Praise for "Praise in Summer"

In his poem, "Praise in Summer", Richard Wilbur literally flips perception of the world upside-down. This poem grants its imagery of a world unimagined through the artful and beautiful meter and rhyme format of an English Sonnet. Wilbur's ending couplet, most interestingly, grants the opposition to his new world by detailing the world as it is normally seen. This is very significant in that the poetic departure from the majority format indicates a figurative divide between Wilbur's world and ours.


Earlier in the poem, there is an interesting juxtaposition of imagery.


"The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!"

Wilbur's use of "branching" when describing the hills above (!) collides with the image of the tree. This may be suggesting that up is down and down is up: all things are of equal merit because, at their most base, all things are the same. 

Another interesting piece, or theme rather, is "this mad instead". Wilbur notices and raises (as an issue) the use of the word "instead" when describing something that could be; "uncreation." Wilbur is definitely of the creative sort. This is by far one of my favorite poems.