"Advice to a Prophet" is an attempt to imagine humanity without nature and to measure the loss. The threat of the bomb is what starts the poet thinking about earthless man and manless earth, but ultimately this threat is no more than a gambit for the introduction of Wilbur's oldest themes: What shall we make of the earth? What has it made of us? How do we need each other? The voice that speaks in the poem seems to be that of a spokesman for the community, like the voice of the chorus in one of Sophocles' tragedies. The voice addresses some lecturing scientist, likening him to an ancient prophet; and it advises him bow to touch the imagination of the people when he comes to warn them about the destructive power of modern weapons. He will reach them only by building on their experience, says the spokesman. He is not to speak of the weapons themselves, because men cannot "fear what is too strange"; nor of "the death of the race," because men cannot imagine the earth without human beings. Instead, he is to "speak of the world's own change," for that men can understand. Having experienced minor disasters that changed the world, they can imagine this major one: the utter extinction of animals and vegetation, the boiling away of rivers. They will be moved, says the speaker, when they consider not what the world would be without them, but what they would be without the world:

[. . . .]

The language is worth--indeed requires--the closest attention. With characteristic tenacity Wilbur develops the point that not only our image of ourselves but even our terms to describe ourselves come from the world outside us. The other creatures are a "live tongue," a language by which alone we can "call our natures forth"--think and act, express love, show courage, conceive of ourselves as human. These creatures are also a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are or want to be. Our conceptions of human virtues like love and courage depend ultimately on the qualities of the rose or of the horse, in which we have glimpsed our own potentialities. The qualities of creatures are perceived and named; their behavior is likened (and, no doubt, contrasted) to our own; already in their gestures there exists a language that we see and interpret; in our own terms for these creatures and in their gestures we tell each other what we have learned and what we want of ourselves. Without the world to perceive and respond to in this way, we could not be human.

So goes the argument, logically complete at this point but given further illustration in the final stanza:

[. . . .]

The "worldless rose" would be, I assume, our memory of the rose, our conception of it, or our word for it. But "kept spirit is corporate," as Wilbur said in "Lament" (Ceremony): without the objects, the things of this world, we shall not drink at "the spirit's right/Oasis, light incarnate." "The rose of our love" depends on the rose of the world, without which, perhaps, "Our hearts shall fail us"--meaning both that we shall lose our courage and that we shall be unable to love. The oddness of the phrase "whether there shall be lofty or long standing" wears off with familiarity. Shall there be qualities when there are no things? The implied answer is no. If we let the world, our language and our mirror, escape us, we may lose our humanity, our natures.

This view of our intimate dependence on nature is striking; certainly in some sense it is true. Wilbur offers it wisely as a hypothesis, the last five stanzas being cast not as assertions but as questions by which the prophet may stir us to a consciousness of our true dependence on the world. It is like Wilbur to set this fancy gravely before us, to ask what human life would be like in a world utterly barren--as if there could be human life at all. But if, as he argues, this is the fancy that moves us, the practical prophet will be well advised to evoke it.

"Advice to a Prophet" is not a radically new poem, either in theme or in technique. It recalls Wilbur's earlier forays into the topic of our relationship, ideal and actual, with other things and creatures: the theme of man on earth. It gathers up from many earlier poems ("Objects," "Sunlight Is Imagination," "’A World Without Objects . . .,’" "Lamarck Elaborated," "Lament," "An Event," "A Voice from Under the Table," "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," and others) Wilbur's hints that our attachment to this world is a matter of self-interest. In "Advice to a Prophet" Wilbur sees that his old question--what use do we have for the world?--is the one raised in a peculiarly dramatic way by the threat of the bomb. Those who don't raise it for themselves, as Wilbur has--out of philosophical curiosity, or mistrust of abstraction, or fear of asceticism--have it raised for them by the bomb's vast contempt for life. Some readers have found the style of this poem too oratorical for their taste, but the reviewers admired it almost without exception; and I imagine that it has appealed to many people who would not otherwise have been much interested in Wilbur's work. M. L. Rosenthal wrote, "I have seen at least one audience deeply moved by it, some to tears, when Mr. Wilbur read it aloud."