Riccardo / Pexels

• Year’s End
• Now winter downs the dying of the year, 
• And night is all a settlement of snow;
• From the soft street the rooms of houses show
• A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
• Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
• And still allows some stirring down within.

• I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
• The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
• And held in ice as dancers in a spell
• Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
• Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
• They seemed their own most perfect monument.

• There was perfection in the death of ferns 
• Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
• A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   
• Composedly have made their long sojourns,
• Like palaces of patience, in the gray
• And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

• The little dog lay curled and did not rise
• But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
• And found the people incomplete, and froze
• The random hands, the loose unready eyes
• Of men expecting yet another sun
• To do the shapely thing they had not done.

• These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
• We fray into the future, rarely wrought
• Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
• More time, more time. Barrages of applause
• Come muffled from a buried radio.
• The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

RIchard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was an American poet and translator. In the latter capacity, he specialized in producing English versions of the 17th-century French dramatists Moliere and Jean Racine. He is considered one of the most accomplished and representative poets of the 20th and 21st centuries to work within the liberating confines of traditional formal verse. He received the Pulitzer Prize twice for his work, in 1957 and in 1989. His style is defined by an exactness of diction and an elegant wit, through which he sought to reveal the surprising within everyday experiences.