Bagatelles | Stephen Spender | The New York Review of Books

Submit a letter:

V.W. (1941)

That woman with her turning gaze
At people in a room—the rays
Showing beyond the masked appearance
Their lives she’d changed into her trance—
Men, women, rocks, moths, leaves,
Golden sea-floor under green waves—

With heavy stones filled her dress
Then lay down in a shallow brook.
I see her there through curving glass,
Broken crystal of her face,
Her mind wave-scattered pages of her book.

AFTER HOELDERLIN

The lines of our lives here are dense and varied
Like wandering paths through forests mountain-boundaried.
But there—they are seen whole and reconciled
—With love, harmonious peace—that here ran wild.

Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) was an English poet and essayist. As a young man, he became friends with W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Christopher Isherwood, a loose collection often referred to as “the Auden Group” or “MacSpaunday.” He published many collections of poems, including The Still Centre and Ruins and Visions, and numerous volumes of nonfiction and other works, including Learning Laughterand Love-Hate Relations.

This Issue

April 20, 1967