Author Archive

"Year’s End" by Richard Wilbur

01
Jan 2010
By

I came upon this today, quite fortuitously, I suppose. Enjoy. Happy New Year to all. 2010 sounds much better than 2009, in my opinion.

“Year’s End” by Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Category: It Is What It Is  One Comment  Tags:

"Icarium Mare" by Richard Wilbur

30
Nov 2009
By

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.



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