Vision, by Robert Penn Warren

Sometimes poems speak straight off the page and their images seem so familiar, not because you’ve read them before, but they seem to come from your own mind, imaginings or dreams. Sometimes you read a poem, and know it will stay with you.

I had never heard of Robert Penn Warren before today; he was born in Kentucky in 1905, and he died in 1989. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, and most eminent in the world of poetry; I haven’t heard of him before, but I am delighted to find him now because I know I have so much more of his work to read and enjoy.

Vision

I shall build me a house where the larkspur blooms

In a narrow glade in an alder wood,

Where the sunset shadows make violet glooms,

And a whip-poor-will calls in eerie mood.

I shall lie on a bed of river sedge,

And listen to the glassy dark,

With a guttered light on my window ledge,

While an owl stares in at me white and stark.

I shall burn my house with the rising dawn,

And leave but the ashes and smoke behind,

And again give the glade to the owl and the fawn,

When the grey wood smoke drifts away with the wind.

Robert Penn Warren