Theodore Russell Weiss

Theodore Russell Weiss Poems

Theodore Russell Weiss Biography

Theodore Russell Weiss (16 December 1916 Reading, Pennsylvania — 15 April 2003 Princeton, New Jersey) was an American poet, and literary magazine editor. He graduated from Muhlenberg College in 1938 and Columbia University in 1940. He was an instructor at the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of North Carolina, Yale University, and Bard College.[1] He taught at Princeton University, until retirement in 1987. He edited (with his wife, Renee Karol Weiss) Quarterly Review of Literature, which published William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound. In 1987, he was the subject of a documentary, Living Poetry: A Year in the Life of a Poem, made by Harvey Edwards.)

The Best Poem Of Theodore Russell Weiss

A Gothic Tale

Framed by our window, skaters, winding
in and out the wind, as water reeling
so kept in motion, on a well-honed
edge spin out a gilded ceiling.

Fish, reflecting glow for glow,
saints around the sun, are frozen
with amazement just one pane below.

Skates flash like stars, so madly
whirling one can hardly tell which
is sky and which the watery floor ...

one night two straitlaced couples,
a footman over them, rode out
in a dappled-horse-drawn sleigh
onto the river, a moonlit lark.

The ice broke and they—sleigh,
footman and all—riding in state,
rode straight on into the lidded water.

That winter all winter folks twirled
over them who—framed in lace,
frost the furs, the shiny harness
and their smiles the fire that keeps
the place—sat benignly watching.

"One foot out, one foot in,
are we real," thought one, "we who
wander sheepishly in dreams, or they,
the really sleepless eyes, under us?

And every night who knows (a laughter
troubles us like dreams) who skates
(a thousand watch fires the stars)
above, peering through the pane?"

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