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.
Ceremony and Other Poems by Richard Wilbur (HarperCollins, 1948)
This poem feels like someone standing quietly at the edge of a year, sensing how fragile time really is.
Wilbur gathers these frozen moments leaves, ferns, ancient bodies, a small dog as if he were touching the world’s tenderness with bare hands.
There’s a deep ache in how he sees life paused mid‑gesture, caught between motion and stillness.
He reminds us that endings rarely shout; they arrive softly, like snow settling on a window.
The people of Pompeii feel heartbreakingly close, frozen in the middle of hopes they thought they’d finish tomorrow.
The line about waiting for “another sun” hurts because we all postpone the life we mean to live.
The poem gently exposes how easily we drift forward without truly shaping our days.
Even the muffled applause feels like a distant echo of joy we’re always slightly late to catch.
Wilbur invites us to pause, to feel the weight of our own unfinished moments without guilt.
And in that pause, he offers a quiet truth: winter asks us not to hurry, but to wake up to our lives.
Exquisite and inspiring. I type-oed inspirititing, and realized this too works. Happy New Year all.