Down the road we go, through mountains and valleys, to the warmest town. Over the stones walk pass lost souls, shivering in colds. Sinners come across, asking for salvation from their never ending pause. On this town you can see time flirting at every corner, every park bench, at every burial. You can hear the wind that sings, the echoes from the past. Mornings come in, bringing yellow heat, until evenings fall under calm dark nights.

Winter Mask by Allen Tate (musicalized)

Winter Mask by Allen Tate (musicalized) by Sannh


To the memory of W. B. Yeats
I

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.

II

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.

IV

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.

V

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.

VI

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.