Advice to a Prophet by Richard Wilbur
"Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange."
Advice to a Prophet
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God’s name to have self-pity, Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange. Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?— The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone’s face? Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters. We could believe, If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return, These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean. Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
from Collected Poems, 1943-2004 (Harcourt, 2004).
The poem feels like someone quietly reminding us how fragile our connection to the world really is. Wilbur writes with this gentle sadness, as if he knows we only fear what we can imagine. The idea that our hearts can’t grasp what’s “too strange” feels painfully true. Instead of shouting warnings, he turns our attention to the small things we understand: the animals, the trees, the rivers. Those images make the loss feel real, not abstract. You can sense how deeply he believes that we see ourselves reflected in the living world. And the thought of those reflections disappearing is more unsettling than any prophecy. The poem asks what becomes of us when the world that shaped our courage, our love, our language begins to fade. By the end, you’re left with a quiet ache, wondering how much of our humanity depends on the beauty we take for granted.
Proper poetry.