Richard Wilbur Quotes

Wisely watch for the sight Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn, Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit's right Oasis, light incarnate.

The tall camels of the spirit Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid Sun. They are slow, proud, And move with a stilted stride To the land of sheer horizon...

I die of thirst here at the fountainside.

Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage.

In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.

"Apology"

A word sticks in the wind's throat;
A wind-launch drifts in the swells of rye;
Sometimes, in broad silence,
The hanging apples distill their darkness.

You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair,
Who come by the field-path now, whose name I say
Softly, forgive me love if I also call you
Wind's word, apple-heart, haven of grasses.

Yes, death is far less dire to contemplate
Than a forced marriage to an unloved mate

Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings, And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws For learning to loiter in air; he merely said, "I merely leap and pause."

Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best — unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.

A Milkweed

Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burstpod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.

A Stone

As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me,
Up to my ears in sod.
Why should I move? To move
Befits a light desire.
The sill of Heaven would founder,
Did such as I aspire.

Tanka
Black-and-white Holsteins
Crowd downfield at feeding time,
Mingling their blotches.
It is like ice breaking up
In a dark, swollen river.

In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

But I am weary of
The winter way of loving things for reasons. — Richard Wilbur, from “Winter Spring,” New and Collected Poems (HBJ, 1988)