The Wolves

-Allen Tate
Author Introduction

On November 19, 1899, John Orley Allen Tate was born in Winchester, Clarke County,
Kentucky. He attended Vanderbilt University and graduated magna cum laude in 1922. He
married the novelist Caroline Gordon in 1924.

Tate was a founding editor of The Fugitive, a magazine of verse published out of
Nashville, Tennessee, from 1922 to 1925. The magazine was named for the Fugitives, a group of
Southern poets which included Tate and several of his colleagues from Vanderbilt, including
John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore.

Tate published his first book of poems, Mr. Pope and Other Poems (Minton, Balch &
Company), in 1928. He died on February 9, 1979.

Poem
I have looked at them long,
My eyes blur; sourceless light
Keeps them forever young
Before our ageing sight.

You see them-too strict forms

Of will, the secret dignity
Of our dissolute storms;
They grow too bright to be.

What were they like? What mark

Can signify their charm?
They never saw the dark;
Rigid, they never knew alarm.

Do not the scene rehearse!

The perfect eyes enjoin
A contemptuous verse;
We speak the crabbed line.

Immaculate race! to yield

Us final knowledge set
In a cold frieze, a field
Of war but no blood let.

Are they quite willing,

Do they ask to pose,
Naked and simple, chilling
The very wind's nose?

They ask us how to live!

We answer: Again try
Being the drops we sieve.
What death it is to die!

Therefore because they nod,

Being too full of us,
I look at the turned sod
Where it is perilous

And yawning all the same

As if we knew them not
And history had no name-
No need to name the spot!

Summary
There are wolves in the next room waiting With heads bent low, thrust out, breathing At
nothing in the dark; between them and me A white door patched with light from the hall Where it
seems never A man has walked from the front door to the stair. It has all been forever. Beasts
claw the floor. I^have brooded on angels and archfiends But no man has ever sat where the next
room’s Crowded with wolves, and for the honor of man I affirm that never have I before. Now
while I have looked for the evening star at a cold window And whistled when Arcturus spilt his
light, I’ve heard the wolves scuffle, and said: So this Is man; so what better conclusion is there.
The day will not follow night, and the heart Of man has a little dignity, but less patience Than a
wolf’s, and a duller sense that cannot Smell its own mortality Now remember courage, go to the
door, Open it and see whether coiled on the bed Or cringing by the wall, a savage beast Maybe
with golden hair, with deep eyes Like a bearded spider on a sunlit floor Will snarl-and man can
never be alone.
Critical analysis