A sad day indeed. Just yesterday, I gave my standard answer to the question of America's greatest living poet--Richard Wilbur--not knowing it would be the last time I could say it. The little one below may be my favorite of Wilbur's poems; I find it beautifully, immeasurably sad. I hope those who mourn Wilbur the man as well as the poet--his friends here and elsewhere, I mean--can be glad amidst their sadness that his life was so long and (from what I've heard) so well-lived.
To The Etruscan Poets
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mothers' milk the mother tongue,
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like a fresh track across a field of snow,
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.
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