This essay is the first in a series by Father Stayer, a professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, reflecting on essential works of writing, art and music.
Mozart once said he would gladly exchange all his music for one Gregorian chant—the Preface of the Roman rite. I would gladly give all my (not-very-good) poems and a large chunk of my (respectable) scholarship to have written just this poem: Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” Of the dozens that I have memorized, it is the only poem that reliably sticks in my head without the need to refresh my mental browser. (Read it here.) A hymn to mercy and love, it springs to my lips when my heart is quiet. I teach it as often as I can for my introductory poetry students.
That “Love Calls Us” is one of my favorite poems is saying a lot. I am a scholar of modernism, the era of the early 20th century whose poets include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore. They have produced some of the prickliest, weirdest, most exhilaratingly dense poems ever written. A poem that is disorienting, skeptical, fragmented and allusive? A work that stares unblinkingly into the depths of human depravity or yowls in existential horror? Sign me up.
And yet my short reading list for a desert island includes this poem by Wilbur: simple, lucid, joyful and profoundly humane.
Here is the opening stanza, which presents three mild difficulties for the first-time reader. But once they are puzzled out, the rest of the poem sails smoothly on:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
At first approach, it is not immediately obvious what the opening line refers to: the eyes (whose?) opening to “a cry of pulleys.” Here a man—if this were a story, we would call him the main character—has been awakened by the screech of metal pulleys. Some offstage person is doing laundry, perhaps in tall apartment buildings with lines strung between them, with pulleys for extending and retrieving the hanging wash. The effect of being so abruptly awakened brings us to the second minor obstacle of this stanza: the man’s “soul/ Hangs for a moment.” In various folk traditions, it is believed that the soul separates from the body during sleep. It goes to some other dream land, sporting itself in reverie or imagination while the body slumbers on, drooling on the pillow.
Drawing on this idea, the speaker of the poem (the narrator, not the awakened man) imagines that the man’s soul, “astounded” by the violent ripping away from its dream world, is not quite ready to re-enter the man’s body. The soul is described as “bodiless”: It is a bit dazed, neither going back to the world of sleep nor definitively entering the body for a proper wake-up. Here is the drama that drives the poem: The hesitant soul must choose either reality (the body) or dreams (sleep).
The third tiny bump to be smoothed over is a new metaphor: the view outside the window is “all awash with angels.” Half-asleep, the man looks out his window and sees nothing so banal as damp laundry, but a vision in which the gently drifting clothes are suggestive of angels. This metaphor of invisible-angels-as-wearing-laundry unfolds throughout the poem, until it ends twenty-eight lines later. If you groove on specialized terminology, a metaphor that is developed at length is called an extended metaphor or conceit.
Once you have grasped the setting (a waking man looking out the window at hanging laundry), the drama (the soul choosing the real world or the dream world), and the extended metaphor (invisible angels floating in the air), you have cracked the code. And that is all you need from the English professor. The poem explains itself. But if you will indulge me, I would enjoy taking you through the rest of it.
In the second stanza, gentle winds lift the clothes, making it appear as if the invisible angels are inhaling:
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Angels are “impersonal” because they have no bodies, no personhood, strictly speaking. This soul minus a body links back to our main character. His soul also does not have a body yet: It is hanging out somewhere above the bed. And before we leave this stanza, note the artfulness of the pairing “feeling, filling.” If you are keeping track of poetic effects, there is alliteration in those f’s and consonance in the l’s and ng’s.
Next, the wind picks up, making the laundry tilt on the horizontal:
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The angels are zooming through the air, but they are not going anywhere. This paradox (clock another poetry term) is sharpened by the speaker’s observation: “the terrible speed of their omnipresence.” Angels are typically portrayed with wings—an artist’s detail to signal speed. And yet, paradoxically, if angels are everywhere, they don’t need to speed anywhere. Like “white water” or caps of waves blown about on a lake, they are both “moving” and “staying” at the same time.
Then suddenly the wind stops. The angels “swoon”: faint or droop, exhaling. Devoid of breath, the clothes now seem lifeless: no one is there. This bit of deflation provokes a deflating thought:
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
The soul avoids its as-yet-unmade decision. If it descends to the body, it will “remember” everything: The misery of the daily grind, the jobs to do and bills to pay.
The jarring metaphor of “punctual rape” compares the blahs of quotidian life to a sexual assault. The poem appeared in Wilbur’s 1956 collection Things of this World, and the metaphor it uses is too casual about a serious issue, in ways that men have long been oblivious about issues that burden women. But I can bracket this discomfiting moment, since it is localized in this one line. The poem’s meaning does not depend upon it. Since the poem ends in a lyrical exhortation to mercy, perhaps we can spare some for the poet himself.
