Robert Frost's "Take Something Like a Star" and Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" are two poems which both invoke the audience to become involved in life while taking inspiration and guidance from spiritual forces manifested in the visible world. Frost's poem uses Keat's "Bright Star" as a launching point for discussion while Wilbur recalls in his title a phrase from St. Augistine's Commentary on the Psalms; yet both authors present complete discussions without requiring from the reader a foreknowledge of the earlier works. For Frost the central image is a star, any star, whose illumination can invoke man to lift his thoughts from the commonplace and mundane; and for Wilbur the central image is a simple clothesline hung with laundry, an image which invokes visions of the spiritual soul floating in the breeze yet at the same time connected to the common world of laborers, thieves, and lovers. Both poems, therefore, see the need for man to be aware of both his earthly and spiritual worlds and to achieve a balance between the two that elevates and defines him as a creature of God. Robert Frost and Wilbur Richard rely on good word choice to exemplify their common theme. Frost's "Take Something Like a Star" sticks with the word star to represent God. All of the adjectives that Frost uses to describe the star also go hand in hand with God. In the Poem "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World", Wilbur uses laundry on a clothesline to characterize the human spirit. Wilbur uses more nouns to describe the spiritual soul than Frost's usage of adjectives. Both Frost and Wilbur stress, Bledsoe 2 however, theses everyday objects pronounce the power of God. "Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they [angels] are." -Willburr "O Star (fairest one in sight), We grant your loftiness the right to some obscurity of cloud-" - Frost The tone in which both authors choose to write about ...
