As “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World” begins, a man awakes to the creak of pulleys outside his window. Readers will soon discover that this sound comes from a clothesline that someone outside is loading with clean laundry. To the half-awake speaker, though, the pulley might as well be a divine trumpet: it heralds the arrival of a sky "all awash with angels." The laundry appears to him as a heavenly host.
This vision arrives in the suspended moment when the speaker isn't quite awake or quite asleep: a "false dawn," not a complete waking. It's the man's "astounded soul" who witnesses this sight, not the man himself; his soul is "bodiless" at first, suggesting his consciousness hasn't completed the journey back to his body from the land of dreams. Rather than using possessive pronouns, the speaker refers to "the eyes" and "the [...] soul," showing that the soul is separate from the man's body. This distinction suggests that man’s experience is a profound and strictly spiritual one, one concerned only with his "soul."
The soft sibilance of words like "spirited," "sleep," "soul," and "simple" evokes the hushed holiness of the speaker's angelic vision.
While the poem doesn't directly say that the angels the speaker witnesses are misinterpreted laundry, there's a clue in a pun: "The morning air is all awash with angels." The word paints a picture of a sky that seems to swim with winged messengers, but also hints that those messengers are the washing. This points readers to an idea that will be important later: these laundry-angels are spotless, clean as the speaker's disembodied soul.
Richard Wilbur will tell the story of this transcendent vision in flexible free verse, without rhyme or a regular meter. Notice the way that the dropped line in lines 4-5 ("As false dawn. / Outside the open window")—that is, what looks like one line divided in two—creates drama, introducing those laundry-angels with a little clean, quiet space of their own.