Still undecided, what the soul would prefer is less trouble. It would make re-entering the body so much easier to have a perfectly abstract world with no problems, duties or responsibilities. The man sighs in exasperation as he looks out the window at his vision:
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
(In moments of overwork, I will mutter these lines under my breath.) It is a lovely vision, but notice that there are no bodies here. There is laundry, and hands, and dances, but no fully formed humans, no personalities or persons, just abstractions. And note, since we have been speaking of men’s blind spots, that this ethereal vision involves hands that are “rosy” (a very pleasant word) doing the back-breaking, skin-tearing work of washing clothes by hand. The man fails to see the reality of laundry: blistering lye, choking steam, scalding water, pounding and twisting. Only a man who has never done manual laundry could romanticize it so. But it is his dream vision, so let him have it.
With the final stanza, we come to the turn in the poem, beginning with “Yet,” an adverb that signals a change of heart:
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body
What has caused this change? The sun, which warmly glows over the “world’s hunks and colors.” This is the wittiest implied metaphor in the poem: laundry has been the controlling metaphor since the first stanza, and here the sun, observing the earth, recognizes its various hills and clusters as color-organized piles of clothes. Women in my classes catch this metaphor more quickly than men—an obliviousness I attribute to college-age men who don’t bother to separate their laundry into “hunks” of whites and colors.
The floating soul rejects this impersonal vision, instead descending to the body “in bitter love.” This phrase is an oxymoron: the linkage of contradictory words into one sense. (Paradoxes, by contrast, are big; they set complex ideas in relation, like St. Paul’s “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Oxymorons are small, usually just two words, like Milton’s “darkness visible.”) “Bitter love” is the first appearance of the word “love” since the title’s use of it. What is it that calls the soul away from the dream world and back to “the things of this world”? Love. No matter that it is qualified as “bitter,” it is still love, and perhaps more real for being bitter. The title of the poem, though not a direct quote, is in conversation with St. Augustine’s Confessions. Elsewhere, Wilbur remarks of his own poem: “Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree, have known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, to the quotidian; Augustine says it is love that brings us back.”
The man—now in a completely ensouled body—has rejected his initial wish for an abstract world. In a “changed voice,” he now longs for a world that is real, filled with personalities and bodies, and drenched in mercy and love. Fully awake, he “yawns and rises,” offering this blessing:
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
In a cruel world, or one narrowly concerned with justice, criminals are led to bloody gallows, and the backs of thieves are stripped of their clothing to be whipped. But the man offers fresh laundry instead to the thieves: “clean linen” rather than punitive strokes. As a speech genre, this last stanza begins with a benediction, or more accurately, the commutation of a sentence. Lovers are similarly exhorted. Like the sinners of the previous lines, lovers are blessed with fresh laundry, so that when they meet, they can throw that laundry off (“be undone”) and make love. Here is another irony: giving clothes so that they might be discarded.
Thieves and lovers are full-bodied personalities, and the last category of persons to receive this blessing is religious sisters. The nuns commended here are not only the conventionally slender ones, but the most overweight, the “heaviest.” They are given freshly laundered habits, which mercy enables them to glide as if floating in air. Unlike those thin, invisible angels met earlier, these nuns are unapologetically embodied. Yet, like the angels, they waft through the air with exquisite grace.
The last line has a peculiar weight to it: “keeping their difficult balance.” Vowed in a religious order, these women have given their bodies to serve—not one man or family—but all the children of God. The balance they keep refers, I think, to two things. The first is the literal balance of their large bodies. A heavy thing floating in the air requires effort, balance, delicacy. This image also refers to the nuns’ vows, the evangelical counsels, made for the sake of the kingdom: poverty, chastity and obedience. One needs balance for these difficult, life-giving patterns of service.
“Keeping their difficult balance”—the poem’s final gesture is slightly off-target. It does not summarize the poem’s primary themes of love and mercy. It refers instead to the notion of hardship. Sitting at an odd angle to the rest of the stanza, this ending is a bracing reminder that the work of love is arduous.
Nevertheless, this dark, last-minute swerve adds piquancy to the sunbaked images that remain in memory: sinners pardoned, thieves clothed, lovers undressed, nuns afloat, all of them trailing the smell of fresh laundry. Rarely have the concepts of love and mercy been clothed in imagery of such warmth and tenderness as in Wilbur’s meditation.
