Hunting is an odd metaphor for a poet to choose when the subject is feeling, yet William Dickey's "After the Romantics" makes it work. The speaker announces, almost like a householder refusing an invitation, that he will no longer go into "that kind of wood": a place where the animals are "all but human" and the water is "not good." The title tells us which wood that is. After the Romantics, a poet can choose to follow them into a landscape where nature mirrors the soul, or he can stay out. This speaker stays out, and the poem is his defence of that decision.
The logic of the central image is sharper than it first appears. In the Romantic wood, the creature you aim at will not behave like prey. Its "ambiguous eyes" look back at the arrow, and the look transfers the animal's sorrow into the hunter: "the sooner to make their sorrow / In your own heart rise." The danger is not that the beasts will fight back but that they will be too like us. Sympathy becomes a kind of contamination. Dickey then lets the sorrow rise "like the black water / Of their tainted springs," and here the poem's two images, the animals and the water, fuse. Feeling is a liquid that seeps upward, and what it does to the speaker is specific: it "deadens the spurt of laughter / With imaginings." The word "spurt" is a good one, quick and bodily, the opposite of the slow, brooding darkness that overtakes it. The complaint against this poetic territory is that it kills lightness, that it turns every encounter into a occasion for brooding.
The fourth stanza gives the poem its dry humour. If someone urges him to go, he will "call him bravery's fellow / And stay behind." This is a graceful, faintly ironic concession. The speaker does not claim that the Romantic wood is false or that its explorers are fools; he grants them courage and declines to share it. That small piece of politeness keeps the poem from sounding like a manifesto. It is a personal preference, stated calmly, and the calm is part of the point.
The alternative he offers is deliberately modest: "my own acre," where the beasts are "thin" and there is "never an eye's flicker / That calls me kin." Notice that the poem treats this as a loss as well as a gain. Thin beasts are poor game, and a world with no kinship in it is a lonelier one. Yet the speaker prefers it, and the closing lines make the case through sound: the "light patter / Of my sole spring" is set against the earlier black, rising water, and the spring "gives only water, plain water, / Not some other thing." The repetition of "water" in that last stanza is the poem's most telling gesture. It reads like someone insisting on the literal, refusing to let the spring stand for anything. The final phrase, "Not some other thing," is a rejection of symbolism itself, which is exactly what makes the poem a response to the Romantics rather than a continuation of them.
The form supports this. Dickey writes short quatrains with alternating rhyme, loose and slightly irregular, with lines of two or three stresses, so the poem moves with the brisk, folk-like lilt of a ballad or nursery rhyme. That plainness is a kind of argument: a poem about preferring clarity to murk should itself be clear and neat, and it is. Some of the rhymes are half-hearted ("wood" and "good" are true, but "kind" and "behind" arrive with a shrug), which suits a speaker who is a little wry about his own retreat.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it turns a literary-historical question into a decision any of us can recognise. Should you feel everything deeply, or protect yourself and keep your laughter? Dickey does not pretend the answer is easy; he lets the safer choice carry its own small chill.