On Having Mis-identified a Wild Flower
A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
—Richard Wilbur, from New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988)
Posts tagged Richard Wilbur:
A Measuring Worm
This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,
Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.
It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant
To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,
And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.
—Richard Wilbur, from The New Yorker (February 11, 2008)
Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole
And, casting out myself, become a soul.
—Richard Wilbur, from “The Aspen and the Stream” (via litverve)
All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.
—Richard Wilbur, from “For Dudley” (via litverve)
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)
The Writer
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
Richard Wilbur, from The Mind-Reader (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)
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