Allen Tate Poems

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
...

Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
...

Last night I fled until I came
To streets where leaking casements dripped
Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame;
A nervous window bled.
...

Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell
Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red
Reverberance of hail upon the dead
...

I
Towards nightfall when the wind
Tries the eaves and casements
(A winter wind of the mind
...

There are wolves in the next room waiting
With heads bent low, thrust out, breathing
At nothing in the dark; between them and me
...

I rise, gentlemen, it is the pleasant hour.
Darkness falls. The night falls.
...

You hold your eager head
Too high in the air, you walk
As if the sleepy dead
Had never fallen to drowse
...

Think about it at will: there is that
Which is the commentary; there's that other,
Which may be called the immaculate
...

Landor, not that I doubt your word,
That you had strove with none
At seventy-five and had deferred
To nature and art alone;
...