[봄영시 3] Another Spring by Kenneth Rexroth

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Another Spring

Kenneth Rexroth

 

The seasons revolve and the years change

With no assistance or supervision.

The moon, wothout taking thought,

Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.

 

The white moon enters the heart of the river;

The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;

Deep in the night a pine cone falls;

Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

 

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;

The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;

High in the sky the Northern Crown

Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

 

O heart, heart, so singularly

Intransigent and corruptible,

Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,

And moments that should each last forever

 

Slide unconsciously by us like water.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kenneth Rexroth, who was born in l905 and died in l982, was a major American poet. He wrote poetry for over sixty years, and though he had some recognition during his lifetime, it was far less than his work (prose as well as poetry) deserved. A bohemian, an astute literary and social critic and radical, an autodidact and polymath, a transvaluational thinker and wit,     confabulator," a translator of poetry from half a dozen languages, Rexroth failed to gain the recognition during his lifetime that he  deserved as a poet in part because American literary politics and literary critical orientations didn’t not work in his favor during a sizable part of his career, Ironically, much of his best verse was written from the l930s to the mid-l950s, a period when  academic, literary and political tastes prevailed that were alien to many of the social, philosophical and artistic values for which  Rexroth’s art and life stood.