Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close to Rees Podcast Network. I'm David Cerman.

Today's poem is by Richard Wilbur, who recently passed away. He passed away in October of 2017.

And in fact, today when I'm recording this, it is Sunday, October 14th, and it is the one-year

anniversary of his passing. So it seemed like an appropriate time to record a poem by Richard Wilbur.

He was certainly one of the most important American poets of his generation of the last hundred years.

He was one of the few poets of the

20th century to be marked particularly by the traditional forms in which he worked and at times

which he reveled in, I think is a fair way of putting it. In 1987, Richard Weber was appointed

as the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress,

and then in 1957 and in 1989 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, which of course is quite an

accomplishment. He also won the Robert Frost Medal in 1996. The poem I'm going to read today was from

a 1956 collection called Things of This World, a collection he dedicated to his children.

And this was one of the collections that won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and then he also won the National Book War.

This was both of those and were given to him in 1957.

This is not what you would call an easy poem, I don't think.

But it is a lovely poem, and it is challenging in the

right sort of ways, I believe. It is called, love calls us to the things of this world. This is how it

goes. The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, and spirited from sleep, the astounded soul hangs for a moment,

bodiless and simple as false dawn.

Outside the open window, the morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed sheets, some are in blouses, some are in smocks, but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

...