Quotes from Richard Wilbur

Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.

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.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:But whether this was false or honest dreamingI beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

Ask us, prophet, how we shall callOur natures forth when that live tongue is allDispelled, that glass obscured or brokenIn which we have said the rose of our love and the cleanHorse of our courage, in which beheldThe singing locust of the soul unshelled,And all we mean or wish to mean.

In her room at the prow of the houseWhere light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,My daughter is writing a story.

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,And spirited from sleep, the astounded soulHangs for a moment bodiless and simpleas false dawn.Outside the open windowThe morning air is all awash with angels.

What you hope forIs that at some point of the pointless journey,Indoors or out, and when you least expect it,Right in the middle of your stride, like that,So neatly that you never feel a thing,The kind assassin Sleep will draw a beadAnd blow your brains out.

But up in his room by artificial lightMy father paints the summer.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changedBy a chameleon's tuning his skin to it.

The soul shrinksFrom all that it is about to remember,From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,And cries,"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steamAnd clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

The werewolf's painful change. Turning his head awayOn the sweaty bolster, he tries to rememberThe mood of manhood,But lies at last, as always,Letting it happen, the fierce fur soft to his face,Hearing with sharper ears.

Apology" A word sticks in the wind's throat; A wind-launch drifts in the swells of rye; Sometimes, in broad silence, The hanging apples distill their darkness. You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair, Who come by the field-path now, whose name I say Softly, forgive me love if I also call you Wind's word, apple-heart, haven of grasses.

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

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.

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

It is always a matter, my darling, Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder.

Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze

If the king had given me for my own Paris, his citadel, And I for that must leave alone Her whom I love so well, I'd say then to the Crown Take back your glittering town My darling is more fair, I swear. My darling is more fair.