The poetry of American novelist John Updike

• January
• The days are short, 
• The sun a spark, 
• Hung thin between 
• The dark and dark. 

• Fat snowy footsteps 
• Track the floor. 
• Milk bottles burst 
• Outside the door.

• The river is 
• A frozen place 
• Held still beneath 
• The trees of lace.

• The sky is low. 
• The wind is gray. 
• The radiator 
• Purrs all day.

• Penumbrae
• The shadows have their seasons, too. 
• The feathery web the budding maples 
• cast down upon the sullen lawn

• bears but a faint relation to 
• high summer’s umbrageous weight 
• and tunnellike continuum—

• black leached from green, deep pools 
• wherein a globe of gnats revolves 
• as airy as an astrolabe.

• The thinning shade of autumn is 
• an inherited Oriental, 
• red worn to pink, nap worn to thread.

• Shadows on snow look blue. The skier, 
• exultant at the summit, sees his poles 
• elongate toward the valley: thus

• each blade of grass projects another 
• opposite the sun, and in marshes 
• the mesh is infinite,

• as the winged eclipse an eagle in flight 
• drags across the desert floor 
• is infinitesimal.

• And shadows on water!— 
• the beech bough bent to the speckled lake 
• where silt motes flicker gold,

• or the steel dock underslung 
• with a submarine that trembles, 
• its ladder stiffened by air.

• And loveliest, because least looked-for, 
• gray on gray, the stripes 
• the pearl-white winter sun

• hung low beneath the leafless wood 
• draws out from trunk to trunk across the road 
• like a stairway that does not rise.

John Updike (1932-2009) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet who was generally best known in that order of avocations. His fiction earned him several awards, including twice being awarded the Pulitzer Prize; he is well known as one of the mainstays of short fiction and poetry in The New Yorker. With more than 20 novels to his name—Updike wrote on average, one book a year—he is considered one of the premiere American writers of this time. He also published eight books of poetry – including his first published book, The Carpentered Hen (1958). Although he began writing poetry in a lighter vein, the whimsical elements were carried over into his more series verse as his talent developed. His poetry is marked by both a precision of language and metaphysical depth, both harkening to the likes of such 17th-century poets as John Donne and George Herbert.