I’m
good at remembering first lines of poems. (A favorite which returns to me
regularly, often seemingly out of nowhere: What I wanted, in the pearly
repetitions of February, was vision -- Robert Hass), or a feeling
a poem gave me, but rarely anything else beyond a few scattered words or phrases. I’ve even come to see myself as an index of first
lines, my life as the inexpressible feelings that come in the absence
of what follows, a suggestion, more start than finish.
But this poem by Richard Wilbur is one that I carry with me in its entirety. In life, I had expected to identify with the milkweed, but in the end it's the stone I know most intimately. Of course I thought about the poem while exploring an actual meadow two days ago.
Two Voices in a Meadow
A Milkweed
Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burst pod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.
A Stone
As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me,
Up to the ears in sod.
Why should I move? To move
Befits a light desire.
The sill of Heaven would founder,
Did such as I aspire.
- Richard Wilbur
from Advice to a Prophet (1961)
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