Love Calls Us to the Things of This World (1956). Content and Description

The speaker of this poem describes awakening to the sound of laundry being hung out to dry on a rope controlled by pulleys; in his half-conscious state, he imagines that the hanging clothes resemble bodiless angels, moving (or not moving) in response to the changing or dying breeze. The speaker says that his “soul shrinks” from the idea of being fully awake, with all the burdens of consciousness and memory that wakefulness implies; he would prefer to stay in bed and watch the beautifully undulating laundry.

Finally, however, the spirit must reunite with the flesh and must accept the material world, and in the end the speaker wishes that the clean clothes should be worn (not merely viewed) even by people who are inevitably imperfect, thus maintaining the “difficult balance” of body and soul, of earth and heaven.

Here as in his poem “A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness,” Wilbur concedes the attractiveness of the spiritual realm but insists that spirit must be united with flesh if life is to seem authentic, meaningful, and rich. The artist who pretends that spirit alone is sufficient denies a basic truth of existence—a truth this poem finally affirms.

The poem opens as the speaker’s eyes open; our own awakening, developing consciousness as readers, thus mimics his. In a poem centrally concerned with the spirit, Wilbur wittily plays on the meaning of the phrase “spirited from sleep” (l. 2), while the imagery of the soul as it “Hangs” (a metrically emphasized verb) “bodiless” already foreshadows the ensuing central imagery of the hanging clothes (l. 3). In a clever pun that introduces that imagery, the speaker says that his vision is “awash” in “angels”—a noun that not only creates a strong visual impression of floating whiteness but also suggests the traditional role of angels as messengers who convey important meanings, as these “angels” certainly do by the time the poem has finished.

The speaker creates a strong sense of immediacy and presence through such words as “Now” (l. 8) and such phrases as “there they are” (l. 7), and the lines themselves (appropriately enough) seem largely free-flowing, unconstrained, unpredictable in their movements, like the movements of the clothes on the line. Wilbur achieves this effect by dispensing altogether with rhyme, by frequently employing enjambment, by irregularly and radically varying the lengths of his line (using sometimes as few as two syllables, sometimes as many as 13), and by breaking lines abruptly (although always in a way that creates effective emphasis, as in lines 4, 17, 20, and 34).

The wonderfully apt and beautiful imagery of the empty clothes as angels is juxtaposed with the startling reference to “the punctual rape of every blessed day” (l. 19), a phrase in which Wilbur gets maximal meaning out of each word. The idea of a “punctual rape,” for instance, seems paradoxical, since rapes are usually imagined as unusual, startling events. Here, however, the negative word rape (which ironically echoes the positive word rapt of line 15) is “punctual” in the sense that day arrives with unfailing regularity: The progress of time is inevitable, however painful it may be and however much we may wish to resist it.

Every day is “blessed” in a double sense: Sometimes we feel like cursing its arrival, but each day is also an almost holy gift and must be accepted as such. Indeed, throughout the poem Wilbur relies on a sense of paradox (as in the reference to “bitter love” in line 26), because, he implies, life itself is paradoxical, and the trick to living fully is to maintain the “difficult balance” (l. 34) of being true to the spirit while accepting the flesh.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare and contrast this work with Wallace Stevens’s poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” What do the works imply about the relations between flesh and spirit? How does each use religious imagery to convey its themes? What is the role of beauty in each work?

2. Compare and contrast this work with John Crowe Ransom’s poem “Janet Waking.” How do the tones of the two poems differ, especially in their use of humor? What do the works imply about the nature of reality? Why is it significant that the titular figure in Ransom’s poem is a young girl, whereas the speaker in Wilbur’s poem is presumably an adult?

3. Compare and contrast this work with Mary Oliver’s poem “Poppies.” How are the works similar in their imagery and in their implications concerning relations between beauty and day-to-day reality? How does each poem embrace loveliness without denying hard facts?