Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece

By Byron Herbert Reece and Jim Clark

Collected here are poems by one of Georgia's most intriguing and talented poets of the twentieth century. Byron Herbert Reece was born in Union County, Georgia, in 1917 and authored four volumes of poems and two novels during his short lifetime. Until now, many of his poems, originally published in the 1940s and 1950s, have been out of print. Reece, who faithfully assumed responsibility for his family's farm when his parents became ill, was never a poet of the academic ivory tower. Indeed, he rebelled against the rising New Criticism associated with the Vanderbilt Fugitives, the elite of southern poetry at that time.

Reece's work reflects both the devastating impact of his parents' death from tuberculosis and his own affliction with the disease, which caused him to distance himself from others: "A solitary thing am I / Upon the roads of rust and flame / That thin at sunset to the air." Reece was also preoccupied with his ambivalence toward the farm, which sustained his solitude yet took time away from his writing: "In the far, dark woods go roving / And find there to match your mood / A kindred spirit moving / Where the wild winds blow in the wood." Reece's poetry is resonant and contemplative, and Jim Clark has included here works that speak for the true grace of Reece's talent. In addition, Clark's attentive introduction should bring increased interest to this notable southern poet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780820355436

Byron Herbert Reece

BYRON HERBERT REECE was a lifelong resident of the north Georgia mountains. An author whose work is closely tied to the spirit and traditions of Appalachia, he wrote two novels: The Hawk and the Sun and Better a Dinner of Herbs (Georgia). In addition, Reece was the author of four highly acclaimed volumes of poetry.

Book preview

Fable in the Blood

Fable in the Blood

THE SELECTED POEMS OF

BYRON HERBERT REECE

Edited by Jim Clark

Paperback edition, 2019

© 2002 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

All rights reserved

Designed by Betty Palmer McDaniel

Set in 11.5 on 14 Centaur

Most University of Georgia Press titles are

available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

The Library of Congress has cataloged the

hardcover edition of this book as follows:

Reece, Byron Herbert, 1917–1958.

[Poems. Selections]

Fable in the blood : the selected poems of Byron Herbert Reece / edited by Jim Clark.

xlii, 185 p. ; 23 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. xli-xlii).

ISBN 0-8203-2347-0 (alk. paper)

I. Clark, Jim, 1954– II. Title.

PS3535.E245 A6 2002

811'.54—dc21             2001042447

The Tree, the Bird, and the Leaf courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book & Manu script Library, University of Georgia Libraries.

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-5542-9

Contents

Preface

Introduction

FROM Ballad of the Bones (1945)

Ballad of the Bones

Fox Hunters of Hell

Lest the Lonesome Bird

Ballad of the Rider

Ballad of the Weaver

A Song of Sorrow

All the Leaves in the Wildwood

If Only Lovers

Bitter Berry

Mountain Fiddler

Invocation

I Am the Dust

In the Mind’s Meadow

House in the Wind

We Shall Not Eat

The Harvest: 1942

Query in This Year of Our Lord

The Dawn Came Down

Summer

Whose Eye Is on the Sparrow

Autumn Mood

Year’s Ending

Seasonal

I Go by Ways of Rust and Flame

Song after Harvest

Boy and Deer

Monochord

Address to the Heart

FROM Bow Down in Jericho (1950)

The Larks at the Meeting of David and Jonathan

The Crows at the Parting of David and Jonathan

The Remembrance of Jonathan

The Adoration

John: A New Testament Ballad

The Riddles

The Fable in the Blood

I’ll Do As Much for My True-Love

Ballad of the Bride and Groom

The Farewell

The Generations of Thought

When First I Fared Upon the Road

The Travelers

Roads

Of an Old Bone I Was Bred

Loath Is the Leaf

O Where Is Charlie Langford Gone

The Spearmen the Bowmen the Archers

A Rural Air

We Could Wish Them a Longer Stay

Now to the Fields

The Speechless Kingdom

Feathers and Fur

Therefore the Mote

The Mower

I Looked into a Dead Man’s Fields

In the Far Dark Woods Go Roving

Good-By

The Country Housewife Tells a Rosary

Gathers Again to Shining

Three Times Already I Have Outwitted Death

FROM A Song of Joy (1952)

A Song of Joy

The Weaver

The Service of Song

From Whence Is Song

A Song for Breath

Pandora, When We Come to Choose

To Market, to Market

If Evil Were a Little Road

I Know a Valley Green with Corn

There Never Was Time

The Elm and the Moon

My Love It Is Twain

Fruiting

The Shaggy Hills of Hughly

Country Autumn

A Certain Essence of the Sun

When I Think of Christmas Time

Three Epigraphs:

I: For Bow Down in Jericho

II: For Better a Dinner of Herbs

III: For Ballad of the Bones

FROM The Season of Flesh (1955)

