Poem of the Day: ‘Austerity’

Throughout her long life, Janet Loxley Lewis (1899–1998) wrote steadily and prolifically, producing ten books of poetry, five novels, and six libretti for the opera. She taught for many years at Stanford and at the University of California at Berkeley. Yet her star has shone more modestly than that of her poet-critic husband, Yvor Winters (1900–1968).Part of the reason, one suspects, is that the poems themselves are modest. Frequently short, they concern themselves with what R.L. Barth, editor of her posthumous “Selected Poems,” calls “domesticity.” They deal, as Barth wrote in his preface to that volume, with “gardens, housework, children, domesticated animals.” The poems identify her with California, but her California is another country from the bleak, isolated California of her near-contemporary, Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), whose “Mountain Pines” appeared as Poem of the Day last December. Lewis’s imaginative world is a world of human connection. Of course, as Barth went on to say, “Any perceptive reader recognizes immediately that, whatever their domestic subject matter, the themes of many of the poems transcend the merely domestic: love, death, memory, acceptance.” He might have added “faith” to that list, as a number of the poems engage quietly but explicitly, and in utter sympathy, with Christianity.Today’s Poem of the Day, excerpted from a longer work, “The Cold Hills,” is very early, young Lewis, pre-1920. With its stamp of Imagism and its undulant lines which vary from trimeter to pentameter to dimeter, this poem might almost have been written by another relative contemporary, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1962). Or perhaps, almost, by some very young, more feminine iteration of Jeffers. Yet in this piece of near-juvenalia, we can see the stamp of Janet Lewis’s own personality. Even as her speaker purports to crave loneliness and to “hate” more domestic landscapes, in the end it is those “warm gardens / full of bees” that she longs for. Austerityby Janet Loxley LewisI have lived so longOn the cold hills alone …I loved the rockAnd the lean pine trees,Hated the life in the turfy meadow,Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.I have lived so longUnder the high monotony of starry skies,I am so cased aboutWith the clean wind and the cold nights,People will not let me inTo their warm gardensFull of bees.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Austerity’

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