Richard Wilbur's poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," reflects upon the experience of waking from sleep, and in a larger sense the experience of awakening into a larger and clearer consciousness (or not). Outside the waking sleeper's window hangs a line of laundry. As Wilbur says, the scene is outside the upper-story window of an apartment building, in front of which, on a clothesline, "the first laundry of the day is being yanked across the sky."
"The things of this world" is a phrase taken from St. Augustine's Confessions, as in these lines from Book X: "I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have no being at all."
"Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree," says Wilbur, "have known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, to the quotidian; Augustine says it is love that brings us back." That is the poem's central theme, the variations and complexities, the imbalance and balance, of returning to the earth, the quotidian, the things of this world. Awakening.
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are
in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;
Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their
omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on
earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven."
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks
and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter
love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult
balance."
— Richard Wilbur
Here is Richard Wilbur commenting upon and reading "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjeLdTk7lPU
And here is another short video portrait of Wilbur, reflecting upon his mother and father, their families and their impact upon his life and work as a poet:
http://www.webofstories.com/play/14719