Today’s Poem: I Sought the Wood in Winter

Willa Cather’s vision of immutable beauty

Michał Gorstkin-Wywiórski, Winter Sunset, 1906 (Wikimedia Commons)

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I Sought the Wood in Winter

by Willa Cather

I sought the wood in summer
             When every twig was green;
The rudest boughs were tender,
            And buds were pink between.
Light-fingered aspens trembled
            In fitful sun and shade,
And daffodils were golden
            In every starry glade.
The brook sang like a robin —
            My hand could check him where
The lissome maiden willows
            Shook out their yellow hair.

“How frail a thing is Beauty,”
            I said, “when every breath
She gives the vagrant summer
            But swifter woos her death.
For this the star dust troubles,
            For this have ages rolled:
To deck the wood for bridal
            And slay her with the cold.”

I sought the wood in winter
            When every leaf was dead;
Behind the wind-whipped branches
            The winter sun set red.
The coldest star was rising
            To greet that bitter air,
The oaks were writhen giants;
            Nor bud nor bloom was there.
The birches, white and slender,
            In deathless marble stood,
The brook, a white immortal,
            Slept silent in the wood.

“How sure a thing is Beauty,”
            I cried. “No bolt can slay,
No wave nor shock despoil her,
            No ravishers dismay.
Her warriors are the angels
            That cherish from afar,
Her warders people Heaven
            And watch from every star.
The granite hills are slighter,
            The sea more like to fail;
Behind the rose the planet,
            The Law behind the veil.”
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Regular readers of Poems Ancient and Modern will recall that we share a particular, possibly eccentric interest in poems by authors not primarily recognized for their poetry. We’ve featured Henry VIII, for example, who was known for many other things besides poetry, but also a number of writers acknowledged chiefly for their prose fiction: Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Katherine Mansfield, and, among American writers, Willa Cather.

For some of these writers, such as Austen, writing a poem was the sort of thing one might do simply in fun. It was one gesture, out of a whole stable of accomplishments that a literate person could draw upon in need, to embellish a letter to a friend, in the same way that one might play the piano and sing to embellish an evening in the drawing room.

For other writers, poetry was a serious aspiration, and only some cast of fate has marked them forever as writers of prose, not verse. John Updike wanted, not without reason, also to be remembered as a poet. And perhaps uniquely, Thomas Hardy simply stopped writing novels, let the poetry take over for the remainder of a long life, and thus engineered an enduring and balanced reputation as a writer who did both.

Today’s Poem by Willa Cather recalls us once again to this second type of novelist-poet as a phenomenon, but also to Cather herself in her lesser-known guise. Like “Fides, Spes,” featured here last spring, “I Sought the Wood in Winter” comes from Cather’s 1903 book of poems, April Twilights, which met with such tepid critical reception that she bought up all the publisher’s remaining copies and burned them — although in 1923, the same year as her Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours, she published an expanded edition of that poetry collection, entitled April Twilights and Other Poems.

Willa Cather, c. 1906 (Wikimedia Commons)

As in “Fides, Spes,” the speaker in Today’s Poem takes up again the position of observer: not merely an onlooker, but a reader of the text of the natural world, with its imagery. Its twelve-line trimeter stanzas (though stanza 2 is an octave), with their rhymes in the even-numbered lines, could be read as sestets in rhyming hexameter couplets (or, in the case of stanza 2, a quatrain).

The unrhymed odd lines, ending on unstressed syllables, seem to anticipate resolution in the lines that follow them. In the larger thematic arc of the poem, this pattern of incompletion and anticipated resolution repeats itself in the speaker’s reading of the wood in its opposing seasons, summer and winter, with their corresponding narratives of beauty.

The summer’s beauty, though undeniable, is frail and fleeting, even deceptive — we might find such beauty personified in the lovely, effervescent, all too tragically mortal Marie Tovesky of Cather’s 1913 novel O Pioneers. The winter, meanwhile, stark and stripped to its essence, points to beauty’s rootedness in eternal law, a matter not of transient prettiness, but of something immutably true.

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