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Content "DIFFICULT BALANCE": THE POETRY
ti
OF RICHARD WILBUR
by
Paul Frank Cummins
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
September 1967
UMI Number: DP23033
All rights reserved
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Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
D issertation PsibtlisMng
UMI DP23033
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Copyright (c) by
Paul Frank Cummins
[_1968_
UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N C A L IFO R N IA
T H E GRADUATE SC H O O L
U N IV ER SITY PARK
LO S A N G ELE S, C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
...........PaaLXKaiik..Cuxnmiixa..........
under the direction of his Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y
G.
Dean
Date jSep.te.iMfoe.r* . . . 19. 6. 7.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
TABLE. OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION ................................. 1
II. FORM: RHETORIC, METER AND R H Y M E ............ 28
Rhetorical Form
Meter and Rhyme
III. DICTION........................................ 61
IV. HUMOR.......................................... 82
V. IMAGERY........................................ 95
VI. WILBUR'S THEORY OF POETRY.................... 124
VII. THE C O S M O S ................................... 139
VIII . THE NATURE OF REALITY........................ 152
IX. THE HUMAN CONDITION.......................... 174
X. LOVE CALLS US TO THE THINGS OF
THIS W O R L D ................................. 204
APPENDIXES
Appendix I: Questionnaire to Mr. Wilbur
Personal Letter from Mr. Wilbur . . . 229
Appendix II: Stanza Forms and Rhyme Scheme .... 235
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................ 243
ii
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In 1949 Philip Rahv divided American writers into two
neat categories, the "palefaces" and the "redskins.""^ The
former are the T. S. Eliots, scholarly, elegant, and con
trolled; the latter are the Walt Whitmans, emotional, vir
ile, and spontaneous. However, with regard to recent (since
1945) American poetry, this division has become a misleading
cliche. For example, Glauco Cambon writes;
Since the war, especially, the "redskin" poet (to say
it with Philip Rahv) had [sic.] definitely had to make
room for the "paleface" and this shift in literary taste
found broad confirmation in the social fact that Ameri
can poets flocked to the sheltering universities. They
were finally respectable'. Hence the academic tone of
much verse published since the war. Sophistication,
irony, priggish detachment were "de rigueur" for every
young writer; everybody knew his Eliot, for yesterday's
revolution has become today's establishment.
• * -Image and Idea (Norfolk, 1949), pp. 1-5.
^Recent American Poetry (Minneapolis, 1962), p. 5.
Hereafter referred to as R.A.P.
,Like Cambon, Leslie Fiedler, Karl Shapiro, and others reduce
twentieth-century American poetry to a continual battle be
tween the Eliot and the Whitman-William Carlos Williams
forces. In fact, Fiedler proclaims the triumph of the pale
face tradition which began with Poe, passed on to Eliot via
.the French Symbolists and from him to certain quasi-official
bards of the academy and the suburbs: "What had begun as a j
revolutionary movement in the arts before World War I had id
three decades stretching roughly from 1926-1955 become an
3
almost unchallenged orthodoxy." Fiedler sees writers born
since 1915 as characterized
by a uniform style, a uniform subject matter, a uniform
evasion of personal anguish and joy, a uniform broad
range of erudition, and a uniform high level of techni
cal excellence . . . At the moment, then, that the
Eliotic new poetry triumphed in the U. S., it was al
ready becoming academic and genteel, well-behaved and
passionless— a convention made out of revolt. (p. 55)
Robert Lowell also has been lured into the paleface-
redskin controversy:
Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The
cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously con
cocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar.
3"A Kind of Solution: The Situation of Poetry Now,"
Kenvon Review. XXVI (Winter 1964), 54. Hereafter referred
to as "Solution."
The raw, huge, blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned ex
perience are dished up for midnight listeners. There
is a poetry that can only be studied and a poetry that
can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry
of scandal
Lowell does not align himself with either camp. James !
Dickey, however, clearly a pro-redskin, refers to recent
American poets (excluding himself, we assume) as the "School-
of-Charm" poets: university-taught, new-criticism oriented.
And although Dickey never explicitly blames Eliot for the
"School of Charm" movement, we can read between the lines
and detect his concern for the widespread acceptance of
I
Eliot's doctrine of "extinction of personality." It is thisj
which Dickey sees as the primary malady of recent poets:
"The belief in the value of personality has all but disap
peared from our verse.
Karl Shapiro is perhaps the most vocal and strenuous
redskin sympathizer, as the title of one collection of his
essays suggests: In Defense of Ignorance. In this book
Shapiro joins what seems to have become a critical trend:
that is, Eliot-debunking. Shapiro eulogizes William Carlos
^As quoted in Hugh Staples, Robert Lowell: The First
Twenty Years (New York, 1962), p. 13.
^The Suspect in Poetry (Madison, 1964), p. 57.
4
Williams, who believed that the publication of The Waste
i
Land was a great catastrophe. "It was a poem," writes
Shapiro, "that made poetry and criticism one and the same
thing" (p. 159). Shapiro, however, unlike Fiedler, does not
see the battle as lost. To be sure, the Eliot forces are
ruling, but not without considerable resistance. William
Carlos Williams is dead, but the rebellion he inspired lives
on in the "Beat" poets and others such as Denise Levertov,
Robert Creeley (and Karl Shapiro?).
The difficulty in dividing American poets into these
two categories is illustrated by the treatment Shapiro has
received from critics. Shapiro proudly considers himself a
"redskin," yet he has been diagnosed by at least two repu
table critics as having paleface tendencies. Alfred Kazin
writes that Shapiro is not a "naive genius" (redskin symp
tom) :
He has never seemed to me even a passionate poet; his
own work is striking for its concrete but detached in
sights; it is witty and exact in the way it catches the
poet's subtle and guarded impressions; and it is a
poetry full of clever and unexpected verbal conceits.
It is a very professional poetry— supple, adaptable, by
no means Dionysian.^
6
Contemporaries (Boston, 1962), p. 49 0.
And Donald Hall has categorized Shapiro as belonging to the
7
"Elegance School" of modern poetry. Shapiro, however, has
not received nearly so much criticism for belonging to this
school as has Richard Wilbur. j
Although the majority of critics agree that Wilbur is
one of the best contemporary poets, many derogatorily in
stall him in the paleface fort. He is negatively character-j
I
I
ized by such terms as respectable, academic, elegant, re
fined, pallid, insulated, impersonal, clever, witty, sophis
ticated, and bland. Certainly it is true that Wilbur does
not write the passionate poetry of Dylan Thomas or the free
verse of Carlos Williams. Wilbur, along with contemporaries
such as Howard Nemerov and Elizabeth Bishop, writes in a
more restrained manner than Thomas or Williams. But it is
equally true that Wilbur, Nemerov, and Bishop have, either
consciously or unconsciously, avoided poetic techniques of
the Eliot-paleface school. For example, they do not write
in the mythic tradition of The Waste Land; they do not
employ a wide range of scholarly allusions; and they do not
deal with explicit Christian themes.
'Ah Love, Let Us Be True': Domesticity and History
in Contemporary Poetry," American Scholar. XXVIII (Summer
1959), 317.
Wilbur is also often criticized for being passionless.
But such criticism would limit passion solely to the physi
cal, sexual, violent aspects of experience. Wilbur's poetryj
does in fact reveal a deep passion: for minute particulars
of the .externa1 world, for odd and unique sounds and colors
and shapes; for the sea and air; for the animal kingdon*; for
the human mind, the imagination, and the vast dimensions it
encompasses.
Nevertheless Richard Wilbur is a traditional as opposed
to an experimental poet, a non-confessional as opposed to a
personal poet. And his traditionalism and impersonality
have been widely criticized. Wilbur himself is,quite aware
8
of the potential dangers of these characterizations. He
simply writes his best poetry in this manner and has had
the courage to persist. I say courage because he has been
exposed to a sufficient amount of negative criticism to
9
tempt a lesser man to accommodate his style:
^Richard Wilbur, "The Bottles Become New Too," Quar
terly Review of Literature. VII (November 1953), 188-192.
Hereafter referred to as "Bottles."
i
i
^Thomas Cole, "Wilbur's Second Volume," Poetry. 82
(April 1953), 37-39; Dickey, The Suspect in Poetry; Fiedler,
"Solution"; Richard Foster, "Debauch by Craft: Problems of
the Younger.Poets," Perspective. XII (Spring-Summer 196 0),
3-17; Horace Gregory, "The Poetry of Suburbia," Partisan
7
Until recently, I have inclined, I suppose, to avoid
the direct, dramatic expression of feeling, and to
convey it through rhetoric or through hints imbedded
in apparently objective description. My best poems
seem to me to account somehow for my whole experience
and to engage my whole nature. When sympathetic crit
ics find what seems to me a passionate poem merely
"amiable," or are troubled by a sense of "fastidious
ness or remoteness," I hardly know what I can sensibly
say. I must concede the possibility, as all must, that
I am not a "whole soul." I must also wonder whether my
poetry may not be too indirect for its emotion to tran
spire. What I must not do, I am sure, is to attempt a
manner which might satisfy my critics; there is nothing
to do, in art, but to persevere hopefully in one's pe
culiarities .
Interestingly, poet-critic James Dickey, whom we have
seen negatively linking Wilbur with the "School-of-Charm"
poets, sets forth a different principle which offers an ex
cellent defense of Wilbur's poetry. Dickey says that the
failure of the "Beats," the Rexrothians, the poets in Donald
Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. "can be
traced to an absence in each of them of what W. H. Auden
calls the 'censor'; the faculty or indwelling being which
determines what shall and what shall not come into a
Review. XXIII (Fall 1956), 545; Hall, "'Ah Love, Let Us Be
True'"; Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York,
1953), pp. 227-230.
•*-°Anthony Ostroff, ed., The Contemporary Poet as Artist
and Critic (Boston, 1964), pp. 19-20. Hereafter referred to
as Artist and Critic.
poem." Dickey admits this smacks of "academism," but
recognizes that academism, nevertheless, "is a defense of
!the mind, and so of the only way in which permanently valu-
I
able poetry may be written" (p. 321).
Wilbur's poetry reveals the censor at work, selecting,
ordering, deleting, and, above all, balancing the disparate
^elements of poetic technique and human experience. To be
sure, he holds back, restrains himself, but restraint is a
i
i
positive value, one which is itself threatened in an age in
which many writers pride themselves on vomiting all the emo-
i
tional bxle they can. Repression, or suppression, is not
i
I
necessarily bad; in fact, it may be the mark of the civi
lized man. Richard Wilbur is such a civilized man. He is
neither a paleface nor a redskin; he is both passionate and
i
I
restrained, spontaneous and scholarly, a traditional and an
I
i
individual talent.
! The difficulty in categorizing Wilbur is evidenced by
the diverse poets whom he resembles. He seems to have been
affected by earlier twentieth-century poets such as Wallace
Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. Also,
I
! H"The Death and Keys of the Censor," Sewanee Review.
LXIX (Spring 1961), 321.
since few artists work completely unaware of or unaffected
toy the work of their contemporaries, Wilbur reveals inter
esting relationships to contemporaries such as Robert
|
'Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Karl Shapiro.
j
! It would seem that Wallace Stevens has exerted a con
siderable influence on Richard Wilbur. One critic has stat-
jed "now that Wallace Stevens is dead, Wilbur seems headed
| 12
itoward being the dandy of American verse." Overlooking
,for the moment the derogatory connotations of "dandy," it is
I 1
( certainly true that Wilbur's poetry parallels Stevens's not i
i
f I
only in a cultivation of wit and elegance for their own
sake, but in the themes which emerge from this wit and elo
quence. Both poets exult in the beauty of the extensional
i
world? both proclaim the limitations and divinity of the
I
1
human imagination? both affirm the primacy of aesthetic
i
(
experience. To a considerable extent, Wilbur's poetry is a
Jcontinuation of the tradition growing out of Pater and
I
jWilde, with perhaps its fullest expression in Stevens. The
poets of this tradition find the ultimate source of value
| \ X
'not in God or society but in imagination, beauty, and order.
j -^Leah Drake, "New Voices in Poetry," Atlantic Monthly
j(June 1957), p. 76.
10
Wilbur also partakes of the "objectivist" tradition of
I
modern poetry, whose main proponent has been William Carlos
.Williams. At first glance Wilbur and Carlos Williams appear
strikingly dissimilar: Wilbur is a lyric, meditative po.et
j " " ' ^ g S S B S S B S z -
operating within fixed stanzaic forms and employing more or
I
I less regular metrical patterns. However, Wilbur is in fun
damental agreement with Williams's assertion that there are
; "no ideas but in things." Wilbur's ideas are always care
fully grounded in the objective world and a deep distrust of
,fleshless abstractions.
I i
I I
For similar reasons Wilbur has frequently praised the
poetic achievement of Marianne Moore:
To insist on the real existence of the four elements, of
object, of animals, taking these things as representa
tives of the ambient reality, is a kind of minimum de
voutness in these days. It is a step toward believing
in people.
I see this devoutness expressed in many ways in recent
! writing. In the vivid and careful descriptions of
Marianne Moore, in her extreme fairness, it is present.^
Vivid and careful descriptions are also hallmarks of Wil- . .
t S S g ’
bur's poems. As Richard Eberhart has stated: "The tutelage
•*•3"Bottles," p. 188. Also, see (Review of Miss Moore's
'Like a Bulwark). The New York Times Book Review. November
11, 1956, p. 18. Hereafter referred to as "Rev. of Moore."
11
of Marianne Moore in the objective manner is evident in
i
f
(several poems, notably in 'Cigales,' and 'The Walgh-Vogel,'
1 14
and in the second stanza of 'Grace.'" And to this list I
I
would add "Potato" and "The Melongene." Miss Moore and
Wilbur are fascinated by the minutiae of life; both place a
jhigh value on ceremony, and both, as Wilbur mentions above,
(extend their observations of the natural world to the ethi-
!
! - i i 15
jcal realm.
Wilbur dislikes abstract poets like Poe, and he strong
ly seconds Miss Moore's statement that "Poets must be lit-
ieralists of the imagination," and must present to the reader
i
jfor inspection "imaginary gardens with real toads in
i
16
them." Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad" deals with the
concept of time, but it begins with a real toad mutilated by
a power mower. In short, James Dickey's comment on Miss
Moore also applies to Richard Wilbur: "Few poets . . . have
shown how endlessly various, how ingenious and idiosyncratic
■^(Review of The Beautiful Changes). New York Times
Book Review. January 11, 1948, p. 4.
1 l^Babette Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time (New York, 1963),
jp. 100.
I ^See James Southworth, More Modern American Poets
(Oxford, 1954), p. 41.
12
and inexplicably fascinating, how sheerly interesting the
i 17
;world is in its multifarious aspects."
I
To compare Wilbur to his contemporaries is more diffi
cult, since one of the essential characteristics of recent
American poetry is its extreme diversity. Poets such as
i
iwilbur, Roethke, Lowell, and Shapiro arrived, as Ralph Mills
jstates, "either in the wake of the modernist revolution or a
jgood ten years or more after its finish":
| They have not enjoyed a mood of collective inspiration,
[ but without the benefit of any shared aesthetic aim or
I revolutionary artistic goal, have had to cultivate voices
! on their own, making them distinctive by selecting for
themselves models and guides both from earlier literature
“ IO
and from pioneer modernists preceding them. °
Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell are often spoken of as
I
[the two finest poets currently producing. Yet the differ
ences between them are extreme. Lowell writes a confession-
'al, autobiographical poetry dealing with personal torments
and anxieties, while Wilbur, like T. S. Eliot, does not
reveal his personal history in his poems. Lowell is, at
i
, 17"The stillness at the Center of the Target," Sewanee
iReview. LXX (Summer 1962), 500. Hereafter referred to as
["Stillness . "
I
I
- ^Contemporary American Poetry (New York, 1965), p. 6.
