Structure and Imagery

Käthe Kollwitz,  Tod and Frau (Death Seizing a Woman) , 1910, 17 1/2 x 17 in. Etching on paper. Pomona College Collection. Gift of the Culley Collection Violent Storm   by Mark Strand Those who have chosen to pass the night Entertaining friends And intimate ideas in the bright, Commodious rooms of dreams Will not feel the slightest tremor Or be wakened by what seems Only a quirk in the dry run Of conventional weather. For them, The long night sweeping over these trees And houses will have been no more than one In a series whose end Only the nervous or morbid consider. But for us, the wide-awake, who tend To believe the worst is always waiting Around the next corner or hiding in the dry, Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating Whether or not to fell the passerby, It has a sinister air. How we wish we were sunning ourselves In a world of familiar views And fixed conditions, confined By what we know, and able to refuse Entry to the unaccounted for. For now, Deep...

Hans Hofmann, White in Blue , 1947 Lines for Winter by Mark Strand for Ros Krauss Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are. Obituary in the NY Times