man of letters from the American South, a central figure in the fields of poetry, criticism, and ideas. In the course of a career spanning the middle decades of the twentieth century, Tate authored poems, essays, translations, and fiction. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor James T. Jones wrote that his "influence was prodigious, his circle of acquaintances immense." Tate relished his "man . . .

Continue reading this biography