In the Corridor

The Betrothed from the Grave

The Disparates

The Cycle

The Stay-at-Home

Fidus Achates

I’ll Make My Love a Present

My True-Love

The Altitudes of Love

In Absence

The Haying

A Fire of Boughs

The Poet and the Vestures

The Minstrel Who Imagined Song

As I Lay Easy on My Bed

Underground

A Simple by the Sea

Uncollected Poems

The Tree, the Bird, and the Leaf

The Abstract Professor

The Thin Woman Upon the Road

Preface

Selecting the poems for this collection was not easy. I have no doubt that some readers who know Reece’s work well will be unhappy that a personal favorite is perhaps not included. I have tried to achieve a balance between the ballads and the lyric poems, and since the ballads tend to be longer, I have tried to present a representative sampling of Reece’s themes, and also to include those that I feel are the strongest and most successful. I have also included more poems from the first two volumes than from the last two, as I feel they are stronger collections overall. Toward the end of his life, Reece was ill, harried, and depressed, and he expended much of his precious store of energy on his novel, The Hawk and the Sun. In 1957 he wrote to his friend Pratt Dickson, "I have written nothing since the last day of 1954, when I completed the manuscript for The Hawk and the Sun. I doubt if I ever write much more poetry. I don’t feel it anymore" (qtd. in Sellers, 25).

I have organized the poems simply by presenting them as selections from each of the four books, chronologically ordered. I feel that an aesthetic progression, or evolution, can be seen.

I would like to acknowledge my considerable debt to Reece’s biographers, Raymond A. Cook and Bettie Sellers, upon whose research and writing I have depended heavily. Anyone interested in Reece and his poetry would certainly find the documentary video The Bitter Berry: The Life and Work of Byron Herbert Reece, coproduced by Bettie Sellers, of interest. I would also like to acknowledge a personal and professional debt to Hugh Ruppersburg. My thanks I gratefully tender to Fred Chappell, James Kibler, John Lang, Betty Smith, Rebecca Smith, and Elaine Marshall.

This edition is dedicated to the memory of

EDWARD F. KRICKEL

Man of letters, Raconteur, Great soul.

Introduction

Byron Herbert Reece was born on September 14, 1917, to Juan and Emma Reece, who lived on a farm near Choestoe, in Union County, Georgia. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, Reece published four volumes of poems and two novels, all with E. P. Dutton, and all receiving generally favorable reviews. In a 1955 review, Edward M. Case wrote: I know of no living poet writing in the English language, or pretending to, who has written lyrics equal to the best poems in ’The Season of Flesh,’ by Byron Herbert Reece…. It seems to me that with the exception of Robert Frost, Reece is our greatest living poet, and even Frost is not so pure a lyricist, nor as strong and lonely a voice (qtd. in Cook 113–14). His mother and father had both contracted tuberculosis by the mid-1930s, so Reece faithfully tended their mountain farm even while accepting visiting writing positions at UCLA, Emory University, and the University of Georgia. As his letters and poems attest, he was at home on the farm, but the hard work and long hours required in running a farm often prevented him from devoting himself to his writing as he would have liked, and the isolation, while good for his writing, hindered his participation in any sort of literary life. On the other hand, his occasional forays into national literary life through readings, promotional tours, and writer-in-residence positions made him generally uncomfortable and homesick and prevented him from devoting the time necessary to maintaining a successful mountain farm. Because of his middling success as both a writer and a farmer and the constant warring of these two, he was often conflicted and ambivalent, and his financial situation frequently required him to take on part-time or temporary teaching assignments that he found onerous. He eventually contracted the disease that had killed both his parents, and, depressed by his deteriorating health and the prospect of hospitalization and dependency, he took his own life in 1958.

Tuberculosis haunted Reece, and, coupled with his natural reticence, shaped both his life and his art. His friend and supporter Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, put it this way:

All of us have within us an inexplicable loneliness. Byron had the mountain silence. He was not an outgoing man. In talks in Atlanta and the mountains he would reveal a little of his inner self, but only glimpses. The fact that he had tuberculosis made him feel himself cut off from falling in love with a girl. He knew, or believed, he could not, with honor, fall in love, marry, and have a family. So he withdrew. But what sorrow and grief this was to him, only he knew. He never shared it. (374)

McGill also says that Reece felt he should not visit the homes of his friends, especially if they had children. One of Reece’s best-known poems, I Go by Ways of Rust and Flame, expresses his sense of loneliness and alienation:

I go by ways of rust and flame

Beneath the bent and lonely sky;

Behind me on the ways I came

I see the hedges lying bare,

But neither question nor reply.

A solitary thing am I

Upon the roads of rust and flame

That thin at sunset to the air.

I call upon no word nor name,

And neither question nor reply

But walk alone as all men must

Upon the roads of flame and rust.

In Reece’s depiction of his solitary, fatalistic traveler, I hear the accents of Frost’s Acquainted with the Night and Desert Places. More particularly, rust and