Maybe this isn't the place for critical commentary. (But why not? His poems can withstand my drivel.) I have tried and tried again to appreciate Wilbur whose poems with few exceptions alight neither heart nor imagination in me. Wilbur's influence on formalism is so pervasive he became a cul-de-sac from which no one seems to know where to go. A century since his birth and poets still try to write the Wilbur poem. There must be more.
That said, here are two I admire very much. They are well-known.
Trismegistus
O Egypt, Egypt—so the great lament
Of thrice-great Hermes went—
Nothing of thy religion shall remain
Save fables, which thy children shall disdain.
His grieving eye foresaw
The world’s bright fabric overthrown
Which married star to stone
And charged all things with awe.
And what, in that dismantled world, could be
More fabulous than he?
Had he existed? Was he but a name
Tacked on to forgeries which pressed the claim
Of every ancient quack—
That one could from a smoky cell
By talisman or spell
Coerce the Zodiac?
Still, still we summon him at midnight hour
To Milton’s pensive tower,
And hear him tell again how, then and now,
Creation is a house of mirrors, how
Each herb that sips the dew
Dazzles the eye with many small
Reflections of the All—
Which, after all, is true.
Thyme Flowering Among the Rocks
This, if Japanese,
Would represent grey boulders
Walloped by rough seas
So that, here or there,
The balked water tossed its froth
Straight into the air.
Here, where things are what
They are, it is thyme blooming,
Rocks, and nothing but—
Having, nonetheless,
Many small leaves implicit,
A green countlessness.
Crouching down, peering
Into perplexed recesses,
You find a clearing
Occupied by sun
Where, along prone, rachitic
Branches, one by one,
Pale stems arise, squared
In the manner of Mentha,
The oblong leaves paired.
One branch, in ending,
Lifts a little and begets
A straight-ascending
Spike, whorled with fine blue
Or purple trumpets, banked in
The leaf axils. You
Are lost now in dense
Fact, fact which one might have thought
Hidden from the sense,
Blinking at the detail
Peppery as this fragrance,
Lost to proper scale
As, in the motion
Of striped fins, a bathysphere
Forgets the ocean.
It makes the craned head
Spin. Unfathomed thyme! The world's
A dream, Basho said,
Not because that dream's
A falsehood, but because it's
Truer than it seems.
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