This article is the first in a series in which Father Stayer, professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, reflects on foundational works in writing, art, and music.

Mozart once said that he would gladly replace all his music with a single Gregorian chant, the Preface to the Roman liturgy. I would gladly give all my (not very good) poetry and a good chunk of my (respectable) scholarship just to have written this poem: “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” by Richard Wilbur. Of the dozens of poems I’ve memorized, this is the only one that reliably sticks in my mind without needing to refresh my mental browser. (Read Here.) The hymn of mercy and love gushes to my lips when my heart is silent. I teach introductory poetry to my students as often as I can.

It says a lot that “Love Calls Us” is one of my favorite poems. I am a specialist in early 20th-century modernism, whose poets include TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, WB Yeats and Marianne Moore. They produced some of the thorniest, strangest, most thrillingly intense poetry ever written. A confusing, skeptical, fragmented and suggestive poem? A work that looks unblinkingly into the depths of human depravity or howls in existential terror? Sign me up.

However, my short reading list for a desert island includes this poem by Wilbur: simple, straightforward, cheerful, and deeply humane.

Here is the opening stanza, which offers three slight challenges for first-time readers. However, once they are confused, the rest of the poem continues smoothly:

Eyes open to the scream of the reels,

And the confused soul waking from sleep

For a moment it hangs disembodied and simple

Like a false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is full of angels.

When you first approach it, it’s not immediately obvious what the opening line means: eyes opening to “a scream of a spool” (whose?) Here a man—if this were a story, we’d call him the main character—is awoken by the creaking of metal spools. Offstage, a person is doing laundry in a high-rise apartment building where there are pulleys, perhaps with ropes drawn between them, to extend and retrieve the hanging laundry. The impact of the sudden awakening brings us to this stanza’s second minor obstacle: The man’s “soul/ Suspends for a moment.” In various folk traditions, it is believed that the soul leaves the body during sleep. He goes to another dreamland, frolicking in daydreams or daydreams while the body slumbers, drooling on the pillow.

Building on this idea, the poem’s speaker (the narrator, not the awakened man) imagines that the man’s soul, “stunned” by his violent break from the dream world, is not quite ready to re-enter the man’s body. The soul is described as “disembodied”: it is somewhat confused, neither returning to the sleeping world nor definitively entering the body to fully awaken. Here is the drama that drives the poem: The hesitating soul must choose either reality (body) or dream (sleep).

The third little bump to smooth out is a new metaphor: the view outside the window is “all full of angels.” Half-asleep, the man looks out the window and sees nothing as mundane as damp laundry, but an image in which gently flowing clothes evoke angels. The metaphor of invisible angels wearing linen appears throughout the poem until it ends twenty-eight lines later. If you prefer specific terminology, a metaphor developed at length is called an extended metaphor or conceit.

Once you get the hang of the setting (an awake man staring at laundry hanging out the window), the drama (the soul choosing the real world or the dream world), and the extended metaphor (invisible angels floating in the air), you’re cracked. code. And that’s all you need from an English professor. The poem explains itself. But if you let me, I’d be happy to tell you the rest.

In the second stanza, gentle winds lift the clothes and it appears as if invisible angels are breathing:

Some with sheets, some with blouses,

Some are wearing aprons: but they are really there.

Now they rise with the calm waves

A peaceful feeling fills whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breaths;

Angels are “impersonal” because they have no bodies, no personalities, strictly speaking. This soul minus body returns to our main character. His soul doesn’t have a body yet either: It hangs somewhere above the bed. And before we leave this stanza, note the mastery of the “emotion, satisfaction” pairing. If you’re following poetic effects, there’s alliteration in those f’s and consonance in the l’s and ng’s.

Then the wind gets stronger, causing the laundry to tilt horizontally:

Now they’re flying where they are, transmitting

The frightening speed of their ubiquity

And remaining like white water; and now suddenly

They love such ecstatic silence

It looks like there’s no one there.

Angels are flying in the air but they’re not going anywhere. This paradox (clock, another poetic term) is further sharpened by the speaker’s observation: “The frightful speed of their ubiquity.” Angels are often depicted with wings; This is an artist’s detail that indicates speed. And yet, paradoxically, if angels are everywhere, they need not speed anywhere. Like the “white water” or the heads of waves tossing on a lake, they “move” and “stay” at the same time.

Then suddenly the wind stops. Angels “faint”: they faint or droop, exhaling. Out of breath, the clothes now seem lifeless: there is no one there. This provokes a slightly fading thought:

The soul becomes smaller

Of everything he was about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every holy day,

The soul avoids its decision that has not yet been made. If it lands on the body, it will “remember” everything: the misery of the daily grind, the chores to be done, and the bills to be paid.

