Stranger

By Allen Tate 1899–1979 Allen Tate

This is the village where the funeral

Stilted its dusty march over deep ruts

Up the hillside covered with queen’s lace

To the patch of weeds known finally to all.

Of her virtues large tongues were loud

As I, a stranger, trudged the streets

Gay with huckstering: loud whispers from a few

Sly wags who squeezed a humor from the shroud.

For this was death.

I should never see these men again

And yet, like the swiftness of remembered evil—

An issue for conscience, say—

The cold heart of death was beating in my brain:

A new figuration of an old phenomenon.

This is the village where women walk the streets

Selling eggs, breasts ungathered, hands like rawhide;

Of their virtues the symbol can be washtubs

But when they die it is a time of singing,

And then the symbol changes with change of place.

Let the wags wag as the pall-bearers climb the hill.

Let a new slab look off into the sunset:

The night drops down with sullen grace.

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 . . .

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