Hereafter referred to as C .A .P.
times, anxious, angry, guilt-tormented, violent, while
Wilbur is more composed. Lowell can be the angry prophet in
jthe Old Testament tradition; Wilbur avoids this role, and
when he does venture to give "Advice to a Prophet," his tone
is restrained and quiet. He does not threaten the coming of
the Apocalypse; rather he asks his prophet to ask us "What
should we be without / The Dolphin's arc, the dove's re
turn." Compare this advice with Lowell's prophetic, first-
»
person vision:
i
| I saw the sky descending, black and white,
i Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore
j The skulls, to jack-o-lanterns on the slates,
i And Hunger's skin-and-bone retrievers tore
. The chickadee and shrike.^
j
j Stylistically Lowell and Wilbur differ most strikingly
;in their rhythm, imagery, and diction. The poetry of Lowell
idisplays a disjointed, frenetic rhythm compared to the
ismooth, continuous-motion of Wilbur. Lowell achieves this
quality by fusing disparate images, as in his recent "1958"
in the volume Near the Ocean:
Remember standing with me in the dark,
j escaping? In the wild house? Everything—
1 I mad, you mad for me? And brought my ring
! Where the Rainbow Ends," Lord Wearv's Castle and the
Mills of the Kavanauahs^(New York, 1964), p . 69 . ______
j that twelvecarat lunk of gold there . . . Joan of Arc,
I undeviating still to the true mark?
Robust, ah taciturn! Remember playing
Marian Anderson, Mozart's SHEPHERD KING,
i IL RE PASTORE? Hammerheaded shark,
I the rainbow salmon of the world— your hand
| a rose . . . And at the Mittersill, you topped
* the ski-run, that white eggshell, your sphere, not land
or water— no circumference anywhere, '
the center everywhere, I everywhere,
infinite, fearful . . . standing— -you escaped.
jWilbur avoids fusing disparate images and usually presents
,an extended development of a single image or theme as he
jdoes, for example, in "Clearness," "Lightness," "Grace,"
"Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," "A Baroque Wall
Fountain in the Villa Sciarra," and "The Terrace."
I
!
i Lowell is concerned with fire and heat, while Wilbur
writes of water.. breezes. ..lakgg. For example, Lowell's
(second volume, Lord Weary's Castle, and Wilbur's first vol- i
i i
{
jume, The Beautiful Changes, each contain forty-two poems.
Lowell's volume contains approximately sixty fire images,
I
iwhile Wilbur's volume contains about ten fire images.
i
j Lowell has been preoccupied with horror and chaos;
i \
jwilbur with beauty and order. Until recently Lowell has
I
I
idwelt almost exclusively upon the negative forces in human
experience. Wilbur acknowledges these forces but focuses
20 (New York. 1967). p. _5_5 .
15
upon countervailing powers. Lowell's landscapes, Hugh
Staples writes, have been "filled with rubble, sewage, and
filth— the end products of erosion, corruption, and decay":
Human success, normal love, conventional beauty have no
place in his vision of the modern world. At the outset,
Lowell's rebellion is total. His war is not with a time,
a place, a fabric of a specific society or a particular
political system, but against the pressures of reality
itself. (p. 14)
Wilbur, however, presents no such rebellion and his land
scapes are filled with flowers, birds, vines. and trees^.
Lowell's early poetry, Lord Wearv's Castle and The Mill of
I the Kavanauahs. focused upon the cruel, guilt-laden inheri-
I
!
tance modern America has received from its Puritan fore-
Jfathers. Life Studies is more autobiographical and calm,
i
|but still presents a climate of decay, morbidity, and death.
And in the preface of his latest volume, Hear the Ocean.
Lowell writes: "The theme that connects my translations is
Rome, the greatness and horror of her empire." The poems in
this volume combine the earlier qualities of explicit Chris
tian diction and attitudes, psychological self-awareness,
and direct references to personal experience. All of these
qualities are notably absent in Wilbur. Although Wilbur
often presents a Christian view of man, as in "Beasts,"
"Love Calls Us," and "Water Walker," he avoids using
v --- - ------------- & * * * * * * *
_________________________X_______________ _
theological terminology. Wilbur is not concerned, as is
'Lowell, with man's alienation from God or'with'-the deterior
ation of Puritan piety into modern materialism. Instead, 1
Wilbur concerns himself with the possibilities of the human..
— > ■ *"*
'imagination, with experiencing the delights... of .external
■reality.. It is quite obvious that Wilbur avoids direct
i
i .
■treatment of human suffering. And Donald Hall is correct m
stating that "when suffering is a subject in a Wilbur poem,
it is understood and discussed (see "A Pardon") not pre-
l
sented in the act":
I
Robert Lowell's poems often seem to have been squeezed
, out of him foot by foot, by the pressure of his suffer-
! ing. Wilbur’s poems present us with the picture of the
poet meditating on a problem.
The main objection to Wilbur by Hall and others seems to be |
that he does not write like Robert Lowell. But suffering isi
1 i
not Wilbur's central concern. Surely joy is also a legiti- j
mate subject and attitude. ‘
I
Theodore Roethke also presents a similar contrast to ;
!
Wilbur. Like Lowell, Roethke projects a wilder energy and
'exuberance than Wilbur. Roethke is not interested in the
; ^lnrphg New p0etry," New World Writing. VII (April
1955), 242.
17
quiet beauty of a meadow or the ornate beauty of a fountain.
What fascinates Roethke are the inexorable life forces, the
irrational forces in man, the sheer force of Being in na
ture. In Roethke's poetry, as Delmore Schwartz writes,
"news of the root, of the minimal, of the primordial, of the
sub-human is given tongue; and the tongue proclaims the
22
agony of coming alive, the painful miracle of growth."
Wilbur and Roethke both differ from Lowell in that they
do not share Lowell's concern with history. The concentra
tion of both Wilbur and Roethke is either inward, almost
untouched by public,events, or outward to the natural world.
But they speak of a vastly different world. Wilbur’s voice
is cool and civilized, while the poems in Words for the Wind
"appear . . . to be uncontrollable and subliminal outcries,
the voices of roots, stones, leaves, logs, small birds
. . ." For example, compare Wilbur's "The Beautiful Chang
es" to Roethke's "Root Cellar":
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.
PP
The Cunning and the Craft of the Unconscious and the
Preconscious," Poetry. 94 (June 1959), 203.
The beautiful changes as a forest i s changed
By a chameleon’ s tuning his skin to i t ;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into i t , makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness i s 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.
"Root Cellar"
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and dropped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life; 2 4
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
The natural world does not inspire Wilbur with sentimental
notions of its sheer peacefulness and loveliness; Wilbur^
simply selects the calm and delicate aspects of nature to
consider. By contrast, Roethke's natural world "Swarms with
malevolent forces. It is a place of scums, mildews, and
^ The Poems of Richard Wilbur (New York, n.d.), p. 226.
Hereafter referred to as Poems.
24words for the Wind (Bloomington, 1965), p. 39.
19
smuts; of slug-soft stems; of obscenely lolling forms; a
25
place moist and rank . . . engulfing, horribly fecund ..."
Also, there is a certain gentleness of motion in Wilbur's
natural world which is in direct contrast to the energy
which bursts forth in Roethke1s world:
This urge, wrestle, resurrection'of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint struggled so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I can feel it,—
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
("Cuttings," p. 38)
Compare the movement in this poem to the movement in Wil
bur's "Piazza Di Spagna, Early Morning":
I can’t forget
H ow she stood at the top of that long marble stair
Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette
W ent dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;
N othing upon her face
But some impersonal loneliness,— not then a girl,
But as it were a reverie of the place,
A called-for falling glide and whirl;
^Stanley Kunitz, "News of the Root," Poetry. 73 (Janu
ary 1949), 223.
20
As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip
Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a moment above it.
Rides on over the lip—
Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.
Roethke1s world pulsates, vibrates, tugs, pulls, explodes,
wrenches, breaks forth, sprouts; Wilbur, however, often
catches the things of this world in moments of pause, of
rest, of gradual movement. Thus state-of-being verbs occur
more frequently in Wilbur than in Roethke. In fact, Wilbur
uses four forms of the verb 1 1 to be" in a single poem, "A
Baroque Wall Fountain," while Roethke uses only five "to be"
verbs in twenty-three poems from The Lost Son collected in
Words for the Wind.
The diversity of contemporary American poetry is even
more conspicuous when' we compare Karl Shapiro with Richard
Wilbur. Like Lowell and Roethke, Shapiro is rhythmically
more vigorous and thematically more violent and shocking
("Auto Wreck," "The Fly," "The Glutton") than Wilbur ("Water
Walker," "A Baroque Wall Fountain," "Piazza Di Spagna"), but
Shapiro's energy is not directed toward expressing metaphys
ical anguish or exploring the darkness of the human psyche.
In Shapiro and Wilbur self-revelation and self-characteriza
tion are not the center of interest as in Lowell and Roeth
ke, but neither is Shapiro concerned with balance, order.
21
and grace as is Wilbur. For Shapiro reveals a penchant for
the grotesque and irrational which are often employed to
jshock the reader into an awareness of the vulgarity ("The
I
blutton" or "Lower the Standard: That's My Motto" from The
bourgeois Poet), the horror ("Auto Wreck")3 and the trivi
ality ("Buick" and "The Fly") of modern life. Shapiro is
often ironic and satiric, and the titles of several of his
poems indicate this concern for the details of twentieth-
!
oentury urban living and twentieth-century problems: "Auto
Wreck," "Buick," "The Conscientious Objector," "Hollywood,"
j"Troop Train," "Drug Store," "The University.” Tempera
mentally, Shapiro is more given to laughter than Wilbur,
i
I
Lowell, or Roethke, but often his humor is bitter, satiric,
or ironic and often fit leads the reader to a position of
i
moral and emotional revulsion, as for example, in "The
iFly":26
i
I
I
I
i
!
^Karl Shapiro, Poems: 1940-1953 (New York, 1953), p.
56 .
0 hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man's nose,
Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan Phyfe
The smoking mountains of my food
And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife.
Riding and riding with your filth of hair
On gluey foot or wing, forever coy,
Hot from the compost and green sweet decay
Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy,*
You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool;
In the tight belly of the dead
Burrow with hungry head
And inlay maggots like a jewel.
At your approach the great horse stomps and paws
Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail;
Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand
Which sweeps against you like an angry flail;
Still you return, return, trusting your wing
To draw you from the hunter's reach
That learns to kill to teach
Disorder to the tinier thing.
My peace is your disaster. For your death
Children like spiders cup their pretty hands
And wives resort to chemistry of war.
In fens of sticky paper and quicksands
You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck
You struggle hideously and beg;
You amputate your leg
Imbedded in the amber muck.
But I, a man, must swat you with my hate,
Slap you across the air and crush your flight,
Must mangle with my shoe and smear your- blood,
Expose your little guts pasty and white,
Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard's hat,
Pin your wings under like a crow's,
Tear off your flimsy clothes
And beat you as one beats a rat.
Then like Gargantua I stride among
The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust,
The broken bodies of the narrow dead
That catch the throat with fingers of disgust.
I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls
And stunned, stone blind, and deaf
Buzzes its frightful F
And dies between three cannibals.
23
The individuality of these four poets is an indication
of the diversity of influences at work in contemporary poet
ry: in Wilbur, the influence of Wallace Stevens, William
|Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore; in Lowell, that of
!
Eliot and Dylan Thomas; in Roethke, that of Thomas and j
jYeats; in Shapiro, that of Auden, Spender, MacNeice, and
|Day Lewis. Nevertheless, it is possible and important to
identify what contemporary American poets have in common and:
what they have added to the tradition.
! The mainstream of contemporary American poetry seems at
once a rejection and a continuation of the major accomplish-
I
I
ments of the first forty-five years of the twentieth cen-
i
tury. Wilbur, Lowell, Roethke, Shapiro, and others such as
'Howard Nemerov, Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, John
| i
.Logan, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov reject the cultural
* i
mythopoeic tradition of T. S. Eliot. As Mills states, "They1
avoid in general the habit of making their work a repository
of intellectual history, learning, and fragments of the j
I
European cultural heritage" (C .A .P.. p. 185). This is not
|to say that Wilbur and Lowell, for example, dispense alto-
i
jgether with historical and literary allusions, but that such
'allusions are more sparingly deployed than in The Waste Land
i
or Pound's Cantos. and that they do not carry the thematic
burden of the poem. These contemporary poets do not, how
ever, swing to the opposite end of the mythic spectrum to
set forth, like W. B. Yeats, a private mythology. Instead,
jthey simply offer "poems of the immediate," poems which
[record the poet's response to everything that falls within
the circumference of his life as an individual (C.A.P.. p.
185), poems which celebrate concrete reality. Not only
Wilbur, but many of his contemporaries represent a
continuation of the William Carlos Williams objectivist
tradition of modern poetry.
In addition to rejecting the cultural-mythic poetry of
! an Eliot or the private mythology of a Yeats, most contem-
l
iporary poets also have rejected the social-criticism,
I
|
ipublic-issues poetry of the 1930's Auden school. The con
temporary poet's orientation is not societal or political
but personal. Whereas Auden concerned himself with the im
pending doom of the bourgeoisie ("Consider"), Robert Lowell
concerns himself with the doom which threatens Robert Lowell
("Skunk Hour"). But generally it is not doom, either polit
ical or personal, which is the contemporary poet's concern.
Rather, he is concerned with his own observations of the
external world and of the subtleties of human response to
the vast variety of situations which life holds.
25 ;
!
It may even be possible to postulate the existence of
a new nature poetry, a poetry which perceives subtle corres
pondences between the natural world and the human condition.
I
I
iF. C. Golffing, speaking of Richard Wilbur, writes:
His true domain is the borderland between natural and
moral perception, his special gift for the genteel,
non-metaphysical conceit which illuminates the hidden
correspondences between natural and moral phenomena.2 ^
!
■Similarly, Ralph Mills speaks of Theodore Roethke's "uncanny
sensitiveness to the subtlest details of nature and their
28
covert human meanings." This is not a pantheistic nature
poetry nor a theistic poetry seeing the beauty of nature as
a proof for the existence of God. It is a poetry which
locates man firmly in the natural order yet avoids the ex-
cesses of Zolaesque naturalism by celebrating the primacy ofi
[the human imagination and moral sense. It is a poetry which,
’ sees a dynamic life force in the universe and perceives
analogues between the operation of this life force in nature,
and in man. (See: Roethke, "Root Cellar," "Cuttings, j
j i
Hater"; Lowell, "Skunk Hour"; Wilbur, "A Black November
I
! 27"a Remarkable New Talent," Poetry. 71 (January 1948),
222.
I
|
^ Theodore Roethke (Minneapolis, 1963), p. 23.
