Venerable Stones Poem by gershon hepner

In the great house of the master stones
are venerable, and those we cast are often
cast only in a brave attempt to soften
the blows cast on our house, our pride, a clone.

The correspondences to all are clear
because our stones, just like our paradigms,
are copies of the master’s, as sincere,
but little more than prose we gild with rhymes.

David Orr reviews Helen Vendler’s “Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form” (“Vendler’s Yeats, ” NYT Book Review, May 11,2008) :
If “Our Secret Discipline” isn’t as strong as it could be, it’s because Vendler has thought deeply about Yeats’s use of form, but not about form apart from Yeats. And this isn’t surprising, really. Her great strength has always been her close reading of individual poets. If that causes her occasionally to find correspondences that don’t exist, well, what steward hasn’t wanted to find a world perfected in the venerable stones of the master’s great house?


5/11/08