Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Curry.

Today's poem is by Richard Wilbur, an American poet, and if you've been listening for a while,

you know by now one of my very favorites. He was the Poet Laureate in 1987, and he received the Pulitzer

Prize for Poetry in 1957 and in 1989.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Crow's Nests. This is how it goes.

That lofty stand of trees beyond the field, which in the storms of summer stood revealed as a great fleet of galleons,

bound our way across a moiled expanse of tossing hay, full-rigged and swift,

and to the topmost sail, taking their fill and pleasure of the gale.

Now, in this leafless time our ships no more,

though it would not be hard to take them for a roadstead full of naked mast and spar,

in which we see now where the crow's nests are.

I once heard Richard Wilbur say that this is a factual poem, that this is a poem about a simple fact,

by which he meant that crow's nest just live in the top of trees.

And one of the things that I love about Wilbur is that for all of his formal pursuits,

experimental or otherwise, for all of the complicated images that he offers us

and the rich language and the varying syntaxes and all the different things that he puts into his

poems, at the core of so much of his work is something like this, an image which captures his

imagination in which he makes more profound, more, I was going to say more meaningful, I don't think that's perhaps the right word, but which he makes more profound, more, I was going to say more meaningful, I don't think that's

perhaps the right word, but which he makes more universal, which he makes more spiritual, I guess,

in a way. So we have this image of crow's nests in the trees, the trees and fall, where they no longer

have leaves on them. And he takes this

this image and offers us a surprising image. You know, lots of people have seen nests up in trees

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