26 .
i
I
Turkey.") I
!
j Contemporary poets also share a concern for order.
i
While few of them arrive at any comprehensive cosmology,
they are, nevertheless, involved in a difficult search for
whatever positive can be wrung out of the things of this
world. This search explains the scrupulous attentiveness to
structure and the use of traditional and intricate forms in
the works of even such passionate and wild poets as Lowell
and Roethke.
i
"Redskin" critics have attacked several contemporary j
poets as "craftsmanlike," "controlled," and "cautious." But
as John Wain argues, these are not necessarily terms of
i
disapprobation: j
We wrote like that because we had seen too much in the
preceding five [1940-45] years of the energy that loses
itself in display, the large gesture that indicates
nothing. If we were cautious it was because we knew I
that we had to be better than our immediate elders, and !
the best way seemed to be to go to work humbly and pa- 1
tiently, as craftsmen, and build upwards from the
ground.^9
If one can explain a poet or poetic movement by cul-
jtural and political-historical forces, then Wain may well
jhave hit upon an explanation for the poetry written since
29
Anthology of Modern Poetry (London, 1963), p. 35.
1946. Both supporters and detractors of this poetry have
agreed upon certain qualities to describe the movement. The
jdetractors, as we have seen, regard the poems as uninvolved
!in the life and the problems of the times, as detached and
anemic. These critics are disturbed by poets who do not
shout against the cultural and metaphysical void and who
instead speak softly and with restraint. But these critics
miss the point. Richard Wilbur and the other so-called
"academics" feel it is more effective to build order quietly
than to rail against the obvious disorder in the world.
CHAPTER II
FORM: RHETORIC, METER, AND RHYME
At a poetry conference on "Experimental and Formal
Verse" William Carlos Williams objected to the continued
use of the forms and meters of one age in the next:
! We accept structure as something static, given to us by
I the hand of God or at least by George Saintsbury, late
! of the English University. We think and we are taught
; that English prosody is a fixed dispensation from above
. . . We are taught to take our prosody without inven
tion and on loan from another language; you take the
bottle with its label already applied and fill it with
| any rot-gut you like. If it fulfills the rules, O.K.^
I
I
t
Richard Wilbur’s reply to these statements tells a great
deal about his own poetic disposition and the nature of his
poetry:
! When poets put new wine in old bottles, the bottles be-
' come new, too. This I suppose, is my main objection to
' Dr. Williams' talk? he lays all the stress on structural
! 1
I Some Hints Toward the Enjoyment of Modern Verse,"
Quarterly Review of Literature. VII (November 1953), 172.
29
reforms and inventions, as if structure were a practic
ably separable thing, instead of talking about the need
of a perpetual revolution of the entire sensibility, in
the incessant task of achieving relations to the always
1 changing face or reality. To this latter purpose I have
■ seen sonnets, villanelles, inversions and all that Dr.
j Williams reprehends do great services in the last years,
and when this is so, one cannot say the poets have sur-
| rendered to traditional forms. They have taken them
j over, rather. ("Bottles," p. 192)
I
!
Obviously Wilbur does not share certain modern poets'
.and critics' objections to traditional forms. These objec-
I
tions are that form binds, and that certain forms have been
I
'exhausted. Wilbur's response to the second objection is
.contained in the quotation above. With the first, Wilbur
Lgrees; form does bind. But to Wilbur it is the artist's
respect for reality which impels him to subject himself to
i
the limitations of form:
(
I What is the rain-dancer doing but trying to establish a
| relation to the rain? It is true that he is trying to
get power over the rain for a very vital economic reason.
| However, since he fails so often and still goes on danc
ing, there is obviously something else at stake in the
dance. As Susanne Langer says, "... the most important
virtue of the rite is not so much its practical as its
I religious success . . . its power to articulate a rela-
i tion between man and nature . . ."
! The rain-dancer casts down his fingers like rain-
j shafts, or beats with his feet somewhat as the rain
, tramples the earth. But it isn't really like the rain,
it can't begin to substitute for what it refers to. It
is not a mere imitation, but a magic borrowing of the
powers it wants to approach, and a translation of what
is borrowed into the language of the dancing human body,
jHow are fingers to reproduce the concurrent precision
30
and dishevelment of rainfall, or feet to approximate
the delicate yet thudding sound of rain striking the
earth? Moreover, there is so much in the dance which
does not seem to refer directly to the rain at all;
| patterns, intervals, repetitions. . Above all, the dif-
I ficulty.
I Rain probably has no difficulty in falling, it ought
to be the easiest thing in the world. The difficulty
and intricacy in the rain-dance arises not from emula
tion, and not from virtuosity in the dances, but from
the difficulty--the impossibility-of achieving a direct
relationship with the rain, or with any other real thing.
In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitute
; for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression
| of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less
overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem
j begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defens
ible positions. Or rather by a perception of the hope
lessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare
of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation be
tween an artist and reality is always an oblique one,
and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously
oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you
know that you can only approach that reality by indirect
means. The painter who throws away the frame and rebels
at composition is not a painter any more; he thinks the
world is himself, and that there is no need of a devious
and delimited struggle with it. He lacks that feeling
of inadequacy which must precede every genuine act of
creation.
So that paradoxically it is respect for reality which
makes a necessity of artifice. Poetry's prime weapons
are words, used for the naming, comparison and contrast
of things. Its auxiliary weapons are rhythms, formal
patterns, and rhymes. It is by means of all these that
poets create difficulties for themselves, which they then
try to surmount. I can't see that any of them needs or
ought to be dispensed with. ("Bottles," p. 189)
t
i To Wilbur, a poem, like any work of art, is not an ex
act reproduction of reality; it is a distillation of one
man's vision of reality. This distillation occurs in the
31
imagination of the artist, and it occurs after the initial
moment of inspiration. This is not to say that the artist
is not inspired while he works on the art object, but that
once he begins he is consciously contriving, refashioning,
interpreting whatever voice or event compelled him to begin.
The artist is by necessity an artificer; he is ,a conscious
i
contriver, and he contrives in order that the reader may be
grasped by whatever originally grasped himself. To achieve
this union between the objective world and his own imagina
tion, the poet must recognize the "difficulty."
Wilbur recognizes that form binds, yet he argues that
the artist cannot hope to translate his direct apprehension
of reality into a meaningful expression without the distance
afforded by form. However, Wilbur also operates within
strict forms partly because he finds the search for order
enjoyable for its own sake. Observing "a landscapeful of
small black birds," Wilbur writes:
What is an individual thing? T hey roll
Like a drunken fingerprint across the skyl
Or so I give their image to my soul
U ntil, as if refusing to be caught
In any singular vision of my eye
Or in the nets and cages of my thought,
32
They tower up, shatter, and madden space
W ith their divergences, are each alone .
Swallowed from sight, and leave me in this place
Shaping these images to make them stay;
Meanwhile, in some formation of their own,
T hey fly me still, and steal my thoughts away.
Delighted with myself and with the birds,
I set them down and give them leave to be.
It is by words and the defeat of words,
Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,
That for a flying m om ent one may see
By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.
("An Event," Poems. p. 106.)
In this poem we see that the order of the natural world
is beyond the narrator's ability to comprehend, yet he de
lights in seeking order. The birds may "roll / Like a
drunken fingerprint across the sky'.," reality may present
itself as chaotic and mysterious, but the poet delights in
struggling against this chaos and mystery. "A poem," Wilbur
2
writes, "is a conflict with disorder." And the poet's main
weapon in this conflict is form. So form is' more than sim
ply a technique; it is an affirmation of the poet's "com-
3
mitment to order." Form and meaning cannot be separated;
the form of a work of art is also an essential part of its
The Genie in the Bottle," Writing Poetry. ed. John
Holmes (Boston, 196 0), p. 123. Hereafter referred to as
"Genie."
^Karl Shapiro and Robert.Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New
York, 1965), p. 180. Hereafter referred to as Prosody.
I
meaning.
J To Wilbur, one cause of man's sense of disorder in life
I
is that he is constantly caught between the pull of emotion-
jal and intellectual polarities. But to surrender to one or
,the other would be to rob life of its dynamic tension. The
very quest for order tempts man to surrender to extremes.
I
As Wilbur explains:
i
I To contemn the consciousness, as Lawrence did and Jeffers
i 7
! seems to me to do, is to deprive existence of its dyna
mism. Likewise the other extreme,— a vacuum-packed con
sciousness , --is undynamic. Neither the mysterious world
nor the formative mind can be denied. ("Bottles," p. 188)
i
I
I
■Both must be kept, as Wilbur says in the poem "Love Calls Us
to the Things of This World," in a "difficult balance" which
by the very nature of its difficulty supplies life with its
'dynamic quality.
This dynamic balance is largely achieved both by Wil
bur's rhetorical use of stanza forms and by his metrical and
rhyme patterns.
i
Rhetorical Form
Rhetorically, many of Wilbur's poems can be more clear-
ly apprehended in terms of a thesis and antithesis, often
I
leading to a synthesis. The synthesis is presented as a
reconciliation of life's opposites. Often these poems are
34
divided into two sections or they contain two speakers.
These two-part poems usually present the theme in part one
with the second part contrapuntally playing a counter-theme.
The synthesis is either explicit, implicit, or unattainable.
There are the poems which achieve an explicit reconcilia
tion between theme and counter-theme; poems which imply a
reconciliation which the reader's own imagination and in
tellect must supply; and poems which present irreconcilable
opposites which man must accept and live with.
To illustrate, there is an explicit reconciliation of
opposites in "Junk." The poem, an imitation of Anglo-Saxon
poetry, is spaced like two vertical poems set opposite each
other in alternating lines and it is also clearly divided
into two sections--the second beginning with line 17— "Yet
the things themselves":
Huru Welandes
wore ne geswiceS
monna anigum
Sara Se Mimming can
heardne gehealdan.
W A LD ERE
An axe angles
from my neighbor’s ashcan;
It is h ell’ s handiwork,
the wood not hickory,
T he flow of the grain
not faithfully followed.
T h e shivered shaft
rises from a shellheap
O f plastic playthings,
paper plates.
And the sheer shards
of shattered tumblers
T hat were not annealed
for the tim e needful.
At the same curbside,
a cast-off cabinet
Of wavily-warped
unseasoned wood
W aits to be trundled
in the trash-man’s truck.
H aul them off! H ide them!
T h e heart winces
For junk and gimcrack,
for jerrybuilt things
And the men who make them
for a little money,
Bartering pride
like the bought boxer
W ho pulls his punches,
or the paid-off jockey
W ho in the home stretch
holds in his horse.
Yet the things themselves
in thoughtless honor
Have kept composure,
like captives w ho w ould not
T alk under torture.
Tossed from a tailgate
W here the dump displays
its random dolmens,
Its black barrows
and blazing valleys,
T hey shall waste in the weather
toward what they were.
T h e sun shall glory
in the glitter of glass-chips,
Foreseeing the salvage
of the prisoned sand,
And the blistering paint
peel off in patches,
36
T hat the good grain
be discovered again.
T hen burnt, bulldozed,
they shall all be buried
T o the depth of diamonds,
in the making dark
W here halt Hephaestus
keeps his hammer
And W ayland’s work
is worn away.
(Poems. p. 9)
Although the poem begins in a mock-heroic fashion, it be
comes serious at line 11, and its dual two-part (vertical
and sectional) form becomes quite appropriate to the theme.
The entire poem synthesizes the opposites of disintegration
and integrity. The poem has its human implications, ex
plicitly affirming that the decay and stripping away of
artificial externals is a painful but necessary process in
reaching the true, the essential.
"A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" is
another example of a two-part poem which sets forth an ex
plicit reconciliation of opposites. This reconciliation,
discussed in Chapter VIII below, is achieved in the person
of Saint Francis, who would have seen in the Baroque Foun
tain the secular ecstasy to which man is driven by his
spiritual nature; Francis would have been able to synthesize
spiritual longing with earthly joy.
37
In several poems, however/ Wilbur presents opposing
forces or attitudes or conditions in which reconciliation is
not explicit but is instead implicit. “Folk Tune" is such a
poem. The poem consists of seven stanzas: part one, in
cluding stanzas 1 through 3; part two, stanzas 5 through 7;
with stanza 4 serving as a transition.
When Bunyan swung his whopping axe
The forests strummed as one loud lute,
The timber crashed beside his foot
And sprung up stretching in his tracks.
He had an ox, but his was blue,
The flower in his buttonhole
Was brighter than a parasol.
He’s gone. Tom Swift has vanished too,
W ho worked at none but wit’s expense,
Putting dirigibles together
Out in the yard, in the quiet weather,
Whistling behind Tom Sawyer’s fence.
N ow when the darkness in my street
Nibbles the last and crusty crumbs
Of sound, and all the city numbs
And goes to sleep upon its feet,
I listen hard to hear its dreams:
John Henry is our nightmare friend,
Whose shoulders roll without an end,
Whose veins pump, pump and burst their seams,
Whose sledge is smashing at the rock
And makes the sickly city toss
And half awake in sighs of loss
Until the screaming of the clock.
John Henry’s hammer and his will
Arc here and ringing out our wrong,
I hear him driving all night long
T o beat the leisured snarling drill.
(Poems., p. 199)
Part one introduces the theme of the vitality, individual
ity, and wit of folk heroes of the past— Paul Bunyan, Tom
Swift and Tom Sawyer:
When Bunyan swung his whopping axe
The forests strummed as one loud lute,
The timber crashed beside his foot
And sprung up stretching in his tracks.
i
But even within this past, the poet prepares for the coun
ter-theme, for we are told that Paul Bunyan is gone and that
"Tom Swift has vanished too."
Stanza 4 carries us from this legendary world into the
present world, the city. Stanzas 5-7 then present a contra-
!
Ipuntal play between the "sickly city"— whose inhabitants are
I
Ipuny compared to the folk heroes of part one— and the Negro
!
i
folk hero John Henry. The story of John Henry contains
within itself the opposites which the theme and counter
theme reveal: John Henry, the autonomous individual, hero
ically defies and defeats the machine— the city world. And
iyet after his titanic struggle with the machine, he dies.
I
Bo like Paul Bunyan, Tom Swift, and Tom Sawyer, John Henry
itoo is gone. We, the inhabitants of the "sickly city," re
main in the nightmare world we have created? yet we
toss
i
| . . . half awake m sighs of loss.
'For although John Henry and company are gone, we cannot for
get the forces and values they represent; we are dimly aware
,of our loss. To state in a sentence or two the implied
I
■reconciliation of the poem would destroy the centrifugal
force of the final stanza. Wilbur leaves each reader with
the image of John Henry "ringing out our wrong." How each
I
i
reader reconciles the past with the present will depend on
I
how he interprets "our wrong," but whether we like it or not
Wilbur will not let us forget that
!
! John Henry's hammer and his will
i Are here and ringing out our wrong
1 I hear him driving all night long
j To beat the leisured snarling drill.
| The third type of dialectical poem, which is closely
related to the implied reconciliation type, is the poem
whose theme and counter-theme simply present opposites which
cannot be reconciled, but which can only be acknowledged and
1
accepted. And yet this very acceptance seems a kind of
reconciliation, for it is only by recognizing these oppo
sites that man can avoid falling victim to one extreme or
another; only by this recognition can the "dynamic balance"
be reached. This balance is established in the poem "Epis-
! temology" :
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
j We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."
j (Poems. p. 121)
i
The first couplet refutes Samuel Johnson's famous refutation
of Bishop Berkeley's contention that "a thing is merely a
ibundle of perceptions . . . [that] all matter so far as we
jknow it, is a mental condition; and the only reality that
1 4
we know directly is mind." Johnson kicks the stones to
jconfirm their reality and refute Bishop Berkeley. But in
!
1
ithe second line, Wilbur refutes Johnson. The line "But
| i
I
cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones" may suggest the
I
whirling molecular, non-solid nature of stones, and may also
i
i
[suggest the ultimate origin of all matter and organisms in
i
dust, gas, and space. The second couplet also presents the !
