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The Dialectics of Love

By Thomas McGrath 1916–1990 Thomas McGrath

Under barley leaf and clover,

Lying cold, the faithless lover

Learns at last an amity

Which allows conformity.

Rocks and tree roots cabin him?

They will teach him discipline.

The rich and heavy turf above,

Closer press than any lover.

Virginal mortality

Closer than himself shall lie,

And all the weathers of his body bear

The frozen rigor of the winding year.

Between brother Dexter and cousin Sinister

Frontiers are open toward the human winter,

And civil war in every sector

Murders, fidelity’s frail perspective;

In the lover’s counties, the hunting heart

Is haggard wherever desires start—

In his own nets is that bright hawk taken,

A willing captive, the old ties broken.

And fearful lovers all complain

The strict modality of change;

Feeling in all their ordered parts

The rebel soviets rising up,

They cry, “I am not; be not false”—

When each day finds them someone else:

Whom every hour creates anew—

He must seem false who would be true.

What love the year shows to the spring

By autumn grows another thing.

And yet each season has its part

In the weathers of that impersonal heart:

The summer bourgeois revolution

Offers morality’s pale solution—

Over the public eye and lip

The seal of personal ownership;

Prepares the realm for civil war

When right hand and left divided are

And the split heart cannot love the more

Public virgin or private whore.

Our of these warring opposites

Arises the needed synthesis:

At nodal points the personal love

Changes, if it is pure enough,

From single idol in man or woman

To equal love for all that’s human.

And even in death the faithful lover

Under barley leaf or clover

His mating body still must share

With the transience of the winding year.

Thomas McGrath, “The Dialectics of Love” from The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems, published by Swallow Press/Ohio University Press. Copyright © 1972 by Thomas McGrath. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Source: The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems (Swallow Press, 1972)

Biography

For some fifty years, the late Thomas McGrath produced a prolific array of titles, encompassing poetry, novels, books for children, and several documentary film scripts, including uncredited work on the eloquent and exhilarating Smithsonian film about the history of flight, To Fly. But McGrath is primarily a poet, and although "important contemporary poets . . . proclaim him as a major voice in American poetry in the last three . . .

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