A Spell before Winter by Howard Nemerov

A Spell before Winter

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. 

Howard Nemerov

Kang-i Sun Chang 新增了 2 張相片。

7小時 · 

Many many thanks to Jiayan Mi 米佳燕 for taking us to the Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail in Princeton, where I found this poem by my former teacher Howard Nemerov (1920-1991).

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The Desuetude of Howard Nemerov - Cosmoetica

www.cosmoetica.com/TOP54-DES51.htm

  Howard Nemerov was born March 1, 1920 in New York, New York. He graduated from the Society for Ethical Culture's Fieldstone School in 1937 and went on to study at Harvard, earning a bachelor's degree in 1941. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U. S. Army Air Force. He married in 1944, and after the war returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book. He then began teaching, first at Hamilton College and later at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Washington University, where he was Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death.

  Nemerov's numerous collections of poetry include Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press, 1991); The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize; The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968); Mirrors and Windows (1958); The Salt Garden (1955); and The Image of the Law(1947). His novels have also been commended; they include The Homecoming Game (1957), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954), and The Melodramatists (1949). Nemerov received many awards and honors, among them fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the National Medal of the Arts. He served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1963 and 1964, as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets beginning in 1976, and as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City, Missouri.

Kang-i Sun Chang 新增了 2 張相片。

28分鐘 · 

The last time I studied with the poet Howard Nemerov was in spring 1973. The last assignment I did in his class was a poem in imitation of Emily Dickinson. Nemerov was a Formalist, to whom rhyme and meter were absolutely important. He died of cancer on July 5, 1991. To this date I'm grateful to him for his mentorship.