"Icarium Mare" by Richard Wilbur

Here’s the poem on which I am writing my final J-Po paper. I thought that some might enjoy making its acquaintance.

Icarium Mare
Richard Wilbur

We have heard of the undimmed air
Of the True Earth above us, and how here,
Shut in our sea-like atsmosphere,
We grope like muddled fish. Perhaps from there,

That fierce lucidity,
Came Icarus’ body tumbling, flayed and trenched
By waxen runnels, to be quenched
Near Samos riding in the actual sea,

Where Aristarchus first
Rounded the sun in thought; near Patmos, too,
Where John’s bejeweled inward view
Descried an angel in the solar burst.

The reckoner’s instruments,
The saint’s geodic skull bowed in his cave–
Insight and calculation brave
Black distances exorbitant to sense,

Which in its little shed
Of broken light knows wonders all the same.
Where else do lifting wings proclaim
The advent of the fire-gapped thunderhead,

Which swells the streams to grind
What oak and olive grip their roots into,
Shading us as we name anew
Creatures without which vision would be blind?

This is no outer dark
But a small province haunted by the good,
Where something may be understood
And where, within the sun’s coronal arc,

We keep our proper range,
Aspiring, with this lesser globe of sight,
To gather tokens of the light
Not in the bullion, but in the loose change.