Poetry for Students, Volume 29

easy, spontaneous air...The poem marks an
important development in Wilbur’s relationship
with words, for here he succeeds as never before
in making wordplay look easy.’’

CRITICISM

David Kelly
Kelly is a professor of literature and creative writ-
ing. In this essay on ‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things
of This World,’’ he explores the poem’s structure,
focusing on the particular function of the fourth
and fifth stanzas.

Richard Wilbur’s ‘‘Love Calls Us to the
Things of This World’’ is not only one of Wil-
bur’s most admired poems, it is one of the most
admired and reprinted poems of the twentieth
century, and for good reason: it has something
for everybody. The poem satisfies realists with
its style—it is calibrated to almost mathematical
precision—but its overall theme is a testimony to
the transcendent spirit.

For readers who view the universe as basi-

cally a series of mechanical processes, Wilber

offers not only praise for the things of this

world (as opposed to the view of, say, the gospel

of St. John, which warns that worldly objects are

a distraction) but also the poem’s mechanical

regularity: its consistent five-line stanzas, its

easily understood metaphors, its even progres-

sion from talking about a ‘‘soul’’ to talking about

a ‘‘man.’’

For those who view the world as a phantom

place, the imagined realm of the spirit, the poem

acknowledges that unseen forces control the

physical nature of the world with its supposition

of the intangible angels. The poem’s structure

reflects its freedom from strict form in several

ways. The most obvious of these is, of course, the

use of the split line. Not only does this serve to

obscure the strict consistency of the five-line

stanzas, but Wilbur uses the split line in no reg-

ular pattern throughout the poem—fourth line

of stanza 1, fifth line of stanza 3, third line of

stanza 4 and the last line of the last stanza. This

throws any sense the reader might have of the

The poem suggests that laundry on a clothesline sometimes looks like anglels(Jodi Cobb / National Geographic / Getty
Images)

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World