!
mind-matter duality, but it contradicts the first couplet: j
J 1
j"We milk the cow of the world"— we live in the material j
j
|universe and our daily actions are predicated upon the
f
isolidity and reality of this universe, and yet "as we do"
^Will Durant, The Storv of Philosophy (New York, 1954),
p. 257.
4 1
this, like Yeats's Bishop of the Crazy Jane poems, we deny
the ultimate reality of matter, choosing to locate reality
in the mind or spirit. And can this conflict be resolved?
No, implies the poet; not if we attempt to subordinate one
polarity to the other. Both realities are true--to deny
this would be to shatter the necessary balance upon which
the dynamic of the human condition depends.
"Next Door" is another poem whose theme and counter
theme are not resolved. The theme sets the home life and
gaiety of a young family in contrast with the pale, motion
less, neglected life in a home for the aged; the theme is
presented in images of growth and spring, while the counter
theme is described in terms of winter and dust and shade:
T h e hom e for the aged opens its windows in May,
And the stale voices of winter-long
Flap from their dusty curtains toward our wood,
That now with robin-song
Rouses, and is regaled. Promptly the trees
Break bud and startle into leaf,
Blotting the old from sight, w hile all the birds
Repeal the w inter’s grief
The poet speculates that these old people may find solace in
their memories or even in fantasies, but then he stops
short, asking:
42
Is it like this? W e have no way to know.
Our lawn is loud with girls and boys.
T h e leaves are full and busy with the sun.
T h e birds make too much noise.
(Poems. p. 54)
The living must be concerned with life, while the dying must
fend for themselves, deriving whatever happiness they can
apart from the living. And the two cannot meet.
A final example of irreconcilability is offered by "La
Rose Des Vents," another dialogue which suggests both W. B.
Yeats's early poetry and his late "Crazy Jane Talks with the
Bishop." The poet in stanza 1 of Wilbur's poem urges his
lady "To rise and go / And we shall dwell / On the rose of
the winds." He urges that they flee this earth where "The
seas abrade / What coasts we know." But— in lines which
suggest Crazy Jane's reply to the Bishop that
"Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent."
--the lady, in stanza 2, part two of the poem, replies to
the poet
Forsake those roses
Of the mind
And tend the true
The mortal flower.
In this last stanza the poet's use of the word "mortal" to
I 43
l
I
modify the flower which has its brief life and dies paral
lels Crazy Jane's insistence on accepting the imperfections
and paradoxes of human experience. Both "ladies"--Yeats's
i
Crazy Jane and the lady of Wilbur's "La Rose Des Vents"—
summarize the essence of all of Wilbur's two-part poems.
j
'For in such poems, as Wilbur states, "The poet speaks out of
his whole nature, acknowledging the contradictions which
5
inhere in life."
i
j Meter and Rhyme
In addition to rhetorical or thematic organization,
Wilbur operates almost exclusively within formal stanzaic
patterns. In fact, with the exception of a few long poems
I
("Shame," "Someone Talking to Himself," "The Mill," "Games
One," "Games Two," "The Waters," and "Lightness"), all Wil-
!
I
i
bur's poems employ regular stanza-forms.
Of sonnets, terza rima, quatrains, and so on, I
j should say the same thing that I have said of rhythms—
that they have no inherent meaning, that they are not
at all "dated," and that writing in them does not oblige
one to sacrifice novelty. This may be said with even
more certainty of stanza-forms devised and followed by
the individual poet himself. Recurring to my statement
j that difficulties of form are a substitute for the in
superable difficulties of direct expression, I would
| ^"On My Own Work," Shenandoah. VII (Autumn 1965), 63.
Hereafter referred to as "Own Work."____________ ____________
44
add that the formidably meaningless seems to me the
best substitute for the alien, and that therefore strict
stanzas are preferable to "free" or "organic" form.
("Bottles," p. 190)
i
In his collected poems Wilbur has two couplets, five ter
cets, sixty-eight quatrains, six cinquains, twenty-four six-
I
'ains, two septets, twelve octaves, one Spenserian stanza,
one ballade and five sonnets (see Appendix II). However,
iwithin the restriction of the stanza form, Wilbur allows
himself wide rhythmic variety. And though he disagrees with
i
Carlos Williams on the matter of form, he is careful to
avoid any misunderstanding regarding rhythm:
In criticizing Dr. Williams' criticism I am not out
to attack free verse (though personally I have little
use for most of it) or anything else. What'I wish to
do is to say a few words in favor of some of the things
he has attacked. In the first place, I would like to
assert that any basic rhythm— iambic, for example— is a
perfectly artificial and abstract thing. I am aware
that any rhythm bears some relation to the heart-beat
j and breath-cycle, and has in that sense a human "mean
ing." But no rhythm may reasonably be thought to be
inherently linked to a particular age or culture. If
the rhythms of Beowulf, lately established by Professor
Pope, are not much used now it is not because they were
somehow darkly suitable then. All you can say is that
they flourished then and don't now, but may again if
enough poets get interested. A basic rhythm is as time
less and noncommittal as the triangle. The horses of
the nineteenth century did not run in iambs, any more
than the Studebakers of the twentieth do. ("Bottles,"
( p. 190)
James Southworth further clarifies the relationship of
45
Wilbur's metrical and rhyme and stanza patterns.
In the volume Poems 1943-1956 Wilbur has employed at
| least 66 different stanza forms, ranging from 2 to 16
1 verses. Although it is apparent that he makes most
frequent use of the 4-verse stanza and 6-verse stanza
(30 and 17 respectively), a mere numerical figure gives
I little idea of the variety within these patterns. Nor ,
j does the fact that he employs 5 different rhyme schemes '
' for the 4-line stanza contribute much more. One can go
1
i even farther and say that the reader will learn little
more if he superficially scans the poems in this stanza
■metrically. He will find that only three have the ap
pearance of being in the a5-b5-a5-b5 pattern and that
he employs only once each of the remaining 9-a3-b5-a-
b5, a3-b5-as-bs, etc. An understanding of Wilbur's
subtlety can only come from a detailed analysis of the
I rhythms of each poem. What he has done is to bring an
essentially rhythmical prosody within the limits of a
metrical one. I think that the sensitive reader con-
| cerned with bringing out the rhetorical meaning of the
i poem would think of the poems as essentially rhythmical
rather than metrical. Seventeen of the poems cannot,
in fact, be read other than as rhythmical; 54 can be
read as metrical if the rhetorical sense is strictly
I subordinated, and 6 can be read either as metrical or j
rhythmical. Examples of the last are "Objects," "The i
Death of a Toad," "Flumen Tenebrarum," and "Giacometti."
Even in those poems which are strictly metrical, the
rhetorical sense counterpoints the basic pattern. Wil
bur has, therefore, performed a great service in fusing
| the best elements of both traditions in his work and has :
| restored to metrical poetry the subtlety that was being ■
! squeezed out of it as the iambic foot gained the domi-
i nance.^
j I
Wilbur verifies Southworth's statements by a comment of his
| James Southworth, "The Poetry of Richard Wilbur," Col-
lleae English. XXXI (October 1960), 25. Hereafter referred
to as "P.O.R.W."
i
own:
46
; The unit of my poetry, as I experience it, is not the
collected poems which I may some day publish; nor is it
the individual volume, nor the sequence or group within
i the volume; it is the single poem. Every poem of mine
j is autonomous . . . No poem of mine is ever undertaken
| as a technical experiment; the form which it takes,
whether conventional or innovating, develops naturally.. i .
as the poem develops, as a part of the utterance. ("Own i
Work," p. 59)
i"A Black November Turkey" is such a naturally-developing
]
poem. Although there is a strict x-a-x-a rhyme scheme, the
i t
!
metrical pattern is unique, and the stresses are not regu- j
i
lar. To illustrate: line 4, of each stanza has two stres
ses, but these two stresses are variously employed as ana-
pest and iamb; iamb and iamb; and trochee and trochee. Each
jscanned line reveals similar divergences from whatever norm
there seems to be.
Wilbur's metrical patterns are idiosyncratic or irregu-
i
I I
ilar for two reasons, both of which Wilbur himself acknow-
\
ledges:
I
i
There are not so many possible basic rhythms for Ameri
can or English poets, but the possibilities of varying
these rhythms are infinite. One thing modern poets do
1 not write, thank heaven, is virtuoso poems of near per
fect conformity to basic rhythms, as Byron, Swinburne,
| and Browning did in their worst moments. By good poets
of any age, rhythm is generally varied cleverly and
forcefully to abet the expressive purposes of the whole
poem. Modern variations on basic rhythms are likely to
suggest the speech patterns, phrasing and familiar beats
of contemporary life, and this is desirable. But the
rhythmic variations cannot do this unless the whole
expression of the poem reflects a contemporary sensi-
: bility: rhythm cannot be modern per se: it may, how
ever, be modern in the ensemble of a poem, in the way
| it works with the words. ("Bottles," p. 190)
I
In sum, Wilbur's metrical patterns are irregular in order to
capture ordinary speech patterns and to be consistent with
'the particular content of the poem. And, as Wilbur states, ;
( the two points are closely related. This interrelationship
jis clear in "Advice to a Prophet." The poem, unlike many of
I
Wilbur’s poems, deals with an explicitly modern subject:
\ i
"the poem may . . . be said to be an occasional one, arising
I
from the hostility and terror of the world's present condi
tion" (Mills, C .A .P .. p. 174). But the poet-prophet is not
delivering a prophetic blast in the tradition of Jeremiah.
Instead of coming into the city "mad-eyed" and attempting to
i i
i
j"Scare us with talk of the death of the race," the poet ad- :
, vises the prophet simply to "ask" several questions. Wil-
I i
i i
bur's prophet is not to be a wild orator but a quiet
ithought-provoker. The rhythm, therefore, has the simplicity1
and directness of speech patterns. Wilbur stated that
j
"modern variations on basic rhythms [which] . . , suggest
•the speech patterns, phrasing, and familiar beats of con
temporary life . . . [are only effective when] the whole
expression of the poem reflects a contemporary sensibility"
("Bottles," p. 190). "Advice to a Prophet" does express a
modern sensibility, a sensibility John Wain has discussed as
'follows:
I
I
. . . we had seen too much in the preceding five [1940-
1945] years of the energy that loses itself in display.
If we were cautious it was because we knew that we had
i to be better than our immediate elders, and the best way
I seemed to be to go to work humbly and patiently . . .
| and build upwards from the ground. (p. 35)
I
I
1 The pace of "Advice to a Prophet" is like an adagio,
slow and careful, reflecting the intelligent, contemplative
|
'sensibility of a poet and generation sick of pretentiousness
and extravagant claims, desiring instead a simple and direct
iappraisal of "the world's own change." When Wilbur begins
I
his advice, he speaks in one- and two-syllable words, or
dinary words:
!
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range
I The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
r
Southworth comments:
i
! Even more interesting is the freer, more rhythmical ef-
| feet Wilbur achieves in an essentially metrical pattern
j . . . by the manner in which he links his stanzas to
gether. Instead of making each stanza complete, he
groups them: one-two, four-five ("The Giaour and the
Pacha"), one-two-three-four; five-six-seven-eight ("Ob-
jects"); one-two-three; four-five-six (''Still, Citizen
Sparrow"), one-two, three-four, five-six, nine-ten
i ("Driftwood") . . . ("P.O.R.W.," p. 25)
!
This technique is used in "Advice to a Prophet," where
stanzas 1-2, 4-5-5, 7-8 are linked together. Wilbur fre-
I
|quently begins a sentence in one stanza and completes it in
i
the center of a later stanza. Although Wilbur uses A-B-B-A
|
( quatrains in "Advice to a Prophet," the stanzaic regularity
i
jis counterbalanced by the rhetorical enjambement.
It is clear that the order and discipline afforded by
I
'stanzaic forms is important to Wilbur; it is equally clear,
however, that freedom is as important to him as order and
'discipline:
To provide a 'norm' in writing a poem it is not obliga
tory to write in a traditional form: a single line whose
basic rhythm and length are to be maintained and varied,
or a single stanza, however novel, which is adhered to,
j constitutes a norm. ("Bottles," p. 191)
I
I
bne other norm which Wilbur carefully and extensively manip-
j
julates is rhyme. Given his concern for form and aesthetic
|
distance, his use of rhyme is certainly natural. As Karl
Shapiro points out, rhyme may give the artist a proper dis
tance from his subject matter:
Rhyme can help a poet get the aesthetic distance he needs
in order to write at all of a subject in which he is in
timately involved, and which threatens to overwhelm him
with paralyzing emotion as he contemplates it and tries
50
to write of it in the most straightforward way. The
necessity of constructing rhyme may in some cases force
the poet to move the original experience just far enough
to the rear of the immediate feelings involved that he
will be able to write about it or some sea-changed as
pect of it, without sentimentality or the enervating
sense of futility that sometimes results from a realiza
tion of the great disparity between the vividness and
depth of an original experience and the expression of
it or any part of it in verse. (Prosody. p. 104)
Of Wilber's 130 collected poems, only fifteen do not
rhyme. One of Karl Shapiro's explanations of why poets use
rhyme applies accurately to Wilbur:
i Making a rhyme scheme is in itself a way of affirming a
; general commitment to order, of implying both the neces-
! sity or order to a high degree of civilization and the
immediate aesthetic pleasure inherent in it. (p. 104)
JThe order which Wilbur imposes on himself through his rhyme
i
jschemes is, however, highly complex and individual. For
example, of his five sonnets none are in the traditional
Shakespearean or Petrarchan rhyme schemes. Many of his
poems use a rhyme scheme which is wholly idiosyncratic. To
illustrate, "Grace" employs a rhyme scheme which interlocks
the five-line stanzas. Lines 1 and 2 rhyme; 3 and 5 rhyme;
and line 4 ends with the rhyme upon which lines 1 and 2 of
the next stanza must be based. Also, the poems "Driftwood,"
"Clearness," "The Terrace," and "A Song" have rhyme between
pairs of quatrains. Thus lines 2 and 4 of stanza 1 rhyme
Jwith lines 2 and 4 of stanza 2; and lines 2 and 4 of stanza
i
13 rhyme with lines 2 and 4 of stanza 4, and so on. "Someone^
I
Talking to Himself" is even more'idiosyncratic, as it does
I
|not restrict itself to a particular pattern. The poem con
sists of three fourteen-line stanzas and each stanza con
tains seven pairs of rhyming words, but these rhyme words
occur in a different order in each stanza. Stanza l.is:
i
I a -B-C-D-D-B-A-C-E-F-F-G-E-G; stanza 2, A-B-A-C-D-C-E-D-F-E-
B-G-G-F; and stanza 3, A-B-C-D-B-A-D-C-E-F-F-G-E-F.
I
[ Wilbur has explained one reason for his use of rhyme:
j I
j [it is] an invaluable aid in composition. It creates
| difficulties which the utterance must surmount by in-
, creased resourcefulness. It also helps by liberally
suggesting arbitrary connections of which the mind may j
take advantage if it likes. For example, if one has !
to rhyme 'tide,' a great number of rhyme-words at once j
I come to mind (ride, bide, shied, confide, Akenside, etc.)..
