Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell Fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seemed their own most perfect monument. There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A million years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their long sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the gray And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes rose And found the people incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expecting yet another sun To do the shapely thing they had not done. These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wrought Save in the tapestries of afterthought. More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio. The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

When in your neighborhood you hear a neigh, It means that there's a horse not far away.

Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air Over the rotten office, let him bear The carrion ballast up, and at the tall Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you’ll see That no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s height, No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight; He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free, The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he Devours death, mocks mutability, Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new. Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget How for so many bedlam hours his saw Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw, And the slam of his hammer all the day beset The people’s ears. Forget that he could bear To see the towns like coral under the keel, And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel How high and weary it was, on the waters where He rocked his only world, and everyone’s. Forgive the hero, you who would have died Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide To Ararat; all men are Noah’s sons.

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm. Your reputation for saying things of interest Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics, Nor will the delicate web of human trust Be ruptured by that airy fabrication. Later, however, talking with toxic zest Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice, You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing Above your head the shrug of unreal wings. Not that the world is tiresome in itself: We know what boredom is: it is a dull Impatience or a fierce velleity, A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude, To make or do. In the strict sense, of course, We invent nothing, merely bearing witness To what each morning brings again to light: Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof, Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones Beginning now to tug their shadows in And track the air with glitter. All these things Are there before us; there before we look Or fail to look; there to be seen or not By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes, According to our means and purposes. So too with strangeness not to be ignored, Total eclipse or snow upon the rose, And so with that most rare conception, nothing. What is it, after all, but something missed? It is the water of a dried-up well Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador. There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung From Hell to probe with intellectual sight The cells and heavens of a given world Which he could take but as another prison: Small wonder that, pretending not to be, He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden In a black mist low creeping, dragging down And darkening with moody self-absorption What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues. Closer to making than the deftest fraud Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray, Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still, How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed To one side on a backlit chopping-board And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail. Odd that a thing is most itself when likened: The eye mists over, basil hints of clove, The river glazes toward the dam and spills To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet, And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile Some great thing is tormented. Either it is A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast Which tries again, and once again, to rise. What, though for pain there is no other word, Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile? It is something in us like the catbird’s song From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord, Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant Of the first springs, and it is tributary To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre, Or of the garden where we first mislaid Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting Out of what cognate splendor all things came To take their scattering names; and nonetheless That matter of a baggage-train surprised By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees Which, having worked three centuries and more In the dark caves of France, poured out at last The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

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.”

I. Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye Stand in a land subdued beyond belief. Belief might lend them life again. I try Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief To see my spellbound fathers in these men Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere, Show but the postures men affected then And the hermit faces of a finished year. The guns and gear and all are strange until Beyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees Verging a road that struggles up a hill. They’re sycamores. The long-abated breeze Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound Of guns and a great forest in distress. Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness. II. But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees Rode on the back of Simois to sink In the wide waters. Reflect how history’s Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls Its salvage of the world in shifty waves, Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls And yielding views of its confounded graves To the new moon, the sun, or any eye That in its shallow shoreward version sees The pebbles charging with a deathless cry And carageen memorials of trees. III. Now, old man of the sea, I start to understand: The will will find no stillness Back in a stilled land. The dead give no command And shall not find their voice Till they be mustered by Some present fatal choice. Let me now rejoice In all impostures, take The shape of lion or leopard, Boar, or watery snake, Or like the comber break, Yet in the end stand fast And by some fervent fraud Father the waiting past, Resembling at the last The self-established tree That draws all waters toward Its live formality.

Huru Welandes worc ne geswiceσ? monna ænigum σara σe Mimming can heardne gehealdan. —Waldere An axe angles from my neighbor’s ashcan; It is hell’s handiwork, the wood not hickory, The flow of the grain not faithfully followed. The shivered shaft rises from a shellheap Of plastic playthings, paper plates, And the sheer shards of shattered tumblers That were not annealed for the time needful. At the same curbside, a cast-off cabinet Of wavily warped unseasoned wood Waits to be trundled in the trash-man’s truck. Haul them off! Hide them! The heart winces For junk and gimcrack, for jerrybuilt things And the men who make them for a little money, Bartering pride like the bought boxer Who pulls his punches, or the paid-off jockey Who in the home stretch holds in his horse. Yet the things themselves in thoughtless honor Have kept composure, like captives who would not Talk under torture. Tossed from a tailgate Where the dump displays its random dolmens, Its black barrows and blazing valleys, They shall waste in the weather toward what they were. The sun shall glory in the glitter of glass-chips, Foreseeing the salvage of the prisoned sand, And the blistering paint peel off in patches, That the good grain be discovered again. Then burnt, bulldozed, they shall all be buried To the depth of diamonds, in the making dark Where halt Hephaestus keeps his hammer And Wayland’s work is worn away.

If you’re fond of road-blocks, this one can’t be beat: A big tree in the middle of the street.

After the clash of elevator gates And the long sinking, she emerges where, A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare, She looks up toward the window where he waits, Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest Of the huge traffic bound forever west. On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye— Even this other pair whose high romance Had only the duration of a dance, And who, now taking leave with stricken eye, See each in each a whole new life forgone. For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn, Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief And baggage, yet with something like relief, It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas To cancel out their crossing, and unmake The amorous rough and tumble of their wake. We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share The frequent vistas of their large despair, Where love and all are swept to nothingness; Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love Which constant spirits are the keepers of, And which, though taken to be tame and staid, Is a wild sostenuto of the heart, A passion joined to courtesy and art Which has the quality of something made, Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent, Like a rose window or the firmament.

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin. But ceremony never did conceal, Save to the silly eye, which all allows, How much we are the woods we wander in. Let her be some Sabrina fresh from stream, Lucent as shallows slowed by wading sun, Bedded on fern, the flowers’ cynosure: Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream That she is airy earth, the trees, undone, Must ape her languor natural and pure. Ho-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness, And love this feigning lady by Bazille. What's lightly hid is deepest understood, And when with social smile and formal dress She teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille, I think there are most tigers in the wood.