A Study Guide for Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535827751

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Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Richard Wilbur

1956

Introduction

Richard Wilbur's poem Love Calls Us to the Things of This World is one of the most frequently anthologized poems in the English language. The title refers to a passage from St. Augustine's Confessions, written in the fourth century, in which the saint laments that the beautiful things of the world have created distance between him and God. St. Augustine is responding to the gospel of St. John, who advises humans to Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. In this poem, Wilbur presents a person waking up in the morning and looking outside at laundry that has just been hung on the clothesline and imaging, in a half-aware slumber, that the clothes and sheets hung there are moved by angels, not the wind. He examines the balance between the material world and the spiritual world. This poem's central image, of laundry waving on a line, opens up the poem to issues of existence, morality and religion.

Since its first publication in Wilbur's 1956 collection Things of This World, this poem has been considered a masterful achievement for its clear style, its authorial control of form and symbol as well as its clarity of meaning. Most recently, the poem has become available with all of Wilbur's most significant works in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1988 collection New and Collected Poems.

Author Biography

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921. His father was a commercial portrait artist and his mother came from a line of newspaper publishers, which led him, when he was in his teens, toward a career in newspaper cartooning. When he was very young, the family moved to a remote, rural area