Selected Poems
Paris Review Interview: Richard Wilbur
Modern American Poetry: Richard Wilbur
poetryfoundation.org: Richard Wilbur

Richard Purdy Wilbur (born March 1, 1921), is an American poet.  Wilbur was born in New York City and educated at Amherst College and Harvard. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the US Army from 1943 until 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade.

Wilbur published his first poem in John Martin's Magazine when he was eight years old. His first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems appeared in 1947. Since then he has published several volumes of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (Faber, 1989). Wilbur is also a translator, specializing in the 17th century French comedies of Molière and the dramas of Jean Racine. Continuing the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur's poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences. Less well-known is Wilbur's foray into lyric writing. He provided many of the finer lyrical touches in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical, Candide.

His honors include a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, both in 1957, the Edna St Vincent Millay award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Chevalier, Ordre National des Palmes Academiques. In 1987 Wilbur became the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren, to be named US Poet Laureate. In 1989 he won a second Pulitzer, this one for his New and Collected Poems. In 2006, Wilbur won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He also wrote several unpublished works such as "The Wing" and "To Beatrice".

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Poems:

Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

A Fable

Securely sunning in a forest glade,
     A mild, well-meaning snake
Approved the adaptations he had made
          For safety’s sake.

     He liked the skin he had—
Its mottled camouflage, its look of mail,
And was content that he had thought to add
          A rattling tail.

The tail was not for drumming up a fight;
     No, nothing of the sort.
And he would only use his poisoned bite
          As last resort.

     A peasant now drew near,
Collecting wood; the snake, observing this,
Expressed concern by uttering a clear
          But civil hiss.

The simple churl, his nerves at once unstrung,
     Mistook the other’s tone
And dashed his brains out with a deftly-flung
          Pre-emptive stone.

                    MORAL

Security, alas, can give
     A threatening impression;
Too much defense-initiative
          Can prompt aggression.

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 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.''

     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.''

Playboy

High on his stockroom ladder like a dunce
The stock-boy sits, and studies like a sage
The subject matter of one glossy page,
As lost in curves as Archimedes once.

Sometimes, without a glance, he feeds himself.
The left hand, like a mother-bird in flight,
Brings him a sandwich for a sidelong bite,
And then returns it to a dusty shelf.

What so engrosses him? The wild decor
Of this pink-papered alcove into which
A naked girl has stumbled, with its rich
Welter of pelts and pillows on the floor,

Amidst which, kneeling in a supple pose,
She lifts a goblet in her farther hand,
As if about to toast a flower-stand
Above which hovers an exploding rose

Fired from a long-necked crystal vase that rests
Upon a tasseled and vermilion cloth
One taste of which would shrivel up a moth?
Or is he pondering her perfect breasts?

Nothing escapes him of her body's grace
Or of her floodlit skin, so sleek and warm
And yet so strangely like a uniform,
But what now grips his fancy is her face,

And how the cunning picture holds her still
At just that smiling instant when her soul,
Grown sweetly faint, and swept beyond control,
Consents to his inexorable will.

The Pardon

My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle-vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive

Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.

Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. My father took the spade

And buried him. Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging. I confess

I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,
And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started in to cry and call his name,

Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
. . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra

            Under the bronze crown
Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet
      A serpent has begun to eat,
Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down

            Past spattered mosses, breaks
On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills
      The massive third below. It spills
In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes

            A scrim or summery tent
For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose.
      Happy in all that ragged, loose
Collapse of water, its effortless descent

            And flatteries of spray,
The stocky god upholds the shell with ease,
      Watching, about his shaggy knees,
The goatish innocence of his babes at play;

            His fauness all the while
Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh
      Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh
In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile

            Bent on the sand floor
Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come
      And go in swift reticulum,
More addling to the eye than wine, and more

            Interminable to thought
Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all
      Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall,
Must it not be too simple? Are we not

            More intricately expressed
In the plain fountains that Maderna set
      Before St. Peter’s—the main jet
Struggling aloft until it seems at rest

            In the act of rising, until
The very wish of water is reversed,
      That heaviness borne up to burst
In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill

            With blaze, and then in gauze
Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine
      Illumined version of itself, decline,
And patter on the stones its own applause?

            If that is what men are
Or should be, if those water-saints display
      The pattern of our areté,
What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,

            Spangled, and plunging house?
They are at rest in fulness of desire
      For what is given, they do not tire
Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse

            And riddled pool below,
Reproving our disgust and our ennui
      With humble insatiety.
Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow

            Before the wealthy gate
Freezing and praising, might have seen in this
      No trifle, but a shade of bliss—
That land of tolerable flowers, that state

            As near and far as grass
Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand
      Is worthy of water: the dreamt land
Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.

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