The Beautiful Changes by Richard Wilbur

The Beautiful Changes
by Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

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This stunning piece came to me by way of a new friend, David McCullough, and it is an incredible meditation on the impact of nature and beauty, how the beautiful changes things through the reflection and deepening and changing of what it changes, and the unpossessiveness of the way of holding roses and touching impermanence with wonder.

The Beautiful Changes is the title poem of Richard Wilbur's debut collection (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), published when he was twenty-six and had just returned from serving as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army during World War II.