By Richard Wilbur
I.
Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye
Stand in a land subdued beyond belief.
Belief might lend them life again. I try
Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief
To see my spellbound fathers in these men
Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere,
Show but the postures men affected then
And the hermit faces of a finished year.
The guns and gear and all are strange until
Beyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees
Verging a road that struggles up a hill.
They’re sycamores.
The long-abated breeze
Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound
Of guns and a great forest in distress.
Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound
Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness.
II.
But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think
How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees
Rode on the back of Simois to sink
In the wide waters. Reflect how history’s
Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls
Its salvage of the world in shifty waves,
Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls
And yielding views of its confounded graves
To the new moon, the sun, or any eye
That in its shallow shoreward version sees
The pebbles charging with a deathless cry
And carageen memorials of trees.
III.
Now, old man of the sea,
I start to understand:
The will will find no stillness
Back in a stilled land.
The dead give no command
And shall not find their voice
Till they be mustered by
Some present fatal choice.
Let me now rejoice
In all impostures, take
The shape of lion or leopard,
Boar, or watery snake,
Or like the comber break,
Yet in the end stand fast
And by some fervent fraud
Father the waiting past,
Resembling at the last
The self-established tree
That draws all waters toward
Its live formality.
Richard Wilbur, “Looking into History” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Source: Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)
Poet Bio
Richard Wilbur began to write poetry in earnest only after experiencing the horrific chaos of battle during WW II service as an infantryman in Italy. No poet of his generation was more committed to careful, organized expression or more thoroughly mastered the forms and devices of traditional poetry; this conservative aesthetic and his deep love for “country things” link Wilbur to the Roman poet Horace and to his fellow American Robert Frost.
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