The jarring metaphor of “time rape” compares the blahs of everyday life to sexual assault. The poem was included in Wilbur’s 1956 collection. Things of This Worldand the metaphor he uses is too casual about a serious subject; so much so that men have long been unaware of the issues that burden women. But I can put this disturbing moment in parentheses because it is localized in this one line. The meaning of the poem does not depend on this. Since the poem ends with a lyrical exhortation to compassion, perhaps we can spare some for the poet himself.

What the still undecided soul prefers is fewer problems. Having a completely abstract world without problems, tasks and responsibilities will make re-entering the body much easier. The man sighs in exasperation as he looks out the window:

“Oh, let there be nothing left in the world but laundry,

There’s nothing but pink hands in the rising steam

And clear dances before heaven.”

(When I’m overworked, I’ll mumble these lines under my breath.) It’s a lovely sight, but notice there are no bodies here. There is laundry and hands and dances, but no fully formed people, no personalities or persons, just abstractions. And since we’re talking about men’s blind spots, remember that this spiritual vision involves “pink” (a very nice word) hands doing the backbreaking, skin-tearing work of washing clothes by hand. The man cannot see the reality of the laundry: the bubbling lye, the suffocating steam, the boiling water, the pounding and twisting. Only a man who has never done laundry by hand could make it this romantic. But it’s his dream vision, so let him have it.

With the last stanza, we come to the poem’s sequence, which begins with “Yet”, an adverb indicating a change of mind:

But as the sun admits

The handsome men and colors of the world with a warm look,

The soul once again descends to bitter love

Accepting the waking body

What caused this change? The sun shining warmly on “huge pieces and colors of the world.” This is the wittiest metaphor implied in the poem: the laundry has been the controlling metaphor since the first stanza, where the sun observing the earth recognizes its various hills and clusters as piles of clothes arranged by color. Women in my classes catch this metaphor quicker than men; I attribute this to college-aged men who don’t bother separating their laundry into white and colored “pieces.”

The floating soul rejects this impersonal view, instead descending into the body with “bitter love.” This expression is an oxymoron: the association of contradictory words with a single meaning. (Paradoxes, by contrast, are large; they relate complex ideas, such as St. Paul’s “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Oxymorons are small, usually just two words, such as Milton’s “darkness appears.”) “Bitter love,” It is the first appearance of the word “love” since the use of the title. What is it that draws the soul away from the dream world and calls it back to “the things of this world”? Love. Even though it is described as “pain”, it is still love and perhaps it is more real because it is pain. The title of the poem, although not a direct quote, is from St. It is in conversation with Augustine’s poetry. Confessions. Elsewhere Wilbur says of his own poetry: “Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree knew that it was painful to return to the cave, to the world, to everyday life; “Augustine says it is love that brings us back.”

Now possessing a fully souled body, the man rejected his original desire for an abstract world. Now with a “changed voice” he longs for a world that is real, full of personalities and bodies, soaked in compassion and love. When fully awake, he “yawns” and offers the following blessing:

“Take them down from their red gallows;

Let thieves have clean sheets on their backs;

Let the lovers go fresh and sweet,

And the heaviest nuns walk pure floating

From dark habits,

They maintain their difficult balance.

In a cruel world, or a world that cares little for justice, criminals are led to the bloody gallows and thieves are stripped naked to have their backs whipped. But the man offers the thieves clean laundry: “clean laundry” instead of punitive blows. As a form of speech, this last stanza begins with a blessing, or rather with a change of phrase. Lovers are similarly encouraged. Like the sinners in the previous lines, lovers are blessed with fresh laundry, so that when they meet, they can shed (“untie”) that laundry and make love. Here’s another irony: Giving clothes to be thrown away.

Thieves and lovers are strong personalities, and the last category of people who receive this blessing are pious sisters. The nuns praised here are not only the traditionally thin, but also the heaviest, the “heaviest.” They have been given freshly washed habits that allow them to soar as if they were floating on air. Unlike the subtle, invisible angels we encountered before, these nuns incarnate without remorse. But like angels, they soar through the air with graceful grace.

The last line has its own weight: “Maintaining their difficult balance.” Sworn into a religious order, these women gave their bodies to serve not one man or family, but all of God’s children. I think the balance they maintain points to two things. The first is the true balance of their large bodies. Something heavy floating in the air requires effort, balance and finesse. This image also refers to the vows the nuns made for the sake of the kingdom, the evangelical counsels: poverty, chastity, and obedience. For these difficult, life-giving patterns of service, one needs balance.

The final movement of the poem – “maintaining their difficult balance” – is a bit off the mark. It does not summarize love and compassion, which are the main themes of the poem. Instead, it refers to the concept of difficulty. This ending, which sits at an odd angle to the rest of the stanza, is a refreshing reminder that the business of love is tough.

However, this dark, last-minute detour adds sharpness to the sun-baked images that linger in the memory: sinners pardoned, thieves dressed up, lovers undressing, nuns swimming, all following the scent of fresh laundry. Concepts of love and compassion have rarely been so adorned with imagery of warmth and compassion as in Wilbur’s meditation.