Most of these in combination with 'tide' will probably
' suggest nothing apropos, but one of them may reveal ;
precisely what one wanted to say. If none of them does, ;
'tide' must be dispensed with. Rhyme, austerely used, '
may be a stimulus to discovery and a stretcher of atten- j
j tion. ("Genie," pp. 128-129)
jAnd not only does Wilbur's care with rhyme aid him in the j
- j
jcreative process, it also makes his poetic statement more
(clear. For Wilbur's rhymes do not rule over the poet; the
j
ipoet is in complete control, choosing his rhyme words to
i
reinforce the essential meaning of the poem. For example,
52
consider "A Fire Truck":
Right down the shocked street with a siren-blast
That sends all else skittering to the curb,
Redness, brass, ladders and hats hurl past,
Blurring to sheer verb,
Shift at the corner into uproarious gear
And make it around the turn in a squall of traction.
The headlong bell maintaining sure and clear,
Thought is degraded action!
Beautiful, heavy, unweary, loud, obvious thing!
I stand here purged of nuance, my mind a blank.
All I was brooding upon has taken wing.
And I have you to thank.
As you howl beyond hearing I carry you into my mind.
Ladders and brass and all, there to admire
Your phoenix-red simplicity, enshrined
In that not extinguished fire.
(Poems, p. 35)
In the third stanza, the rhyming of "blank" with "thank"
reinforces the central theme of the poem. The poet has been
shocked by the siren blast and the speed of the fire truck,
his mind has been purged of its prior troubles to an un
thinking, "blank" state, and for this he wishes to "thank"
the truck. In the last stanza the "mind-enshrined" rhyme
summarizes the meaning of the poem. Thoughts, images, feel
ings once perceived by the mind are lasting; they become en
shrined in our memories. The word enshrined is also appro
priate in that it suggests that the mind is a temple— an
attitude, by the way, which further verifies Wilbur's
similarity to Wallace Stevens.
This technique of reinforcing meaning through rhyme is
also illustrated by the last stanza of "For the New Railway
Station in Rome":
j "What is our praise or pride
j But to imagine excellence, and try to make it?
j What does it say over the door of Heaven
I But homo fecit?"
j (Poems, p. 110)
I
The rhyming of the Latin and English words is more than
clever craftsmanship; it points up the essential theme of
jthe poem. The creative spirit of antiquity— represented by
I
the Latin— is still alive in the modern world— represented
'by the English rhyme word. Man's creative expression, like
!his language, is constantly changing forms, but his spirit
I
jis changeless and timeless.
| In "Juggler" Wilbur uses exact internal rhyme not only
|to enhance the meaning but to give a physical approximation
I
of the action of the subject matter. Several times in the
poem a sound is exactly repeated ("there-their"; "falling-
falls") or is repeated in a neighboring line ("heaven" in
lines 12, 13, and 16). Word reinforcement and lyrical
sounds are also achieved in "Juggler" by the use of initial
rhyme in lines 14-16:
[14] . . . and still and sole within
[15] The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble
[16] He reels that heaven in.
-In the next two lines we catch a glimpse of the variety of
rhyming devices Wilbur exploits. We see internal rhyme in
lines 17 and 18 and slant rhyme in lines 15 and 18:
[17] Landing it ball by ball,
[18] And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table,
i (Poems, p. 130)
I
| Rhyme words are also used to contribute to tone as well
1
i
as meaning. "To an American Poet Just Dead" conveys a bit-
1
jter, ironic tone strikingly similar to Yeats's "To a Shade."
||n stanza 4 the mock elegiac satire is pointed up by the in-
*
pongruity of rhyming "tears" with "gears" and "mourn" with
I
"horn."
1
Will the sprays weep wide for you their chaplet tears?
For you will the deep-freeze units melt and mourn?
For you will Studebakers shred their gears
And sound from each garage a muted horn?
(Poems. p. 161)
1
Often, however, it seems as though Wilbur simply de-
jlights in word play, in what Shapiro calls "the immediate
aesthetic pleasure inherent in language" (Prosody, p. 180).
1
At times this pleasure runs in a humorous vein, as in, for
example, Dr. Pangloss's song in the Leonard Bernstein oper-
\
etta Candide. for which Wilbur wrote most of the lyrics. Dr
Pangloss, despite a case of syphilis, is still convinced
that "all's for the best in this best of all possible
worIds“:
Colum bus and his men, they say,
Conveyed the virus hither
W hereby my features rot away
And vital powers wither;
Yet had they not traversed the seas
And com e infected back,
W hy, think of all the luxuries
T hat modern life w ould lackl
A ll bitter things conduce to sweet,
As this exam ple shows;
W ithout the little spirochete
W e’d have no chocolate to eat,
N or would tobacco’s fragrance greet
T h e European nose.
(Poems, p . 44)
k
r -
The humorous employment of rhyme is also apparent
Piece" which, in the first stanza, rhymes "shoes"
louse":
The good gray guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impatiently protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.
(Poems, p. 125)
in "Museum
with "Tou-
John Ciardi has referred to Wilbur as "Our Most Melodic
7 I
'Poet," a title whxch Wxlbur well deserves. The lyrxcal
quality of his poetry_is, in part, created by his rhyme—
I -■saSS^S:
terminal, internal, and initial.
i Alliteration and assonance are, like stanza forms, sssgss*-
i
hallmarks of Wilbur's poetry. Both devices are uncommon in '
prose and their very uncommonness makes them a source of
pleasure in poetry. However, as Shapiro points out, both
i
i
jdevices serve to "focus our attention minutely on the lin-
I
guistic details of a sequence of words: [they serve to] . _^a c a i s H -
make us feel the words rather than race across them to get
jto the idea, as is our habit with prose" (Prosody. p. 93).
Thus these devices can be employed to focus attention on
certain objects and by so doing create a meditative, grace-
I i
ful pace and tone. In many of Wilbur's poems alliteration
jand assonance serve in just this fashion; they make us £eel3GB&er~jf
jthe words and carefully focus our attention on the objects j
I - '
he has so carefully described. "The Beautiful Changes" and ■
! I
:"Grace" are two excellent examples of this. j
j
j The title poem of Wilbur's first published volume, The j
Beautiful Changes, reveals the poet's delight in the partic-'
ulars of life and his wonder at the subtle and beautiful
i
7
Saturday Review. August 18, 1956, pp. 18-19.
57
changes which the Beautiful is. constantly undergoing. The
quiet statements in celebration of beauty are enhanced by
the soft, lyrical alliterative flow of "1" and "s‘ ‘ sounds,
by assonantal "i" sounds,
One wading a fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
by "f" sounds, and by the rich "e" sounds, and simply by the esse"
repetition of words:
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
(Poems, p. 226)
"Grace" is a poem whose intricate use of alliteration
and assonance calls to mind Auden's "That Night When Joy
Began":
So active they seem passive, little sheep
Please, and Nijinsky’s out-the-window leap
And marvelous midair pause please too
A taste for blithe brute reflex; flesh made word
Is grace’ s revenue.
One is tickled, again, by the dining-car waiter’s absurd
Acrobacy— tipfingered tray like a wind-besting bird
Plumblines his swinging shoes, the sole things sure
In the shaken train; but this is all done for food,
Is habitude, if not pure
58
Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
And Nijinsky hadn’t the words to make the laws
For learning to loiter in air; he “merely" said,
“I merely leap and pause.”
(Poems - p. 219)
It is interesting to note here that Wilbur uses internal
rhyme (between lines 10 and 11) to reinforce the relation
ship between "food," "habitude," and "hebetude."
"The Death of a Toad" uses abrupt, clipped allitera
tions in the first stanza to correspond with the event of
the toad being mutilated by a power mower. The poem, des
pite its seemingly trivial subject matter, is highly serious
and meditative. In the poem Wilbur uses internal rhyme
(eyes, lies, dies) and rich assonance (lines 13-14, for
example) to create a lyrical, flowing character— particu
larly in the third stanza, which literally flows into vast
regions of the past. As the poem moves from the initial
event of the toad's mutilation to his death to a regression
in time retracing the course of evolution, the poem relies
less and less on clipped "g" and "d" alliterative sounds
and more and. more on "s" alliterations and sensuous asso
nances :
59
A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaricd him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen hcartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.
The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,
Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning, and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.
(Poems. p. 152)
Wilbur's lyricism and delicacy of tone are perhaps even
more evident in "Piazza Di Spagna, Early Morning":
I can’t forget
H ow she stood at the top o f that long marble stair
Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette
W ent dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;
N othing upon her face
But some impersonal loneliness,— not then a girl,
But as it were a reverie of the place,
A called-for falling glide and whirl;
As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip
Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a m om ent above it,
Rides on over the lip —
Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.
(Poems, p. 68)
Like the girl in the poem, the words glide and dance. The
use of alliteration and assonance here is more restrained
than in "Grace," but no less effective. In line 3 the only
repeated consonant sound is the "p" sound between "sleepy"
I
land "pirouette," but it functions beautifully together with
I
the intervening "e" (y) to create a slight pause, almost a
syncopated motion suggestive of an actual pirouette. .The
I
!poem also contains a subtle internal rhyme between "girl,"
i
"were," and "whirl" in lines 6-7-8. And the delicate asso-
i
nantal "i" sound which dominates all four terminal rhymes in
stanza 3 is masterfully balanced by the short "a" (fall,
drawn, on) and the alliterative "p" and "t" sounds which
i
also form the terminal rhymes. We must remember, though,
'that these sounds also derive their beauty from being part
j
;of carefully chosen words which are combined to create
jlovely images. But certainly the process is reciprocal.
CHAPTER III
i
i
DICTION
The high degree of formalism and craftsmanship in
Richard Wilbur's poetry is reflected not only in his use of
stanzaic structure, meter, and rhyme, but in his diction.
I
Of his diction Wilbur has said:
i
| I have no special theory of diction, but I am strongly
in favor of the greatest catholicity in the choice of
words. Some of the poets of our older poetic genera-
i tion accomplished, before and after the first world war,
J a necessary subversion of the poetic diction of their
predecessors. Since then their imitators have been so
slavish as to establish in verse several recognizable
argots. The Auden school of the 30's, which gave poetic '
language a refreshing infusion of slang and technical I
j terminology, has also been aped quite enough now. In an !
| age of separation and specialization, poets can serve
I the public sensibility by making continual recombinations
of all our many modes of speech— by trying incessantly to j
counterfeit a general language. If this is to be done, !
' we must hope that no particular combination will be I
allowed to harden into a poetic dialect. ("Genie," pp. [
124-125) j
i
Wilbur's word choice has not hardened into a poetic dialect,
lalthough he has avoided the Whitman-Pound-Carlos Williams- ;
62
"Beat" tradition of colloquial language. Wilbur uses few
colloquialisms; he has not censured the "redskin" dialect,
but such language would hardly be appropriate to his subject
matter and poetic personality. Wilbur's subject matter, as
we have seen, is generally of a speculative, ceremonial
nature, and he admits to a certain shyness and reserve (see
Appendix X). He inclines to a formal, classical diction.
And as the structure of his poems reveals his awareness of
the literary and historical past, so does his exploitation
of the root meanings of words and his use of foreign words.
Through his use of the root meanings of words Wilbur's
background in the classics is apparent and impressive.
Often this technique is not immediately evident, for many
words which employ the root meaning are readily comprehen
sible on a more current or common level of meaning. Never
theless, close inspection of such word choices reveals an
added dimension which enhances the poem's meaning and ef
fect. "Juggler," one of Wilbur's most widely anthologized
poems, provides good examples of this technique:
A ball will bounce, but less and less. It’ s not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what i t loves, and the earth falls
So in our hearts from brilliance,
Settles and i s forgot.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls
63
To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air
The balls roll round, wheel on his wheeling hands,
Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres
Grazing his finger ends.
Cling to their courses there,
Swinging a small heaven about his ears.
But a heaven i s easier made of nothing at a l l
Than the earth regained, and s t i l l and sole within
The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble
He reels that heaven in,
Landing it ball by ball,
And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.
Oh, on his toe the table i s turning, the broom’ s
Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls
On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:
The boys stamp, and the girls
Shriek, and the drum booms
And all comes down, and he bows and says good-bye.
If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands
In the dust again, if the table starts to drop
Through the daily dark again, and though the plate
Lies flat on the table top,
For him we batter our hands
Who has won for once over the world’ s weight.
fPoems. p. 130)
The ordinary reference of the word "juggler" is simply
to one who performs tricks by tossing or balancing objects.
But the Middle English origin of the word is "joglere,"
which means one who deceives by trickery, and the juggler in
early Celtic history was a magician. So Wilbur's juggler is
more than a public performer. The poem itself tells us
this, but a knowledge of the history of the word helps us to
draw the analogy between the juggler and the artist. The
64
juggler is a magician, a deceiver in the sense that the
artist is a deceiver. Like the artist, Wilbur's juggler
deceives his audience into believing that he can "win over
the world's weight." And like the artist it is this decep
tion which can "shake our gravity up," can shake the audi
ence out of its settled lethargy and passivity. The juggler
and the artist are, in a sense, magicians; they can defy the
basic human impulse to "settle," for both the ball and the
human spirit resent their own resilience and wish to settle
into comfortable stasis. But "Whee," along comes the artist
whose freshness and life compel men to move and "for him we
batter our hands . . ."
Wilbur's verbal magic is revealed in an even more con
centrated fashion in a single word choice in "A Black Novem
ber Turkey":
Nine white chickens come
With haunchy walk and heads
Jabbing among the chips, the chaff, the stones
And the comhusk-shreds,
And bit by bit infringe
A pond of dusty light,
Spectral in shadow until they bobbingly one
By one ignite.
Neither pale nor bright,
The turkey-cock parades
Through radiant squalors, darkly auspicious as
The ace of spades,
65
Himself his own cortege
And puffed with the pomp of death,
Rehearsing over and over with strangled rale
His latest breath.
The vast black body floats
Above the crossing knees
As a cloud over thrashed branches, a calm ship
Over choppy seas,
Shuddering its fan and feathers
In fine soft clashes
With the cold sound that the wind makes, fondling
Paper-ashes.
The pale-blue bony head
Set on its shepherd's-crook
Like a saint’ s death-mask, turns a vague, superb
And timeless look
Upon these clocking hens
And the cocks that one by one,
Dawn after mortal dawn, with vulgar joy
Acclaim the sun.
(Poems, p. 70)
The poem develops a death motif and, as in the dialectical
poems, presents polar themes: death set against the life
force. The turkey, surrounded by time-bound, "clocking
hens" is to be slaughtered; and yet the turkey-cock possess
es a dignity and vitality which is timeless. The single
word which suggests the poem's ambiguity is "auspicious."
The turkey cock is "parading," a word which conveys a sense
of pomp and of the turkey's sense of self-importance, there
by pointing up the more common meaning of the word "auspi
cious" as meaning "fortunate, promising success, propi
tious." However, the poem also deals with the impending
|doom of the turkey cock and this motif is developed by the
use of the word "cortege," which can mean merely "a train of
attendants," but also "a procession of mourners at a funer-
!al." In context, it is obviously the latter meaning which
I
jwi lbur intends:
I
Himself his own cortege
And puffed with the pomp of death,
! Rehearsing over and over with strangled rale
i His latest breath.
i
j Wilbur also exploits several root meanings of the word
! " auspicious " :
I
I
AUSPICE [L. aus-picium, fr. auspic-, auspex bird, seer,
augur fr. AV- (fr. avis, bird) + -spic-, -spex (fr. spi-
cere, specere to look)] 1. Observation (as in Augury)
esp. of the flight and feeding of birds intended to dis
cover a sign of the future; also, an omen based on such
observation. (Webster's Third International Dictionary)
■The word, we see, originally alluded to a bird in a rela
tionship to prophecy. By referring to the turkey cock as
"darkly auspicious as / The ace of spades" Wilbur picks up
the root meaning of the bird as offering man signs of the
future. And the modifier "darkly" in combination with "the
ace of spades" adds further suggestions of mystery and
death. So in context, "auspicious" synthesizes overtones
67
of optimism with overtones- of impending doom.
