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Continuing the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur’s poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences. Less well-known is Wilbur’s foray into lyric writing. He provided lyrics to several songs in Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 musical, Candide, including the famous “Glitter and Be Gay” and “Make Our Garden Grow.” He also produced several unpublished works including “The Wing” and “To Beatrice”.

Wilbur died on October 14, 2017, at a nursing home in Belmont, Massachusetts from natural causes aged 96.

Verse

• Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
  The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
  And Nijinsky hadn’t the words to make the laws
  For learning to loiter in air; he merely said,
  “I merely leap and pause.”
  • “Grace” in The Poems of Richard Wilbur (1963)

• 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.
  • “Walking to Sleep” (1969)

• 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.
  • “Walking to Sleep” (1969)

• What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.
  • “Opposites” (1973)

• In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.
  • As quoted by John Gery in Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry (1996)

• A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
  Burst rightly into song
  In a world not vague, not lonely,
  Not governed by me only.
  • “Having Misidentified a Wild-Flower”

• Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
  They are not only yours; 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.
  • “The Beautiful Changes”

The Beacon

• Founded on rock and facing the night-fouled sea
  A beacon blinks at its own brilliance,
  Over and over with cutlass gaze
  Solving the Gordian waters …

• The beacon-blaze unsheathing turns
  The face of darkness pale
  And now with one grand chop gives clearance to
  Our human visions . . .

Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World

• The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
  And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
  Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
  As false dawn.
  Outside the open window
  The morning air is all awash with angels.

• Now they are rising together in calm swells
  Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
  With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing…

• The soul shrinks
  From all that it is about to remember,
  From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
  And cries,
  “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.”

• The soul descends once more in bitter love
  To accept the waking body

A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness

• The tall camels of the spirit
  Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud
  With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the
  arid
  Sun. They are slow, proud,
  And move with a stilted stride
  To the land of sheer horizon…

• O connoisseurs of thirst,
  Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink
  Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst
  That shimmer on the brink
  Of absence; auras, lustres,
  And all shinings need to be shaped and borne.

• Wisely watch for the sight
  Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,
  Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’s right
  Oasis, light incarnate.