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Looking into History

By Richard Wilbur b. 1921 Richard Wilbur

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)

Biography

Richard Wilbur “is a poet for all of us, whose elegant words brim with wit and paradox,” announced Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin when the poet succeeded Robert Penn Warren to become the second poet laureate of the United States. Wilbur won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his collection Things of This World: Poems in 1957 and a second Pulitzer for New and Collected Poems. He has won the Wallace Stevens . . .

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