Welcome back to The Daily Poem here in the Closer Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. Today is January 15th,

2020. And the poem that I'm going to read today is by an old friend of ours here on the podcast,

someone who we return to pretty often. That's Richard Wilbur, an American poet who lived from

1921 to 2017. He, of course, was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and in 1989,

and then in 1987 he was Poet Laureate Consultant and Poetry to the Library of Congress.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Orchard Trees January.

It goes like this.

It's not the case, though some might wish it so, who from a window watched the blizzard blow white riot through their branches vague and stark, that they keep snug beneath their pelted bark.

They take affliction in until it gels to crystal ice between their frozen cells, and each of them is inwardly a vault of jewels rigorous and free of faults,

unglimpsed by us until in May it bears a sudden crop of green-pronged solitaire.

I love this poem. This is one of my favorite Richard Wilbur poems, and I like it for a few reasons.

The first one is sort of formal.

There's just a few little things that I want to touch on quickly.

It's a ten-line poem that is made up of five, two-line stanzas.

And there's a ton of enjambment in this poem.

Only two lines in the whole poem have end stops there

is a period at the end of line four and then there's a period after the last line line 10

and then there's like six other lines that have enjambment where the lines blend together and the

way he does this the way he pushes these lines together is really interesting because

take for example the second line. We get this, who from a window watch the blizzard blow.

So we've got these repetitions of sounds in the W, who, window, watch, and blow all have that

oh or our sound, the what sound multiple times.

...