Love Calls Us to the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur
"Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" is a lyric poem by Richard Wilbur that explores the themes of awakening, acceptance, and the beauty of the mundane. Set during the early morning hours, the poem captures the disorientation of waking from sleep, where the initial experience can feel jarring and alien. Through vivid imagery, Wilbur illustrates a transformation as laundry hung out in the morning breeze evokes the ethereal presence of angels, infusing a sense of joy and wonder into the scene. However, this enchantment is fleeting, giving way to the inevitable responsibilities of daily life. The speaker reflects on the bittersweet nature of accepting reality, recognizing that even the ordinary moments carry their own intrinsic beauty. The poem contrasts various archetypes—thieves, lovers, and nuns—highlighting the complexity of human existence and its connection to both the spiritual and physical worlds. With its playful language and intricate structure, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" invites readers to appreciate the interplay between the sacred and the everyday.
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Love Calls Us to the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur
First published: 1953; collected in Things of This World, 1956
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” is a lyric poem written in blank verse. The title is taken from Saint Augustine and gives theological support to the particular mood of acceptance significant to the poem.
The poem is set in the first awakening of consciousness after sleep in the morning. The time of initial dislocation between sleep and waking is often portrayed negatively in literature; at first waking, one can often feel alien to the world, even to one’s own life. Indeed, even in this poem it is a “cry of pulleys” from clothes being hung out early in the morning that wakes the “astounded soul,” hardly a pleasant way of being roused from sleep. Yet immediately the laundry is identified with angels in the awake but still-dreaming mind.
The poem next plays with the observer’s imaginings of angels dressed in the bedsheets, blouses, and smocks hanging on the line. As if on cue, the breeze begins and the laundry comes to life with “halcyon feeling” that fills the scene with a “deep joy of their impersonal breathing.”
The waving laundry is next compared to white-water rapids in their rippled dancing until the breeze stops and the garments “swoon down into so rapt a quiet/ That nobody seems to be there.” This sudden stillness brings the consciousness in the poem back to a realization that the “punctual rape” of the day is waiting, the day lived without the magic and delight of the angels that the half-awakened mind imagines. With this realization, the speaker in the poem wishes that he could remain in this pleasant waking fantasy.
Yet he knows he cannot. He does realize, however, that the daily round of common events has its own beauty, a beauty that contains the playful epiphany of the first moments of his morning. The soul of the man “descends once more in bitter love/ To accept the waking body”; the emotion may have bitterness in it, but it is also an emotion of love. As the soul must descend and accept the waking body, so the laundry must be taken down and worn, though it will be dirtied by doing so.
This “clean linen” will be worn by thieves, by lovers who are (like the laundry) “fresh and sweet to be undone,” and by nuns. By choosing nuns to complete this earthly trinity, Richard Wilbur makes a particularly apposite choice. Just as the thieves and lovers contrast with each other, so do the nuns and angels. Nuns are creatures of this world as angels assuredly are not, but their existence speaks of the world of the spirit to which the man in the poem awakes. The nuns are termed “heaviest,” but they walk in a “pure floating/ Of dark habits.” They live in a world of wakened fact but also of the bodiless joy of the opening of the poem; so, by inference, do all humans.
Forms and Devices
On the page, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” appears at first to be semi-free verse, the lines metered but of indeterminate lengths. On close reading, however, one sees that the poem is actually written in blank verse. Typographically, the lines are scattered, and there are many dropped lines, much as one sees in William Shakespeare’s plays when two characters share one line of iambic pentameter. Thus there is only one line—“Yet, as the sun acknowledges”—that is not a pentameter line, and this line is lacking only one foot. The effect is that a leisurely, seemingly loosely constructed poem does take a definite shape, much the same as the consciousness in the poem itself does accept a form. In both cases, the shape is one of discovery of meaning and correspondence.
The poem is about a joyous acceptance, and the poet indeed takes a delight in language. “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” is full of playful language, perhaps most notably in its use of puns. The awakened soul fancifully seeing angels is described as “spirited from sleep.” The laundry causes the morning air to be “awash with angels.” When consciousness wins the upper hand and insists that these objects are not angels but laundry, the “soul shrinks.” When the speaker rails against the “punctual rape of every blessèd day,” there are two puns involved. The first is “blessèd,” used as both an epithet and an affirmation of the sanctity of the commonplace. Second, the entire phrase is about the killing nature of habit. Yet the nuns “walk in a pure floating/ Of dark habits,” which are reminders that one’s daily actions are meaningful, that the things of this world are not only of this world.
The voice in the poem is another carefully considered construct of the poem. Only once is anything specific said about who it is who awakens in the poem; Wilbur writes in one line that “the man yawns and rises.” In all other instances, nothing as particular is noted. Usually, the being in the poem is simply referred to as the “soul.” There are two major reasons for this. The poem is about disembodied dreams that take a shape in common objects as the awakened consciousness ceases to dream. Therefore, as the consciousness in the poem gets out of bed, Wilbur refers to “the man” where he had twice previously used “soul.” He has become once more of this world. Also, the poet wants the situation he describes to apply to all humankind, and too much particularization would be inconsistent with this goal.
Bibliography
Bixler, Frances. Richard Wilbur: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Hougen, John B. Ecstasy Within Discipline: The Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994.
Michelson, Bruce. Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.
Reibetang, John. “What Love Sees: Poetry and Vision in Richard Wilbur.” Modern Poetry Studies 11 (1982): 60-85.
Salinger, Wendy, ed. Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.
Stitt, Peter. The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.