Richard Wilbur Short Quotes

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

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

Richard Wilbur
But up in his room by artificial light My father paints the summer.

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

Richard Wilbur
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

Richard Wilbur
Love is the greatest mercy,
A volley of the sun
That lashes all with shade.

Richard Wilbur
All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain On the shore of what we know.

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

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

Richard Wilbur
Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole
And casting out my self, become a soul.

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

Richard Wilbur
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, 'You are not true.'

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

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

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

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

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
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 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
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
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