The word "inspired" serves a similar function in
"Lamarck Elaborated".:
“The environment creates the organ"
The'G reeks were wrong who said our eyes have rays;
N ot (roin these sockets or these sparkling poles
Conics the* illum ination of our days.
It was the sun that bored these two blue holes.
It was the song of doves begot the ear
And not the car that first conceived of sound:
T hat organ bloom ed in vibrant atmosphere*
As m usic conjured Ilium from the ground.
T h e yielding water, the repugnant stone,
T h e poisoned berry and the flaring rose
Attired in sense the tactless finger-bone
And set the taste-buds and inspired the nose.
O ut of our vivid am biance came unsought
A ll sense but that most formidably dim.
T h e shell of balance rolls in seas of thought.
It was the m ind that taught the head to swim.
N ew tonian num bers set to cosmic lyres
W helm ed us in whirling- worlds we could not know,
A nd by the im agined floods of our desires
T h e voice of Sirens gave us vertigo.
(Poems. p. 75)
In part, "inspire" is used here in its ordinary sense
of appealing to the imagination. But the word also draws
upon the Latin root meaning: in- in + spirare to breathe,
and thus literally means "to breathe life into." And as the
poem demonstrates the mutual impingement of the physical on
the imaginative and the imaginative on the physical, so the
68
word "inspire" in itself suggests both the physical and
imaginative dimensions.
In addition to having one word simultaneously possess
two meanings by combining a root meaning with a current
meaning, many of Wilbur's word choices exploit the grada
tions and subtleties of meaning in current usage. For exam
ple, in line 11 above the word "tactless" means, first of
all, without discrimination. Without an environment to pro
vide us with different externals to sense and feel, our
senses would be dull; they would lack the ability to make
distinctions; second, they would lack the simple ability to
sense, to touch— hence the meaning "tact(ile)less." Again
Wilbur has combined the imaginative and the physical in one
word.
"October Maples, Portland" offers an illustration of
how a word, "sanguine," not only suggests two simultaneous
meanings but of how these meanings refer backward and for
ward in the poem, unifying and cross-fertilizing the theme:
T h e leaves, though little tim e they have to live,
W ere never so unfallen as today,
And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve
T h e very light from which tim e fell away.
A showered fire we thought forever lost
Redeem s the air. W here friends in passing meet.
T hey parley in the tongues of Pentecost.
Gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street.
69
It is a light of maples, and w ill go;
But not before it washes eye and brain
W ith such a tincture, such a sanguine glow
As cannot fail to leave a lasting stain.
So Mary’s laundered m antle (in the tale
W hich, like all pretty tales, may still be true),
Spread on the rosemary-bush, so drenched the pale
Slight blooms in its irradiated hue,
T h ey could not choose but to return in blue.
I Poems, p. 24)
The poem can be read on a literal level as revealing
the regenerative effect of natural beauty upon the human
imagination. Thus "unfallen" leaves are simply leaves which
remain on the branch,* and "redeems" simply means to regain
possession. Yet even on this level Wilbur's diction is
rich. Consider, for example, "sanguine." The word suggests
both the deep blood-red color of the leaves, and the other
primary definition of "eager hopefulness"— hopefulness be
cause the leaves have "washed eye and brain"? they have
deeply affected the perceiver, who is now changed, whose
imagination has received a "lasting stain" from the beauty
of the leaves. The word "stain" itself acts as a check and
balance upon the optimism suggested by "sanguine," for
"stain" also has negative connotations, and it sets off a
subtle overtone with the "blood" connotations of "sanguine."
There is yet another level on which the poem may be
■read, and on this level "sanguine" occupies a central rela
tionship with several other words. To set up this relation
ship, it is necessary to digress for a moment,
j The word "fall" appears in two forms in stanza 1 (un
fallen; fell) and each suggests the Christian story of the ■
Fall. Thus "unfallen" leaves are leaves before the Fall, 1
leaves which in their pure, uncorrupted state reflect the
"very light" ("Light of Light. Very God of Very God . . .")
yhich is the source of all life, "the very light from which
time fell away"— that is, the infinity from which time fell
to become finite. The second stanza continues the Christian
theme:
I
j A showered fire we thought forever lost
I Redeems the air . . .
I
Time having fallen is "redeemed" by the "showered fire"— thej
word "fire" acting as a preparation for "Pentecost." Thus
I I
suggestions of Christ enter the poem; it is He whom "We" ;
i
(perhaps the disciples or friends who "in passing" were met 1
by the Holy Ghost) had "thought forever lost" at the Cruci
fixion, yet whose Resurrection conquers death and assures
man of redemption through that triumph.
J
j Stanza 3 then confirms the mighty impact of this Resur-
rection and the ensuing visitation of the Holy Ghost;
7 i :
. . . it washes eye and brain
With such a tincture, such a sanguine glow
As cannot fail to leave a lasting stain.
I
I
|So the optimistic connotations of "sanguine" are now im
mensely magnified, while "stain" now gathers the blood con
notations of "sanguine" in reference to the blood of Jesus.
The simultaneous combination of secular and religious
j
iconnotations of a single word is also manifest in "The Aspen
and the Stream" where the word "Damned" in the stream's
exclamation
j
i Oh, never have I been blind
' To the damned universe
can be read both as a curse and as a comment on the human
condition. Similarly the word "plain song" in the title of ’
the poem "A Plain Song for Comadre" has both secular and
religious meanings. For the poem's subject— Bruna Sandoval ;
— is a simple woman, and the poet is offering her a,plain
song, a simple tribute. However, a plainsong -is also an
ancient chant of a church service dating back to services
in the early days of the church. This second meaning is
also appropriate, since Bruna possesses a faith and dedica-
i
tion suggestive of the simple piety of a medieval peasant |
church-goer.
_____ Wilbur also uses the word "mass" in two poems to
capitalize on simultaneous secular and religious connota
tions. In "A Courtyard Thaw," a premature appearance of a
spring day in January brings a reprieve
(For two short hours, anyway)
From hardship of the January freeze.
(stanza 1)
But the poet recognizes that the apparent spring day is
false:
O false gemmation! Flashy fall!
The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art,
Staging within a courtyard wall
Such twinkling scenes. But puzzling to the heart,
This spring was neither fierce nor gay;
This summary autumn fell without a tear:
N o tinkling music-box can play
The slow, deep-grounded masses of the year.
(.Poems, p. 155)
This spring day is not the beginning of spring; it is a
false gemmation— the buds will not yet reproduce. And
though the viewer may see the pre-spring courtyard thaw as
work of art, as a created delicate "twinkling scene," the
sheer "mass" of nature moves at its own slow pace. Now
certainly it is a pleasing sight, as a work of art is pleas
ing, but it is also artificial like a play. The drops of
melted water were sown "From windbent branches in arpeggios
but, as the final two lines state:
73
No tinkling music-box can play
The slow, deep-grounded masses of the year.
'And now we see Wilbur using the musical meaning of the word
i
!"mass" in addition to the religious meaning. The tinkling
|
■music-box is therefore set in direct contrast with the
i
"deeply-grounded" mass of a church service.
j In "Altitudes" the word "mass" is first used to suggest
I
Jthe church service:
I
! . . . lofty premises are floored
With the massed voices of continual prayer. |
r
By the communal act of prayer the values and beliefs and '
"lofty" philosophical "premises" of the worshippers are !
i
bound to this earth— within the "premises" of the church. j
i
By contrast, in part II, Wilbur presents Emily Dickin
son's chamber, "furnished only with the sun," in which therej
I
i
only
!
Is she and she alone |
A mood to which she rises, in which she sees
Bird choristers in all the trees \
And a wild shining of the pure unknown . . . j
(Poems, p. 63)
In this stanza the bird choir contrasts the human choir of !
Part I and this contrast points up the poem's essential dia
lectic of community and isolation.
In addition to exploiting root and multiple meanings ;
74
of English words, Wilbur's diction is notable for its
foreign language words. Glauco Cambon, in comparing Wilbur
to Wallace Stevens, notes that Wilbur possesses the "Steven-
sian hankering for the interjection of a French word in the
English context: 'danseuse,1 'cigales,' 'royaume,' 'bavar-
dage,' 'travailleur,' are ready examples" (see Appendix II
for others). Cambon goes on to say that "Wilbur never falls
into whimsicality, as Stevens, for all his genius, often
does " (R .A .P .. p. 13). Wilbur defends his practice of
borrowing words from foreign languages:
The borrowing of words from other tongues should not be
condemned as mere elegance. Self-confident cultures
like the Elizabethan have always very cavalierly taken
whatever they needed from foreign languages; and the
Elizabethans pronounced their borrowings as they chose.
Whenever a foreign tongue can supply us some word more
exact or more suggestive than those at hand, I think
we may profitably do the same. (“Genie," p. 125)
The words "arete" and "ennui" in "A Baroque Wall Fountain
. . ." illustrate this use of a more "exact and suggestive"
word than English supplies:
If that is what men are
Or should be, if those water-saints display
T h e pattern of our aret£,*
W hat of these showered fauns in their bizarre,
Spangled, and plunging house?
T hey are at rest in fulness of desire
For what is given, they do not tire
Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse
75
And riddled pool below,
R eproving our disgust and our ennui
W ith hum ble insatiety.
(Poems. p. 103)
"Arete" includes more qualities of meaning appropriate to
the context than any single English word the poet might have
chosen: excellence, valor, virtue, manliness are all con
tained within the Greek word. Thus the word has a compre
hensive character, a suggestion of the harmony within a
single human being we assign to the saint.
The French word "ennui" is equally effective. Again no
single English word affords the connotations of metaphysical
and spiritual languor, weariness, and disaffection with life
which "ennui" affords. And possessing such connotations,
the word sets up a striking rhymed contrast with "humble in-
satiety ."
In his use of allusion Wilbur's control and moderation
in word choice is obvious. He does not commit "the fallacy
of mere reference":
I think the point should be made that one does not,
merely by referring to the dying god or what not, evoke
a legitimate emotional response. The value of the ref
erence must in every case be proven. I think it possible
that the basic aesthetic mistake in Finnegan's Wake is
what one might call, in the language of the new critics,
"the fallacy of mere reference." This is not to say that
references must be explained in poetry. Artistic economy
J won't allow it. But it should be the use of the refer-
i ence, and not its inherent prestige, which demands re-
| sponse. ("Genie," p. 125)
I
'Here Wilbur's practice is quite consistent with his theory.
i
I
His poetry is not littered with dying gods, authors, histor
ical personages. In fact, Wilbur's use of allusion is
neither extensive nor obtrusive. His allusions enhance the
meaning and mood of his poems but do not call excessive at
tention to themselves. The use of the word "Atlantis" in
"After the Last Bulletins" demonstrates this unobtrusive- j
ness. The poem is an affirmation of rebirth in life and thej
continuousness of life itself, and, like so many of Wilbur'sj
i
poems, deals with the polarities of life and death. The
i
I !
poem begins with a scene of wind-scattered newspapers
I
swirling around the city— the news is dead and the city's
jinhabitants are asleep but the morning will bring life
i , I
again, for "saintlike men, / White and absorbed, with stick |
and bag remove / The litter of the night . . ."
The "Atlantis" allusion in the opening stanza picks up
the word "founder" (to sink below the surface of the water):
After the last bulletins the windows darken
And the whole city founders readily and deep,
Sliding on all its pillows
To the thronged Atlantis of personal sleep,
(Poems, p. 73)
; 77
The city's inhabitants, by sinking deep into "personal
sleep" each night, are sinking into personal empires which,
I
like Atlantis, have been lost.
Though most Wilbur poems contain relatively few allu
sions, compared, for example, to Robert Lowell, they are
often crucial. In the poem "Objects," a celebration of the
'magical, mystical powers of the imagination, the last line
contains an allusion to Alice in Wonderland which summarizes
jin a compressed manner the essence of the poem. In the
I
second to the last stanza Wilbur has asked:
i
!
; For is there any end to true textures, to true |
i Integuments; do they ever desist from tacit, tragic j
| Fading away? . . .
| _ I
And he answers his own question, the reference to Alice !
I
jserving to offer tribute to the powers of the imagination: j
] t
j . . . Oh maculate, cracked, askew, 1
I Gay-pocked and potsherd world
I voyage, where in every tangible tree
I see afloat among the leaves, all calm and curled, 1
The Cheshire smile which sets me fearfully free.
(Poems, pp. 195-196) I
I
I The function of allusion here and in many other Wilbur
i
'poems is to keep alive the human capacity for seeing the
j
magic in life. We live in an age which prides itself on
eliminating the mystery of natural phenomena, but Wilbur, as
the poet must do, remainds us that we have an alternative;
we need not only see the wave in terms of scientific forces:
j It is the nereid's kick endears
j The tossing spray . . .
In "Poplar, Sycamore" Wilbur concludes that "My eye will
never know the dry disease / Of thinking things no more than
what he sees." But Wilbur is aware that what a man "sees"
I
i
j
!is shaped by the words he uses to describe what he sees.
I
For this reason Wilbur is concerned with the vocabulary used
to describe the natural world. And Wilbur is therefore con
cerned with the current tendency to choose words only for
.their informational connotations:
i
i
j This act of naming is the essential poetic act, as I
' was reminded only this April, when I took my three-year-
j old son for a walk in Lincoln Woods. As we went along
l through these woods, which were still stark from winter
but full of slight beginnings, I identified what trees
and plants I could (a good deal less confident than
Thoreau among their ancestors). "That's sassafras . . .
that1s arbutus . . . that's skunk cabbage . . . that's
j reindeer lichen." After a while we came to a stretch of
] woodsfloor thick with those three-inch evergreen plants
one sees everywhere in New England woods, and I was
obliged to confess that I didn't know what to call them.
My three-year-old stepped promptly into the breach.
"They're millows," he told me. "Look at the millows."
No hesitation, no bravado; with a serene Adamite confi
dence he had found a name for something nameless, and
brought it under our verbal control. Millows they were.
, I, of course, was aware that there must be a right
name for those plants, and was not wholly easy until I
had got it from a Harvard botanist. The right generic
name_was.JLycopodium (the_vulgar term was club moss) , and
79
the plant had seen far better days. Among the dino
saurs, it had been a great tree 130 feet in height. The
buried corpse of that great tree gives us most of our
bituminous coal today. And even the degenerate Lyco-
podium has had its uses, as the botanist told me: be
cause of its oiliness, the plant was for a time used in
the making of flashlight-powder.
I learned more, still, about Lycopodium— for example,
that it unaccountably refuses to live after transplanta
tion? but I had better keep to my subject. The relevant
thing about this anecdote of the millow-Lycopodium was
j that I was left with two versions of one plant on my !
! hands. On the one hand there was the millow, a plant I
I named on a certain day of April in the Lincoln woods, and
involved, for me, with my feeling for my son, and with
all the thoughts and sensations I was having on that day.
; On the other hand there was a plant of the genus Ly co
podium, a pteridophyte distinguishable from the mosses |
through its possession of well-developed stems and leaves ;
j and roots? a plant of a certain description and presump- |
; tive history, which bore no necessary relation to any 1
place, day, person, thought, or feeling. i
It is the millow with which we are more familiar? it
is the Lycopodium which we are more disposed to believe.
