My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
— Richard Wilbur
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More quotes by Richard Wilbur
What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.
Opposites (1973)
A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws
For learning to loiter in air; he merely said,
"I merely leap and pause."
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."
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