Shape and Substance

Year’s End

By Richard Wilbur

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.

Copyright Credit: Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Cited from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43052/years-end-56d221b9e6bd8.

Every New Year's Day, I find myself drawn again to this poem. Richard Wilbur is, I think, my favorite American Poet (although there are several candidates for that honor). His poem "Year's End" is somber, dark—hardly the sort of sentiment appropriate for a celebration like New Year's Day. One commenter I read spoke of the poem as Wilbur's meditation on death. I can see how he got there. I also think that's not inappropriate for the day in general. After all, New Year's Day is all about the passage of time, its inexorable march toward death and decay, whether the things decaying be leaves or wooly mammoths or little dogs preserved in pyroclastic Vesuvian ash. But it's not death that draws my attention here.

Rather, it's Wilbur's phrases in the final stanza that summon my response. "We fray into the future," he says, and that image always seems the right one to describe our disorganized, disheveled, discombobulated slide into tomorrow. Moreover, the future we fray into is "rarely wrought/ save in tapestries of afterthought." For all our thinking about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, it's by and large thinking devoid of any real plan other than fancy and fantasy. And when at last the real future arrives, we are once again confronted with our unpreparedness. We can but pray for "more time, more time."

The truth, of course, is that we cannot see the future except as it is a projection of the trends of the recent past or the lessons of accumulated experience. Even if we could, I suspect, the novelty would wear off quickly and we'd yearn for a return to the days of shooting from the hip. Long term planning is not written into our genes. 

And that, I think, is what makes this poem resonate with me. Wilbur knows a truth about the way we live: that the possibilities of the new will always be "wrangling" with the frozen past, and we will always struggle to break free of the icebound torpor of our behavior. Whether it's a belated (indeed, non-existent) response to global warming or a return to a fantasized national greatness, or just an inability to live out resolutions to eat less and walk more, we live our lives facing backward, dwelling in an imagined past that never existed and denying the reality of a future looming ahead. Until the ice forms or the bog rises or the ash covers us, and we are slowly buried in the snow.