Do you recognize those words—the last line of a poem? They were cited recently by a poet who came to speak to a gathering of reporters. (Because the event was off the record, I will leave his identity a mystery.)

The poet registered, physically, with a jolt. He looked barely different from the homeless men who, now that spring flirts with us, commandeer the steel benches in Central Square. His face was purplish red, as were his hands, where large bruises bloom. His thinning gray hair, grown four or five inches, scythed in every direction: an exuberant J on the right side of his head, a backward J on the left, preposterous spikes on top. His ankles were thick beneath cream-colored socks; the ties of his black cross-training shoes barely reined in the swollen mounds of his feet.

His pronouncements were as fierce and unruly as his hair: The paramount thing in a poem is the way it sounds, or rather the way it engages the parts of the mouth—tongue, roof, lips. The unfortunate use of “the barn dies” in one of his own poems, because that’s a dead metaphor—a barn can “rot” and it can “fall down” but it can’t “die.” His having no truck with contemporary poets; as one ages, he said (and he is truly aged), one can’t comprehend poets 50 years younger. Instead he reads—he relishes—poets from the seventeeth century. (But he does look forward to Louise Glück’s next book.)

And he devours Thomas Hardy. “The novels are good, but the poems are GREAT,” he says, allowing that last adjective to come out as a growl.

To Hardy we owe the haunting title of this post, the closing lines of “During the Wind and Rain,” with its internal half-rhymes (name and rain), its unruly pentameter, its concentration of hard consonants rolling like stones along the tongue.

In a world that often seems to reward the tamed, the socially gracious, the kempt, the professional, this poet was a reminder of a sensibility that carves deeper meanings.