Complete 4 pages APA formatted article: Author Richard Wilbur Poem. We need to appreciate too that the earlier quotation continues to note that the "beautiful things" "if they had not been in you woul

Complete 4 pages APA formatted article: Author Richard Wilbur Poem. We need to appreciate too that the earlier quotation continues to note that the "beautiful things" "if they had not been in you would have had no being at all." and The charms of the material world are the work of God too, and this is what Wilbur explores in the poem. It amounts, as the critic Paul Cummin says, to "a civilized man quietly and honestly acknowledging the beauty of the world and of the human spirit" (Cummin, 39).

The situation posed at the beginning of the poem is a bewildering mixture of the comic and the exalted. We are asked to imagine someone waking in the morning, and in the half-conscious state seeing the washing on the line as a flight of angels. The "pulley" which hoists the washing line also drags open the eyes of the sleeper, whose soul would prefer to remain in the unsullied world of dreams. This is the first example of Wilbur's subtle use of words both literally (the pulley on the washing line) and metaphorically (suggesting the effort involved in bringing the eyes to focus on the material world rather than the spiritual).