"A Storm In April" Some winters, taking leave, Deal us a l… - Richard Wilbur

"A Storm In April"

Some winters, taking leave,
Deal us a last, hard blow,
Salting the ground like Carthage
Before they will go.

But the bright, milling snow
Which throngs the air today — It is a way of leaving
So as to stay.

The light flakes do not weigh
The willows down, but sift
Through the white catkins, loose
As petal-drift

Or in an up-draft lift
And glitter at a height,
Dazzling as summer’s leaf-stir
Chinked with light.

This storm, if I am right,
Will not be wholly over
Till green fields, here and there,
Turn white with clover,
And through chill air the puffs of milkweed hover.

Richard Wilbur

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About Richard Wilbur

Richard Purdy Wilbur (1 March 1921 - 14 October 2017) was an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.

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Also Known As

Alternative Names: Richard Purdy Wilbur

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Originators like Richard Wilbur:

Theodore Roethke William Butler Yeats Emily Dickinson Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams

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the health of the sick, and, what mocked their sighing, Of the strange intactness of the gladly dying.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed 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."

"A Storm In April" Some winters, taking leave, Deal us a last, hard blow, Salting the ground like Carthage Before they will go. But the bright, mil… - Richard Wilbur

About Richard Wilbur

Also Known As

Additional quotes by Richard Wilbur