Richard Wilbur: Love Calls Us

Today is the 95th birthday of the great American poet Richard Wilbur - an occasion to rejoice that he is still with us. I hadn't realised until today that he shared his birthday with Robert Lowell, born four years earlier (and dead nearly 40 years). When I was at university (as the Sixties became, with sickening inevitability, the Seventies) Lowell enjoyed an almost god-like status among contemporary poets; it was pretty well taken for granted that he was one of the greats and that his fame would endure, certainly outlasting the likes of Wilbur, who was seen as an irrelevant old-school formalist.  As it turned out, the intervening decades have not been kind to Lowell; though he is still respected, is he still read? The last time I tackled the Selected Poems (a few years ago), I was surprised to find how underwhelmed I was... Ah well, it is not a competition, but it is good to know that Wilbur is still alive and, I like to think, being read anew, now that the decades of unfashionableness no longer matter. Who could fail to enjoy a poet so in touch with the pleasures of being alive in this world, whose poems, so beautifully constructed, are such a delight to read? Here is one of his best-known works. Enjoy - and pay attention, and give thanks - that is all the world asks of us, and no living poet has better embodied those sweet imperatives than Richard Wilbur.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”