on the same washline, so to speak, a colorfully
promiscuous variety of loves—material, erotic,
charitable, and sacred.
Within the context of seventeenth-century
meditative literature familiar to Wilbur, a soul’s
final response to the openings of divine love—
whether found in scripture tropes or laundry—
takes the form of personal colloquy. Such is like-
wise the case in Wilbur’s poem, whose compas-
sionate conclusion registers one soul’s answer to
the call of Love.
By the same token, Wilbur was clearly
affirming the incarnational beauty and necessity
of the material world when he insisted in verse of
a few years earlier that ‘‘A World Without
Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness.’’ Here, in fact,
the historical moment of a particular barn-birth,
haloed with ‘‘Lampshine blurred in the steam of
beasts,’’ becomes the central paradigm for dis-
covering ‘‘the spirit’s right / Oasis, light incar-
nate.’’ And yet, without attending closely to the
poem’s originative context in Thomas Tra-
herne’sCenturies, we are not apt to see how
much its rejection of ideality has to do with
Traherne’s own overarching theme of love.
Across the desert landscape of Wilbur’s
poem, the soul’s ‘‘tall camels of the spirit’’ start
off walking in pride toward a desolation of thirst
and absence. For until this soul descends in lov-
ing humility toward a world whose ‘‘shinings
need to be shaped and borne,’’ it is chasing a
cursed mirage. Traherne points out about souls
that ‘‘till they love they are desolate; without
their objects...but when they shine by Love
upon all objects, they are accompanied with
them and enlightened by them’’ (Traherne 80).
In the poem’s closing quatrain, then, the
true ‘‘sight’’ celebrated is the light of love,
which momentarily reveals divine glory in the
surrounding trees, creeks, hills, and steaming
beasts. If Traherne states that ‘‘Life without
objects is sensible emptiness,’’ so also he goes
on to reflect in the same passage that ‘‘Objects
without Love are the delusion of life’’ because
‘‘The Objects of Love are its greatest treasures:
and without Love it is impossible they should be
treasures’’ (86). Rejecting ideality as a desolating
delusion, Wilbur’s poem ends up endorsing once
again the return to incarnate relation.
Still, the soul’s recovery of an illuminative
oasis within this world cannot permanently sat-
isfy its longings for the infinite. Restlessness,
incompletion, the imperfection of all earthly
loves—these Augustinian motifs have been and
remain persistent in Wilbur’s writing. As
recently as ‘‘Hamlen Book,’’ the poet is wonder-
ing ‘‘How shall I drink all this?’’ or how carry on
the lips that ‘‘ache / Nothing can satisfy?’’ Or as
he writes earlier, ‘‘The end of thirst exceeds expe-
rience’’ (‘‘A Voice from under the Table’’).
According to Wilbur, both Traherne and Emily
Dickinson had discovered that infinite desire of
the soul which, unlike mere appetite, could never
rest content in finite satisfactions. This thwarted
desire for completion also characterizes a second
form of love discernible throughout Wilbur’s
writing: the love of human beings...
Source:John Gatta, ‘‘Richard Wilbur’s Poetry of Love,’’
inRenascence, Vol. 45, No. 1–2, September 1992,
pp. 3–15.Frank Littler
In the following article, Littler critiques ‘‘Love
Calls Us to the Things of This World’’ from a
theological perspective.
In the gospel of St. John, the adjuration to
mankind is to ‘‘Love not the world, neither the
things that are in the world’’ (1 John 2:15). Man
is thus counseled to seek the spiritual directly,
avoiding the ‘‘things’’ of this world which pre-
sumably would lessen his capacity to exist on a
spiritual plane. In Richard Wilbur’s poem ‘‘Love
Calls Us To Things of This World’’ (The Poems
of Richard Wilbur[New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1963]) however, this biblical notion
is examined critically, and the paradoxical
notion that man best seeks the spiritual through
his participation in the actual or world of the
body is put in its place. The poem is not, of
course, overtly theological but does make a theo-
logical point. Wilbur uses structure and diction
to create a highly refined presentation of the
contrast between the spiritual and the physical
and of the paradox of man’s finding the spiritual
through the actual—the theme of the poem.
The poem’s two part structure is perhaps the
most obvious indication of how the contrast of
the spiritual and physical is presented. The first
part of the poem, running to line seventeen,
stresses a fanciful world of spirit, epitomized by
the ‘‘angels,’’ which to the ‘‘soul’’ are, in the light
of false dawn, the transformed clothes hanging
on a clothes line. The image of the angels,
appearing in the midst of the wholly mundane
setting of, perhaps, a tenement district, is a wel-
come contrast to the real world. Line 17 of theLove Calls Us to the Things of This World