I So that however personally we may take the landscape,
however much sympathy and meaning we may discover in it, '
there is always a suspicion that our words are not an
chored in the objects at all— that the word "tree" does
not harpoon and capture the tree, but merely flies
J feintingly towards it and, like a boomerang, returns to
the hand.
The suspicion that the landscape really belongs to
the scientist has undermined the poet's confidence in
the controlling, expressive and relating power of his
nature-language. For most poets today, the idea is pre- j
cisely a suspicion and no more— an unexamined concession, j
a habit of feeling, an inheritance of the later nine- '
teenth century, which was so full of the shock of aliena
tion and disinheritance. • * •
Poetry and the Landscape," The New Landscape, ed.
Gyorgy Kepes (Chicago, 1956), pp. 86-87.
j 80
I
In his own poetry Wilbur prefers the millow to the
Lycopodium. Thus his meadows contain "Queen Anne's Lace"
'rather than Daucus carota. Now obviously no poet is going
to fill his work with terms of botanical genus and species.
jBut few modern poets have Wilbur's "confidence in the con-
l
trolling, expressive and relating power of . . . nature-
language":
Returning to myself and to the Lincoln woods, let me
confess that I really do not think that Lycopodium is
the right name for the three-inch evergreen; I refuse
to concede that the name Lycopodium indicates the plant-
an-sich, and that "millow" and "club-moss" are in com
parison irrelevant to the object. No word touches the
heart of things. The word of botany and the word of
poetry each pursue a kind of truth; neither invalidates
the other; and the word of poetry is rather more impor
tant because it is spoken by the whole psyche.
Poetic metaphor, as I have said, pursues its own
kind of truth, and could only be ultimately absurd in
a realm where some other kind of truth stood absolute,
j If science offered the only truth about nature, nature
might lie outside our emotional field. But it does not.
A great quantity of facts attests our membership in the
j natural world; for the rest, the landscape remains as
i always mysterious, and open to our intuitions. ("Land
scape," p. 89)
Unfortunately the attitude is widepsread today that
science does "offer the only truth about nature." Wilbur
Sarcastically gives voice to this narrow attitude of some
!
I
men of science in "All These Birds";
81
Let. us, with glass or gun,
Watch (from our clever blinds) the monsters of the sky
Dwindle to habit, habitat, and song
And tell the imagination it is wrong.
(Poems. p. 102)
CHAPTER IV
HUMOR
Critics have been preoccupied with Wilbur's seriousness
of tone and formal elegance to such a degree that a signifi
cant aspect of his personality and poetry has been neglect
ed: that is, his humor. Unlike the grotesque and bizarre
humor of Karl Shapiro (see "The Fly," pp. 21-22 above), the
iconoclastic and bawdy manner of e. e. cummings, or the grim
sociopolitical manner of Auden in the 1930's, Wilbur's humor
has the same qualities which give his poems a serious tone
and formal elegance. It is a direct product of his subtle
and sophisticated wit.
The sonnet, "Praise in Summer," which contains many of
the serious qualities of Wilbur's poetry, at the same time
demonstrates his humorous vein:
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
82
83
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncrcation, why
Such savor’ s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? T o a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
(Poems. p. 225)
The poem is a sonnet (ABABBCBCCDCDEE) which contains a
theme (or thesis), counter-theme (antithesis) and resolution
(synthesis), and which affirms that the artist (as in "Jug
gler" ) plays an essential role in "wrenching things awry" so
that men do not grow stale in their observations of reality.
The poem makes this point in a humorous fashion. In dis
cussing man's compulsion to think metaphorically, Wilbur
selects exaggerated comparisons whose visual images are
themselves rather amusing; for example, "star-nosed moles
fly overhead . . ." and "the sparrow burrows in the sky'."
However, the primary element of humor is simply the poet's
inability to avoid making metaphors. The poem begins (lines
1-6) with the thesis that when the poet is "called to
praise," almost instinctively he turns to metaphor. But
then in the counter-theme (lines 7-12) the poet wonders why
it is necessary to "wrench things awry," he wonders why he
cannot accept the world as it is without comparing opposite
or unrelated objects and experiences. He argues to himself
that it should be enough to call the grass green, and yet,
as the last two lines indicate, not only can we not think
and measure experience except by comparison and analogy, but
we must constantly have our habits and conventional compari
sons shaken, our outlooks altered, our senses "deranged,"
lest we grow stale. So in this poem the speaker attempts to
be prosaic and down to earth by saying simply "That trees
grow green" but inevitably he begins to slide back to the
poetic with the use of the unconventional word "course"
(line 13) and in the concluding line, the synthesis, he re
turns to metaphor, thus resolving the dichotomy in favor of
the original thesis. The concluding line (6) of the thesis
had found the "sparrow burrow[ing] in the sky" and the syn
thesis closes with "... sparrows sweep[ing] the ceiling of
our day."
This same method of achieving humor while at the same
time presenting a serious balancing of opposites is also
apparent in two short poems, "Parable" and "Gemini":
I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide
Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.
For glory lay wherever he might turn. ^
His head was light with pride, his horse’s shoes
85
Were heavy, and he headed for the bam.
(Poems. p. 131)
The poem is an affirmation of reality-orientation, a rejec
tion of the abstract in favor of the concrete. Yet the poem
is faithful to Cervantes's great novel, and the noble Knight
of the Rueful Countenance retains our sympathy through his
deluded idealism. The humor is the contrast between Quixote
— the fantasy principle— and the reality principle, here
represented by.the earth-bound Rocinante.
The second short poem is entitled "Gemini," which in
astronomy refers to the constellation containing twin stars;
the twins in this poem are of a different nature:
I
Because poor P U E R ’s both unsure and vain,
T hose who befriend him suffer his disdain.
W hile those who snub him gain his deference.
H e loves his enemies, in a certain sense.
II
It is the power of Heaven to withdraw
W hich fills PU ELLA with religious awe.
She worships the remoteness of a wraith.
If God should die for her, she’ d lose her faith.
(Poems. p. 21)
This poem presents two related qualities of the human comedy
— the comedy of people sustained by their inadequacies,
which lead them to twist and distort reason and experience.
86 ;
The first stanza provides an ironic twist on the Christian ‘
dictum of "Love Thy Enemy": PUER does love his enemies, "in
a certain sense," in the sense, that is, that their rejec-
I
i
tion of him feeds his insecurity and his masochistic desire
to be rejected. His love is sick and distorted. PUELIA'S
distortion is her worship of impersonality; it is God's
j i
jwithdrawal, his remoteness which she finds appealing, but if:
|
he were to summon her to a personal encounter, she would
"lose her.faith"— which is itself amusing, since she never
i
i
really had a meaningful faith to lose. And the last line . j
I .
; i
provides even another turning upside down of the Christian
i
message. >
i . . . 1
j Wilbur's humor and wit are also manifest m two pairs
of poems, and "0"^ and "Games One" and "Games Two,"
which, as the titles of the latter pair suggest, are playful
(reflections of the poet's imagination. "Games One" takes |
| !
off from an asterisk and "Games Two" from a colon. "Games i
! <
iTwo" opens by contrasting birds who go south in the winter, j
Ito words which go east:
I !
i
|
/
| and "0" are also essentially poems of word play
but both involve less speculation than "Games Two" and seem ’
jsimply to be more playful expressions of the poet's imagina
tion. However, they seem rather contrived and offer little
■more than unnecessary proof of the poet's wit.
N
I
| TT The way of words _
j W • ill
I Is east. When written down
I
S
Yet though each line moves from left (west) to right (east),
still each line is finite in length, and thus
. . . though they burn
For the east, all words must turn
Back where they came
From . . .
(Poems, p. 147)
To say that words long for the east means they long for that
space beyond the end of each line where there are no words,
that is, where there is infinity. Thus for words— and for
man too--infinity would be a place or dimension where ex
perience could take place in silence
Past which creation lies
In morning sun
Where word with world is one
And nothing dies.
In several early poems Wilbur made attempts at social
humor, but most of these attempts were unsuccessful. "The
Regatta," for example, suggests the 1930's Auden of a poem
such as "The Unknown Citizen" or "Let History Be My Judge,"
or perhaps Part III of The Waste Land:
88
The hotel guests make joking bets,
And Mrs. Vane has turned, inquired
If Mr. Vane is feeling "tired."
He means to answer, but forgets.
(Poems, p. 213)
The humor here is rather obvious and not terribly fresh,
perhaps because it has been done so well already by Auden
and Eliot. Certainly there is none of Wilbur's subtle word
jplay or wit evidenced in such lines. Another poem (not in-
i
jcluded in The Poems of Richard Wilbur but published in
Poetry. 73 [December 1948], 127-128), "We," demonstrates the
same weaknesses as "The Regatta":
!
I
The servant girl has spoken back to me.
My dividends are yearly getting lower.
The nights are full of fires and burglary.
"We ought to drop the bomb at once before
Those Russians do. I'm sure you all agree?"
Of course we do; and hearing of a war
The Continentals rise in clouds of tea
Attired in looks of conscious ancestry,
Decorous rags, and decorative gore.
"I fear we're growing soft," says Mr. Fee,
A hardened gentleman of several score.
"Lemon?," inquires Miss Blood. "It seems to me
We mustn't shilly shally any more."
The Continentals quick-step out the door
And pivot off around the shrubbery.
How good to have the Russians to abhor:
It lets us dance the nation on our knee
Who haven't been quite certain since the war
Precisely what we meant by saying WE.
The alien elements have come to be
Entirely too enormous to ignore.
The Jews have bought my cottage by the shore.
I feel at times like locking up the door
And never even going out to tea.
The poem does manage to capture a rather snooty tone of
voice, but at best it is caricature and too heavy-handed to
ring true.
None of Wilbur's poems is sustained comedy, and few of
his themes are comic. His humor comes in smaller units, in
an idea, and more often in an image or individual word. The
‘ second half of "Parable” or the conclusion of "Praise in
Summer" would be examples of amusing ideas. The picture of
Andrew Mellon glowering at a painting in "A Dutch Courtyard"
or the picture, in "The Walgh Vogel," of the "more than
fifty pound Dodo / . . . who when incarnate wore two token
wings" or, in the poem "Grace," the
. . . dining-car waiter's absurd
Acrobacy--tipfingered tray like a wind-besting bird
i Plumblines his swinging shoes, the sole things sure
1 In the shaken train; . . .
(Poems - p. 219)
are examples of humorous images. But Wilbur's most exten
sive use of humor is found in his choice of individual
words, as for example, in the pun on "sole" above,
j Stanza 3 of "The Aspen and the Stream" offers another
I
'example of a Wilbur pun. The aspen, confused by the
90
stream's philosophical meanderings, confesses to the stream:
"I must have lost the drift of what you said." And in
stanza 2 of "A Voice from under the Table" the intoxicated
narrator, under the table, addresses the pious as "You up
right people"— the word "upright" referring both to their
moral and physical stance. The pun on the word "blind" in
"All These Birds" serves to make a serious point.
Let us, with glass or gun,
Watch (from our clever blinds) the monsters of the sky
Dwindle to habit, habitat, and song,
A nd tell the im agination it is wrong
T ill, lest it be undone,
it spin a lie
So fresh, so pure, so rare
As to possess the air.
(Poems. p. 101)
The tone of the passage is sarcastic, the "us" referring to
modern men of science, who while in their "blinds," their
hiding places, are "blind" to the damage they are causing.
It is not suprising that Wilbur is inclined to the pun,
given his sensitivity to multiple meanings of words. In
fact, the element of humor in some of his doubles entendres
derives from the exploitation of a current and a root mean
ing of a word. For example, in "In a Bird Sanctuary" Wilbur
writes:
91
Commissoncrs of Public Parks have won
a partial wisdom, know that birds exist.
And seeing people equally insist
on birds and statues, they go hire a man
to swab sans rancor dung from granite stare
and marble hair.
(Poems. p. 189)
Here the word "rancor" obviously means "bitterness" and
"sans rancor" means without bitterness. But the word stems
from the Latin ranceo. which in English became "rancid" and
means rank, stinking. So the commissioners may without
rancor hire a man "to swab dung" from statues in the park,
and the hired man may do his job without bitterness, but it
is doubtful if the "granite stare / and marble hair" is
without rancore.
In addition to balancing meanings of individual words
to achieve humor, Wilbur often achieves humor by contrasting
human opposites. Consider "Two Voices in a Meadow":
A Milkweed
Anonym ous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
W hite seeds are floating
O ut of my burst pod.
W hat power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.
92
A Stone
As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me,
U p to the ears in sod.
W hy should I move? T o move
Befits a light desire.
T h e sill of Heaven w ould founder,
D id such as I aspire.
(Poems. p . 5)
The Milkweed's elevated statement is set in amusing contrast
to the Stone, whose casual lethargy will surely remind each
reader of someone.he has known— someone who, if he had
"aspired" to move— which "befits a light desire"— would have
caused "The sill of Heaven to founder."
"Museum Piece" provides a similar sort of humor by con
trasting opposites:
The good gray guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.
Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.
Sec how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.
93
Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
T o hang his pants on while he slept.
(Poems. p. 125)
First of all, there is the ridiculous contrast between lines
5-6 and 7-8 where we see a Degas dancer pirouetting upon the
parting hair of a museum guard. Also there is the ironic
picture of Edgar Degas— acting more indifferently than the
sleeping museum guard— hanging his pants on "a fine El Greco
. . . while he slept."
In 1962, Reed Whittemore introduced the notion that
there are two distinct divisions, or "rooms," as he put it,
of American verse:
One for light and one for heavy verse, and . . that
this division seems rather characteristic of American
verse in general. I think the sharpness of this division
is unfortunate, for both parties. It commits Ogden Nash
to perpetual Ogden Nashery, and it commits our loftier
poets to the cold, forbidding countries.above the tree-
line . . . ^
Whittemore then calls for serious poets to strive for a
greater balance of the light and heavy, even in serious
poetry. In such poems as "Praise in Summer," "In a Bird
^"The Two Rooms: Humor in American Verse," Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature. V (Autumn 1964), 186.
Sanctuary," "Two Voices in a Meadow,1 1 and "Museum Piece,
'Richard Wilbur is one serious poet who achieves such a
balance.
CHAPTER V
I
IMAGERY
i
j Every poet, even a poet as expansive as Walt Whitman,
I
is obliged to select his images from the limitless raw
material available to him. "It follows," argues John
Ciardi,
that a simple tabulation of the kind of imagery that
appears in a man's poetry is one index to his mind. The '
! contents of a prop room can suggest, to some extent, '
what sort of play is being produced. The contents of
the poetic catalogue can tell one much more accurately
; the nature of the poet's mind.^
I 1
jFurthermore, one can learn a great deal about the nature of
a particular poet by noting how he employs the various |
images which pervade his poetry. j
I I
] Richard Wilbur's poetry is distinctive for both the ;
I
images which he uses most frequently and the absence of
■ 1 -How Does a Poem Mean? (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p.
870.
96
certain kinds of images. In all four volumes of poetry |
jwhich Wilbur has published, there is little imagery of spe-
jcifically modern objects, places, experiences, or events. .
i
jThere is hardly any reference to things such as television,
radio, automobiles, freeways, skyscrapers, airplanes, space :
rockets, or any of the wide range of scientific or indus
trial phenomena. Instead, Wilbur selects much of his ima-
2
gery from the natural world. Among the most prominent are
images of birds, trees, leaves, vines, and flowers. Rarely
are these images ugly or grotesque; nor are they sublime in
jthe eighteenth-century meaning of the word; rather they are_ _
(described with delicacy and extreme attentiveness to detail.,
» ,
I However, while in some poems Wilbur seems preoccupied j
with observing the beauty surrounding him, in other poems
observation leads to statement. Ideally, Wilbur argues, |
there must be a balance between image and statement: 1
I think it is a great vice to convey everything by ima- !
gery, particularly if the imagery is not interrelated.
