Winter Remembered
John Crowe Ransome, 1888--1974

Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:
A cry of absence, absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks
And parts the tight board hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat, my center.

Better to walk forth in the murderous air
and wash my wound in the snow; that would be healing,
Because my heart would throb less painful there,
Being asked with cold, and past the smart of feeling.

Which would you choose, and for what boot in gold,
the absence, or the absence and the gold?

Born in 1888, in Tennesse, the poet John Crowe Ransome founded 
The Kenyon Review and guiding member of the Fugitive.