Quotes from Richard Wilbur

A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.

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.

Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage.

As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there, Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses, Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

I die of thirst here at the fountainside.

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

Yes, death is far less dire to contemplate Than a forced marriage to an unloved mate

Tanka Black-and-white Holsteins Crowd downfield at feeding time, Mingling their blotches. It is like ice breaking up In a dark, swollen river.

the health of the sick, and, what mocked their sighing, Of the strange intactness of the gladly dying.

But I am weary of The winter way of loving things for reasons. — Richard Wilbur, from "Winter Spring," New and Collected Poems (HBJ, 1988)

Limitation makes for power. The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.

In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man.

Cuál es el opuesto de dos? Tu y yo en soledad

It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.

The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence

Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.

To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.

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