Richard Wilbur Quotes & Sayings

Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray ... — Richard Wilbur

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

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. — Richard Wilbur

What you hope for Is 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 bead And blow your brains out. — Richard Wilbur

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened — Richard Wilbur

Most women know that sex isgood for headaches. — Richard Wilbur

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

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

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. — Richard Wilbur

During my lunch hour, which I spent on a bench in a nearby park, the waitresses would come and sit beside me talking at random, laughing, joking, smoking cigarettes. I learned about their tawdry dreams, their simple hopes, their home lives, their fear of feeling anything deeply, their sex problems, their husbands. They were an eager, restless, talkative, ignorant bunch, but casually kind and impersonal for all that. They knew nothing of hate and fear, and strove instinctively to avoid all passion. — Richard Wilbur

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 — Richard Wilbur

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. — Richard Wilbur

Mantova
The first thing I saw in the morning
Was a huge golden bee ploughing
His burly right shoulder into the belly
Of a sleek yellow pear
Low on a bough.
Before he could find that sudden black honey
That squirms around in there
Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.
The pear fell to the ground,
With the bee still half alive
Inside its body.
He would have died had I not knelt down
And sliced the pear gently
A little more open.
The bee shuddered, and returned.
Maybe I should have left him a lone there
Drowning in his own delight.
The best days are the first
To flee. — Richard Wilbur

Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best - unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle. — Richard Wilbur

What's lightly hid is deepest understood, — Richard Wilbur

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. — Richard Wilbur

Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven. — 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. — Richard Wilbur

I die of thirst here at the fountainside. — 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. — Richard Wilbur

What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit? — Richard Wilbur

The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art. — Richard Wilbur

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. — Richard Wilbur

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack. — Richard Wilbur

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.
What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow's walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea. — Richard Wilbur

Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze. — Richard Wilbur

A woman I have never seen before
Steps from the darkness of her town-house door
At just that crux of time when she is made
So beautiful that she or time must fade.
What use to claim that as she tugs her gloves
A phantom heraldry of all the loves
Blares from the lintel? That the staggered sun
Forgets, in his confusion, how to run?
Still, nothing changes as her perfect feet
Click down the walk that issues in the street,
Leaving the stations of her body there
Like whips that map the countries of the air. — Richard Wilbur

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday. — Richard Wilbur

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

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. — Richard Wilbur

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

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. — Richard Wilbur

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

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia. — Richard Wilbur

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

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

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry. — Richard Wilbur

A Storm In April"

Some winters, taking leave,
Deal us a last, hard blow,
Salting the ground like Carthage
Before they will go.

But the bright, milling snow
Which throngs the air today -
It is a way of leaving
So as to stay.

The light flakes do not weigh
The willows down, but sift
Through the white catkins, loose
As petal-drift

Or in an up-draft lift
And glitter at a height,
Dazzling as summer's leaf-stir
Chinked with light.

This storm, if I am right,
Will not be wholly over
Till green fields, here and there,
Turn white with clover,
And through chill air the puffs of milkweed hover. — Richard Wilbur

The beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder. — Richard Wilbur

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

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

We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light — Richard Wilbur