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A Poet Reflects

Posts tagged Anterooms:

“A man’s heart may have a secret sanctuary where only one woman may enter, but it is full of little anterooms which are seldom vacant.”

—Helen Rowland

Anterooms
Out of the snowdrift Which covered it, this pillared Sundial start to lift,
Able now at last To let its frozen hours Melt into the past
In bright, ticking drops. Time so often hastens by, Time so often stops—
Still, it strains belief How an instant can dilate, Or long years be brief.
Dreams, which interweave All our times and tenses, are What we can believe:
Dark they are, yet plain, Coming to us now as if Through a cobwebbed pane
Where, before our eyes, All the living and the dead Meet without surprise.
—Richard Wilbur, from Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)

Anterooms

Out of the snowdrift
Which covered it, this pillared
Sundial start to lift,

Able now at last
To let its frozen hours
Melt into the past

In bright, ticking drops.
Time so often hastens by,
Time so often stops—

Still, it strains belief
How an instant can dilate,
Or long years be brief.

Dreams, which interweave
All our times and tenses, are
What we can believe:

Dark they are, yet plain,
Coming to us now as if
Through a cobwebbed pane

Where, before our eyes,
All the living and the dead
Meet without surprise.

—Richard Wilbur, from Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)