Hang it on the line!

This week, town board members in Southhampton NY who had banned hanging clothes out to dry in 2002 voted to allow the use of clotheslines. This is a small victory for environmentalists and lovers of the laundry aesthetic, but the fact that the decision is economic is a sad sad commentary about modern (suburban) life. Don't these people know of the rich culture --art, music, poetry -- lauding laundry? Here is Richard Wilbur's famous and widely anthologized poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" which is a pretty sneaky title for a poem about laundry. (Blogger doesn't display the beautiful floating line breaks so go to the Poetry Foundation site to see the shape of this lovely lyric.)

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”