Richard Wilbur, who died last night, was born in New York City in 1921 and grew up in rural New Jersey. His father was a portrait painter, and his mother came from a long line of journalists. A graduate of Amherst College (class of 1942), he served during World War II with the 36th Infantry Division. He saw action in Italy, France, and Germany. He taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Smith, and his alma mater. Dick liked living in the country. With his late wife Charlotte he lived year-round in Cummington, Massachusetts, birthplace of William Cullen Bryant, and spent many springs in Key West, Florida. In 2004 his Collected Poems 1943-2004 appeared from Harcourt. Twice he won Pulitzer Prizes. He wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and his translations from seventeenth century French drama (Molière, Racine, Corneille) are performed widely in the United States and abroad.
Dick's greatness as a poet, translator, and wordsmith are (or should be) self-evident to all practicing.poets. He was also the most genial and gracious of individuals. It was an honor to know him and work with him. I profited from his expertise on many subjects: Edgar Allan Poe, the great American songbook, French classical tragedy, Milton, riddles, the haiku stanza put to narrative or expository use. In a New York City hotel in 1981 or '82 I heard Dick read his poem "Lying." He prefaced the reading by rehearsing his doubts about the merit of the work. But James Merrill had reassured him that it passed muster. "Lying" was one of Dick's great poems, I like teaching his "Boy at the Window" alongside Stevens's "The Snow Man." We were lucky to have Richard Wilbur among us for so many years. — DL
Advice to a Prophet
Richard Wilbur
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?
Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
(1961)