Garden of Verses
Beauty joined to energy -from “Museum Piece” by Richard Wilbur
At 85, winner of two Pulitzer prizes among many other recognitions, Richard Wilbur is still going strong in his rustic retreat in Cummington, Massachusetts. The last time he read here in Santa Barbara, we took a beach walk, and he learned with awe and a guffaw that you can use mayonnaise to treat a case of beach tar.
Wilbur is a devoted gardener, as meticulous in that art as he is with the use of words. I wrote for him, on that Santa Barbara visit, four lines in celebration of the way he approaches even the least exalted of activities with a religious passion:
