The somber mood of a mid-December Sunday morning twilight calls for a somber bit of Sunday verse:
THE ROWS OF COLD TREES
by Yvor Winters
To be my own Messiah to the
burning end. Can one endure the
acrid, steeping darkness of
the brain, which glitters and is
dissipated? Night. The night is
winter and a dull man bending,
muttering above a freezing pipe;
and I, bent heavily on books; the
mountain, iron in my sleep and
ringing; but the pipe has frozen, haired with
unseen veins, and cold is on the eyelids: who can remedy this vision?
________________________I have walked upon
the streets between the trees that
grew unleaved from asphalt in a night of
sweating winter in distracted silence.
____________________________________I have
walked among the tombs -- the rushing of the air
in the rich pines above my head is that which
ceaseth not nor stirreth whence it is:
in this the sound of wind is like a flame.
It was the dumb decision of the
madness of my youth that left me with
this cold eye for the fact; that keeps me
quiet, walking toward a
stinging end: I am alone,
and, like the alligator cleaving timeless mud,
among the blessed who have Latin names.
(I'm attempting something with a bit of code I just learned to see if it can be used to approximate the typographical format of this poem, since I have no idea how to do such a thing properly with HTML. My apologies to you (and the ghost of Yvor Winters) if my experiment fails.)