COLLECTED POEMS OF RICHARD WILBUR
By Melissa Schubert
If you’ve never encountered the poetry of Richard Wilbur, one of the most distinguished living Christian poets in the U. S., you might consider picking up his recently published Collected Poems 1943-2004. While much of twentieth century poetry contemplates the anxieties of our age or confesses the tumult of the individual psyche, Wilbur’s lyrics are often marked by a delight that is neither sentimental nor superficial. One of his earliest poems, the sonnet Praise in Summer, caught my eye recently.
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said,
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
Wilbur opens by turning the world topsy-turvy with metaphors, emphasizing in his reversals the way things are not. He proceeds to reproach himself for this, asking sharp questions of his imagination, aspiring to purify his praise. And in his final lines, as resolution, he offers a celebration of things as they are.
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