Poems Of Richard Wilbur

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

•ADVICE TO A PROPHET AND OTHER POEMS• (1961)

Two Voices in a Meadow

Advice to a Prophet

Stop

Junk

Loves of the Puppets

A Summer Morning

A Hole in the Floor

Jorge Guillén: The Horses

Jorge Guillén: Death, from a Distance

She

Gemini

The Undead

October Maples, Portland

Eight Riddles from Symphosius

Shame

A Grasshopper

Salvatore Quasimodo: The Agrigentum Road

The Aspen and the Stream

A Fire-Truck

Someone Talking to Himself

In the Smoking-Car

Ballade for the Duke of Orléans

Gérard de Nerval: Antéros

To Ishtar

Pangloss's Song: A Comic-Opera Lyric

Two Quatrains for First Frost

Another Voice

Moliére: TARTUFFE, Act I, Scene 4

Fall in Corrales

Next Door

A Christmas Hymn

Notes

•THINGS OF THIS WORLD• (1956)

Altitudes

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Sonnet

Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning

John Chrysostom

A Black November Turkey

Mind

After the Last Bulletins

Lamarck Elaborated

A Plain Song for Comadre

Merlin Enthralled

A Voice from under the Table

The Beacon

Statues

Looking into History

Charles Baudelaire: L'Invitation au Voyage

Digging for China

Francis Jammes: A Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys

Philippe de Thaun: The Pelican

Apology

Paul Valéry: Helen

Beasts

Exeunt

Marginalia

Boy at the Window

Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act

All These Birds

A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra

An Event

A Chronic Condition

The Mill

For the New Railway Station in Rome

•CEREMONY AND OTHER POEMS• (1950)

Then

Conjuration

A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness

The Pardon

Part of a Letter

La Rose des Vents

Epistemology

Castles and Distances

Museum Piece

Ode to Pleasure

In the Elegy Season

Marché aux Oiseaux

Juggler

Parable

The Good Servant

Pity

The Sirens

Year's End

The Puritans

Grasse: The Olive Trees

The Avowal

The Gifts

Five Women Bathing in Moonlight

The Terrace

A Problem from Milton

A Glance from the Bridge

Clearness

Games One

Games Two

Beowulf

Still, Citizen Sparrow

Wellfleet: The House

The Death of a Toad

Driftwood

A Courtyard Thaw

Lament

Flumen Tenebrarum

From the Lookout Rock

To an American Poet Just Dead

Giacometti

He Was

A Simile for Her Smile

Ceremony

•THE BEAUTIFUL CHANGES AND OTHER POEMS• (1947)

Cigales

Water Walker

Tywater

Mined Country

Potato

First Snow in Alsace

On the Eyes of an SS Officer

Place Pigalle

Violet and Jasper

The Peace of Cities

The Giaour and the Pacha

Up, Jack

In a Bird Sanctuary

June Light

A Song

The Walgh-Vogel

The Melongene

Objects

A Dutch Courtyard

My Father Paints the Summer

Folk Tune

Sun and Air

Two Songs in a Stanza of Beddoes'

The Waters

Superiorities

A Simplification

A Dubious Night

L'Etoile

Sunlight Is Imagination

&

O

The Regatta

Bell Speech

Poplar, Sycamore

Winter Spring

Attention Makes Infinity

Grace

Lightness

For Ellen

Caserta Garden

Praise in Summer

The Beautiful Changes

Notes

Books By Richard Wilbur

About the Author

Footnotes

Copyright © 1963, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1958, 1957, 1956, 1955, 1953, 1952, 1950,1949,1948, 1947 by Richard Wilbur

Copyright renewed 1987, 1986, 1985, 1984, 1983, 1981, 1980, 1978, 1977, 1976,1975 by Richard Wilbur

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Beasts, A Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys, and The Pelican appeared in A Bestiary, by Richard Wilbur, copyright, 1955, by Pantheon Books, Inc.

The poems Grasse: The Olive Trees, Year's End, Juggler, Clearness, The Sirens, In the Elegy Season, Boy at the Window, The Beacon, Exeunt (originally published under the title Exodus), Merlin Enthralled, After the Last Bulletins, A Black November Turkey, All These Birds, A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra, Loves of the Puppets, Two Voices in a Meadow, Someone Talking to Him-self, A Fire-Truck, Advice to a Prophet, A Grasshopper, Two Quatrains for First Frost, In the Smoking-Car, A Summer Morning, October Maples, Portland, Stop, Ballade for the Duke of Orléans, Next Door, The Undead, A Hole in the Floor, and The Aspen and the Stream" appeared originally in The New Yorker. Other poems appeared originally in Accent, American Letters, The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Audience, Beloit Poetry Journal, Between Worlds, Botteghe Oscure, Chicago Choice, Foreground, Furioso, Harvard Advocate, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, Imagi, Inventario, Junior Bazaar, Kenyan Review, Mandrake, The Nation, New Directions No. 10, Nimbus, Origin, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, Poetry New York, Poetry Quarterly (London), Quagga, Quarterly Review of Literature, Trinity College Review, Spectrum, Tiger's Eye, Transatlantic Review, Virginia Quarterly, and Wake.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

ISBN 0-15-672251-8

eISBN 978-0-544-10895-0

v1.1112

•ADVICE TO A PROPHET

AND OTHER POEMS•

(1961)

FOR LILLIAN HELLMAN

Two Voices in a Meadow

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 the ears in sod.

Why should I move? To move

Befits a light desire.

The sill of Heaven would founder,

Did such as I aspire.

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.

Stop

In grimy winter dusk

We slowed for a concrete platform;

The pillars passed more slowly;

A paper bag leapt up.

The train banged to a standstill.

Brake-steam rose and parted.

Three chipped-at blocks of ice

Sprawled on a baggage-truck.

Out in that glum, cold air

The broken ice lay glintless,

But the truck was painted blue

On side, wheels, and tongue,

A purple, glowering blue

Like the phosphorus of Lethe

Or Queen Persephone's gaze

In the numb fields of the dark.

Junk

Huru Welandes

worc ne geswiceð

monna anigum

ðara ðe 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