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Born in 1900 at McAndrews, Kentucky, Sylvia Trent Auxier became one of the finest lyric poets in Kentucky literature. Her traditional rhymed poems focusing on the symbiotic relationship between Man and Nature were popular among critics and readers. She was a prolific writer, and major anthologies such as Lillie Chaffin’s God’s Plenty and William S. Ward’s A Literary History of Kentucky have kept her work in print and her name before the public well into the Twenty-First Century.
It has been said of Sylvia Auxier that she was always writing poetry, but long before she published her first poem she was expressing herself in song. In her book Pikeville College Looks to the Hills Alice Kinder tells how Sylvia Trent, as a student of Pikeville College in the early twenties, accompanied Kinder’s father, William M. Justice and the school’s president, Dr. James F. Record and his wife, on a fund-raising tour of northern cities. The trip included a three-week speaking engagement in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “She held the Philadelphia audience spellbound as she sang “Pretty Polly” and other mountain ballads,” Justice said.
Pikeville College recognized Sylvia’s talent for writing in 1921, when she was named Associate Editor of the school’s newly founded newspaper The Record. Surprisingly, following graduation, young Sylvia began her professional life, not as a writer or a teacher, but as a public health nurse. Aggressive and eager to help her fellow mountaineers, she rode horseback to the homes of patients in the hills and valleys of Pike, Knott, Perry and Leslie counties. Nursing would not become her life’s work, but it brought her close to nature and the hill folk that inspired her writing.
I pause to note the lesson which earth teaches,
For earth is friend and teacher, absolute:
Among her pages man continually searches,
Hers the decisions which none may refute.
Later on she became a teacher of English at John Creek High school in Pike County. At the same time, she turned her attention to writing for publication. Her poems began appearing regularly in The New York Herald-Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Evening Star, The Lyric and others. Her first book, Meadow Rue, was published in 1948. This hard-to-find volume has been made available in a facsimile edition by Kessinger Publishing. Love-Vine was published by The Story Book Press in Dallas in 1953. No Stranger to the Earth was published by The Wings Press in 1957. It was followed by The Grace of the Bough, privately printed in 1958, and The Green of a Hundred Springs in 1966. With Thorn and Stone: New and Selected Poems, appeared posthumously in 1968 under Hilltop Editions, an imprint of Pikeville College Press.
Sylvia Auxier was the wife of Gene Auxier, a Pikeville attorney. They had one son. She found time from teaching and writing to edit a poetry column in the Pike County News showcasing local talent, and was involved in local and regional projects for the promotion of poetry. She was a member of the Kentucky State Poetry Society and the Poetry Society of America and served as president of the Kentucky Hill Branch of the National League of American Pen Women.
The Pulitzer Prize poet Gwendolyn Brooks praised Sylvia Auxier’s poetry as “sane as well as beautiful. In it are to be found balance, a tenderized exaltation, and a comprehensive clarity.”
Ann Steward, novelist and author of Let the Earth Speak, came closer to the heart of Auxier’s work: “Earth and Man are evident in the poems of Sylvia Auxier…the basic requirements of the true artist…Experience of Story and revelation is here…”
These lines from “Hill-Folk” are confirmation:
Time holds the gates of dawn ajar,
And hill-folk know that earth and star
And sun are close as brothers are.
Sylvia Trent Auxier was listed in International Who’s Who in Poetry, Who’s Who in the South and South-West and Who’s Who of American Women. She died in 1967. She is best remembered for the poem “Someday in a Wood,” beginning with these lines:
Death never was a match for me,
so light my feet, so river strong
My coursing blood. My enemy,
As life and I rushed on headlong…
Contributor – Gayle Compton
Crest of Summer
I wondered when my trees had reached the crest
Of summer green, when every weaving leaf
Had reined the last unwilling wind, and pressed
The last frail sunbeam in its netted sheaf.
I wondered when each bough and bole and high,
Leaf- waving twig– endorsed by night and day,
Had borrowed all which earth and sun and sky
Would lend on unpenned promises to pay.
But only years could teach the eye to see,
In that deep green, the crimson danger sign
The broad-leafed buckeye, guarding zealously,
Had hoisted in the ragged timberline;
And life alone could teach the heart to say
That death was only a brittle frost away.
From Love-Vine
Leaf
Stars have overwhelmed me,
Shadowed me to grief.
Heart, ignore the universe,
Contemplate a leaf:
Beauty fashioned best to serve,
Faithful signature
Trees inscribe upon the earth,
Readable and sure.
Through your narrow waterways
Earth’s old rivers run;
Winds cannot escape you,
You have snared the sun.
Born in promises, in faith
All promise you fulfill
Year on year the same,–O leaf,
I am confounded still.
From With Thorn and Stone
Twilights
Each day at dusk
my twilight doves come home,
come home to nest
in the broad eaves of this ark,
riding the evening waves of air,–
dove-day, dove-dusk, dove-dark.
The fields, the folds
of earth they visited in their
day-odyssey they bring,
exaltations that will stay
with me forever through my nights,–
dove-dark, dove-dusk, dove-day.
The songs they sing,
though always those of sorrow,
upon the evening air
are borne away as husk,
leaving the golden wheat of peace,–
dove-day, dove-dark, dove-dusk.
From With Thorn and Stone
Within My Hand
When night confounds me with the sight
Of galaxies and nebulae;
When day confronts me with the might
Couched in the atom’s minutiae;
When I fee alien to the land,
Waif in a cosmic sea of air,
Before my eyes I spread my hand
And scan the symbols written there:
Along the palm flows line on line,
Upon the fingers blossom whorls,
Each solely and uniquely mine,
All as unfathomed as the worlds.
From No Stranger to the Earth
Bulwark
If in the winter season I should forget,–
Seeing the twigs’ gray ash upon the hill
And the brown earth of leaves sodden and still,
That green which is the summer’s coronet;
If on the skeleton tree I cannot drape
One leaf and another leaf in the full
Nimbus of green that is one leaf’s multiple
Nor dream its great green glory into shape,–
I shall look upward where a pine tree flings
Against the fallow hill its bold design,
Its stubborn needles holding the tree’s outline
And its dark depths the green of a hundred
springs.
From The Green of a Hundred Springs
Someday In A Wood
Death never was a match for me,
So light my feet, so river-strong
My coursing blood. My enemy,
As life and I rushed on headlong,
Could only follow, dark and grim
Because I could outdistance him.
But someday in a haunted wood
Of fog and twilight days, when Time
Has blanched my flesh and slowed my blood,
Death will out-run me on the climb.
Then I will face him, take his hand,
Murmur his name, and call him friend.
From No Stranger to the Earth
