Reference Points
Stranger within • Generation gap • Midwinter spring • Silent revolution • Trees, travelling • Under the wave • Magnolia • Augury • Four elements • Peacocks • Old house • Rainbird • Apocalypse
Histories
Historian • Portraits • The janitor • Ancestors • Yesterday's loss • Counter-revolution • Prayer of an elder • Robert Lowell • Social control • Waitomo • Parihaka • Rongopai
Myths and Emblems
Counter talk • The empty chair • The candle • Wave and shell • Increase and multiply • November 1978 • Rumpelstiltskin • Thumbelina • The swineherd • A Japanese tale • Solstice
Source: Out of Season: Poems. Wellington; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980
Electronic source: Out of Season: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
Robert Lowell
Celebrate Robert Lowell, of all the masters the one
whose voice rings truly of the ambiguous years
endured by conscripts in an obscure battle
never concluded and for a time called Vietnam.
So many shadows lengthen over the world;
his gangling outline has an awkwardness
more human than most, four hundred sonnets long
stretching at sunset back the way he came.
It needed a puritan generations deep,
a veteran of faiths, to hold in check
that major public grief, to march on the Pentagon
with a wry humour, knowing before he began
that the evil would never depart, to make a place
beside it for more gentle loving sorrows.