Richard Wilbur Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging.

Richard Wilbur
What can I do but move From folly to defeat, And call that sorrow sweet That teaches us to see The final face of love In what we cannot be?

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

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.

Richard Wilbur
When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself.

Richard Wilbur
Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man.

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

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

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
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind.

Richard Wilbur
The good grey guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes.

Richard Wilbur
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...

Richard Wilbur
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.

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

Richard Wilbur
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it.

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

Richard Wilbur
Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

Richard Wilbur