There ought to be areas of statement. But the statement
should not equal and abolish the "objects" in the poem,
j as Arnold's does in "Rugby Chapel." All those rocks and
j cataracts gone in a puff of piety'. The statement should
| have obliquity, and congruence to the imagery, as
I
^Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry
(Berkeley, 1964), p. 282.
97
I
Marianne Moore's does— not vitiating the objects, but |
rather finding in them an ideal dimension. ("Genie,"
p. 128)
! Often in balancing these two elements— image and idea—
i
iWilbur's poetry suggests parallels with Andrew Marvell,
jj. B. Leishman, in The Art of Marvell's Poetry, writes that
Marvell's pastoral poems reflect his "... blending of the
conceptual and the pictorial, of intellectual excitement and
,visual delight" and though his poetry is full of intellect
1
I
land argument, we remember poems such as "The Mower Against
I I
hardens" even more as "an evocation of gardens and orchards •
I
3 i
than as an argument about Nature and Art." Virtually the
same can be said about Wilbur: we remember a poem such as j
i
"A Baroque Wall Fountain" more for the evocative picture of
the Baroque fountain than for the opposition of secularism
and piety. Another statement by Leishman about Marvell ,
j
(applies equally well to Wilbur: "Almost all of his best j
poems are as much descriptions and evocations of things he
finds it delightful to contemplate as they are wittily con- :
structed arguments" (p. 130).
Wilbur is not merely a descriptive nature poet; con
ceptualization is both a part of and set apart from his
_____ 3 (London, 1966 ),_p_. 130_. ______________________
nature imagery. And in poems such as "Caserta Garden,"
jMarvell's "The Garden," the poet subordinates description to
argumentation.
Both Wilbur and Marvell demonstrate a fondness for
4
garden images. This fondness is not surprising, since both^
are men of cultivated sensibilities and sophistication who
are attracted by balance, civility, and delicacy. Both
'poets make distinctions between the world within the garden^
j - c t r s
and the world without. Marvell's "The Garden" argues for
the superiority of the world within: its "delicious soli
tude," "the luscious clusters of the vine," the ensnaring
heaps of flowers, the greenness, the fountain, the orderly
array of flowers and herbs, all far surpass anything to be j
I
[
found in "rude society." These delightful images lead |
i
Marvell to an assertion of what Leishman describes as "four I
! !
I [
more or less paradoxical propositions: ;
I
i
(1) The superiority of the contemplative to the active i
life. !
(2) The superiority, because more favorable to contem- j
plation, of solitude to society. !
(3) The superiority, for the same reason, of the beauty :
I A
\ See Wilbur, Poems, "Caserta Garden," "Lightness," "The'
■Death of a Toad"; and Marvell, "The Nymph Complaining for
jthe Death of Her Faun," "The Garden," and "The Mower Against
Gardens."
99
gardens to the beauty of women.
(4) The superiority of the invisible to the visible and
of the inner world created by the mind to the exter
nal world perceived by the senses. (p. 293)
Similarly, in "Caserta Garden," Wilbur reflects his
attraction to the flowers, the "geometric grace," the "si
lence dark and cool," the fountains, but he arrives at a
different conclusion from Marvell. It would be wonderful
to contain reality within the beauty and order of such a
garden, argues Wilbur, but this cannot be done. Reality is
mysterious; it cannot be walled in. We may try to contain '
i
it, but it is "fugitive"--it escapes our attempts to impose j
[simple symmetries upon it.
The garden of the world, which no one sees, j
Never had walls, is fugitive with lives; |
Its shapes escape our simpler symmetries;
There is no resting where it rots and thrives.
(Poems, p. 223)
Nevertheless, although Wilbur's and Marvell's gardens J
I
lead them to different conclusions, it is interesting to
!
note that Marvell’s catalogue of the superior qualities of j
I
the garden is virtually a summary of the major images in
Wilbur’s poetry: birds (line 53 of "The Garden"), trees,
leaves, "luscious clusters of the vine," flowers (ensnaring
heaps of flowers and orderly arrays of flowers and herbs),
greenness , and soundlessness_--"delicious solitude." Each_
100
of these will be taken up in the following pages.
| Of the "things of this world" in Wilbur's poems, birds
l
appear with perhaps the greatest frequency. They are used
I
jto infuse the poetic landscape with the sounds of' life— of
I
fragile, transient, yet singing life. In "Altitude," to
Emily Dickinson, birds are "choristers"; in "He Was" the
I '
poet speaks of the "sparrowy air." In "A Voice from under
the Table," the songs of birds are a "holy lucid drunken
ness . "
| |
j In many of Wilbur's poems images are used not only to ■
I 1
describe a scene but to suggest metaphoric correspondence !
1 1
between the image and another element. In "Marche aux '
piseaux," for example, a bird image is used metaphorically. |
Here birds are placed in cages by men in order that other
I
men may purchase them in their "hunt for love." Birds thus j
symbolize the dependency relationships which men create in
order to satisfy their hunger to be loved:
\ i
We love the small, said Burke. And if the small i
Be not yet small enough, why then by Hell 1
We'll cramp it till it knows but how to feed,
And we'll provide the water and the seed.
(Poems., p. 129)
"All These Birds" provides a direct contrast with
"Marche aux Piseaux," for in the former, birds become a
101
symbol of the poetic imagination which modern science
threatens "to . . . batter out." Wilbur accepts the reality
that man must operate under severe restrictions but argues
that the imagination should not be shy; it should "put on
the reins of love" and try to soar as best it can given
these reins:
W hy should it be more shy
Than chimney-nesting- storks, or sparrows on a wall?
Oh, let it clim b wherever it can cling
Like some great trumpet-vine, a natural thing
T o which all birds that fly
come natural.
Come, stranger, sister, dove:
Put on the reins of love.
{Poems, p. 102)
Wilbur's concern for order and freedom is further de
veloped in two poems which focus upon birds: "An Event" and
"In a Bird Sanctuary." "An Event" presents man's compulsion
to order all that he encounters.' Here the poet-observer
witnesses a "landscapeful of small black'\birds" which "roll
/ Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky'." But the order
of nature is beyond his ability to comprehend and just as he
is shaping his images, "They tower up, scatter, and madden
space / With their divergencies . . ." Yet the poet is not
depressed by this inability to bring reality completely
under his control:
102
D elighted with myself and with the birds,
I set them down and give them leave to be.
It is by words and the defeat of words,
Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,
T hat for a flying moment one may see
By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.
(Poems, p. 106)
"In a Bird Sanctuary" humorously continues the theme of
praising the liberty and seeming independence of birds:
"The liberty of anything becomes / The liberty of all."
In the poem "Then," bird imagery is symbolic of muta
bility, of transience, of death, of loss of innocence:
Then when the ample season
Warmed us, waned and went.
W e gave to the leaves no graves;
T o the robin gone no name,
N or thought at the birds’ return
Of their sourceless dim descent,
And we read no loss in the leaf,
But a freshness ever the same.
The leaf first learned of years
One not forgotten fall;
Of lineage now, and loss
These latter singers tell,
Of a year when birds now still
Were all one choiring call
Till the unretuming leaves
Imperishably fell.
(Poems, p. 115)
Leaf imagery appears in Wilbur's poems with the same
wide variety as sea and bird imagery. In fact, we can
through the use of leaf imagery find the same balance and
103
contrast between different poems that we have seen in single'
poems. In "Digging for China" leaves are in jerky motion as
i
a dizzy boy looks up at the sky and sees "tides of leaves,"
l
I
while in "Piazza Di Spagna, Early Morning," a single leaf
'circles for a moment and then gracefully rides over the lip ;
I
I
|of a waterfall. In "Next Door" the image of a joyous family
in springtime when the buds "startle into leaf" is set in
contrast to the image of trees without leaves which in the
Ipoem "In Elegy Season" creates a mood of loss and loneli
ness. In "October Maples, Portland," the imagination is
jstruck by the blood-brightness of the leaves, while in
I
! "Grasse: The Olive Trees" the leaves are pale, "like cloudsi
jof doubt against the earth's array."
]
i As the last pair of examples suggest, tree images fill
I
Jwilbur's poetic landscape. But here too Wilbur's metaphoric
i
and contemplative nature manifests itself. In "Seed
5 !
Leaves," a tree or plant in embryo is made analogous to the
growth of the human personality which, whatever its ambi
tions, is bound by its essential nature. In the final two
stanzas, Wilbur sets forth the duality which man must some
how reconcile. The desire to reach for the sky, to escape
^New Yorker. April 4, 1964, p. 42.
104
the boundaries of the earth and, like the mythological
iYggdrasill, possess the entire earth, is balanced by the
'necessity of growing within the soil of this earth:
i
The plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo;
Increase, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast, and climb
To the tip end of time
With all of space to fill,
j Like boundless Yggdrasill
That has the stars for fruit.
I
But something at the root
More urgent than that urge
Bids two true leaves emerge,
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.
Another recurrent Wilbur image, related to trees and
i
jleaves, is vine imagery. In "A Plain Song for Gomadre" it
contributes to the theme of the divinity of the small things
of this world. The force which infuses the saint also in
fuses simple vines and simple people. For at the "sun's
continual sign," "The dimly prompted vine / Upbraids itself
to a green excellence."
i
Wilbur's concern with and knowledge of varieties of
trees and flowers--although they are usually given names
105
from common usage--is •uncommon in an age of city poetry.
Among the many varieties are poplar, tamarack, aspen, maple,
cottonwood, acacia, olive trees, honeysuckle, trumpet-vine,
saxifrage, jack-pine, hyacinth, lilac, cineraria, and sumac.
The lilac, in "In the Elegy Season," is a symbol of both
spring and reality; in "She," saxifrage symbolizes growth
amid ruin.
Flowers and trees are used also to contribute to mood.
In "A Voice from under the Table" the myrtle-shoot is an
important element in a scene which calls to mind Stephen
Dedalus' s epiphany at the end of Part A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man: f
A nd down by the selfsame water I have seen
A blazing girl with skin like polished stone
Splashing until a far-out breast of green
Arose and with a rose contagion shone.
“A myrtle-shoot in hand, she danced; her hair
Cast on her back and shoulders a m oving shade.”
(Poems. p. 79)
The meaning of the passage is enhanced when we know
that the myrtle is used as an emblem of love and was held
sacred to Venus.
The use of cineraria in "The Death of a Toad" shows
Wilbur combining a lush-sounding word, the visual image of
106
a heart-shaped leaf, and the etymological root meaning of ->
ashen, in color. The word also picks up the connotations of
death contained in the word "cinerarium," which is a place *
for depositing the ashes of the dead after cremation. This
overtone is apt in that the maimed toad has crawled under
the cineraria leaves to die.
A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
T o the garden verge, and sanctuaricd him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.
(Poems. p. 152)
Plant life is also used to create mood in "Wellfleet:
The House":
Roof ovcrwovcn by a soft tussle of leaves,
The walls awnvc with sumac shadow, lilac
Lofts and falls in the yard, and the house believes
It’s guarded, garlanded in a former while.
Here one cannot intrude, the stillness being
Lichcnlikc grown, a coating of quietudes;
The portraits dream themselves, they arc done with seeing;
Rocker and tcacart balance in iron moods.
(Poems. p. 151)
A third function of flower and tree imagery is to pro
vide contrasts with other elements or objects. In "The
Pardon" the poet's dead dog lies amidst a jungle of colorful
and fragrant honeysuckle vine:
107
My dog lay dead five days without a grave
! In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine j
> And a jungle of grass and honcysucklc-vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive
W ent only close enough to where he was
T o sniff the heavy honcysucklc-smcll
Twined with another odor heavier still r
And hear the flics’ intolerable buzz.
fPoems. p. 118)
In the center of Wilbur's poetic landscape is the gar
den, beautifully filled with birds, trees, fLowers, vines and
fountains. Unlike Whitman or Robinson Jeffers, Wilbur does
not treat craggy mountains or vast plains. He prefers to
deal with smaller, more sharply detailed objects which the
human eye can focus upon clearly. Again unlike Whitman or
William Carlos Williams, or even a paleface like T. S.
Eliot, Wilbur does not present extensive lists of disparate
images in his landscapes; he is more likely to focus upon a
single image osrimage-cluster and develop it in some detail.
Three prominent image-clusters in Wilbur poems' are
architecture, ballet, and wind-air-sun imagery. Given Wil
bur's careful attention to balance and structure, it is not
surprising that he reveals a strong affinity toward archi
tecture. This affinity is most clearly expressed in "For
the New Railway Station in Rome." The building of -the title
is described with praise and awe:
108
See, from the travertine
Face of the office block, the roof of the booking-hall
Sails out into the air beside the ruined
Servian Wall,
Echoing in its light
And cantilevered swoop of reinforced concrete
T h e broken profile of these stones,
(Poems, p. 109)
In essence, the poem is a paean to the power of the human
imagination. In fact, the poet states that "the architec
ture of heaven itself is the work of the human imagination":^
“W hat city is eternal
But that which prints itself w ithin the groping head
O ut of the blue unbroken reveries
O f the building dead?
“W hat is our praise or pride
But to im agine excellence, and try to make it?
W hat does it say over the door of H eaven
But h o m o fecit?"
(Poems, p. 110)
Wilbur's delight in the balance and symmetry of archi
tectural forms is also apparent in his several poems de
scribing the beautiful structure and intricacy of fountains.
In "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra," Wilbur
contrasts the title fountain with the fountains before St.
Peter's in Rome:
^Stephen Stepanchev, American Poetry since 1945 (New
York, 1965), p. 102.
109
Under the bronze crown
T o o big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet
A serpent has begun to cat.
Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down
Past spattered mosses, breaks
O n the tipped edge o f a second shell, and fills
T h e massive third below . It spills
In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes
(Poems. p. 103)
In contrast with the ornate intricacy of the baroque foun
tain is the classical and austere fountain before St.
Peter's . The poet wonders are we not
More intricately expressed
In the plain fountains that M adcm a set
Before St. P eter’ s—the main jet
Struggling aloft until it seems at rest
In the act of rising, until
T h e very wish of water is reversed,
T hat heaviness borne up to burst
In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill
W ith blaze, and then in gauze
Delays, in a gnatlike shim m ering, in a fine
Illum ined version of itself, decline,
A nd patter on the stones its own applause?
(PoemsT p. 104)
As usual, Wilbur's imagery points to a meaning beyond mere
description, and in this poem the Baroque Wall Fountain
serves as a reproach to the inability of men to accept the
beauties of this earth— an inability which leads men, like
St. Peter's fountain, to "struggle aloft" rather than to
look down upon this earth with the "saecular ecstasy" of
110
the inhabitants of the baroque fountain.
Seven of Wilbur's poems employ a central ballet or
dance image. “Five Women Bathing in Moonlight" is a haunt
ing vision of the harmony of the women with their surround
ings. The poem seems to echo Yeats's question, "0 body
swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the
dancer from the dance?" For in Wilbur's vision, the five
* women become one with the moon and water:
N ow wading where
The moon’s misprision salves them in-
T o silver, they are unaware
H ow lost they are when they begin
To mix with water, making then
Gestures of blithe obedience,
As five Danilovas within
The soft compulsions of their dance.
(Poems, p. 140)
The harmony here is also reminiscent of the girl in Ste
vens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" who "sang, and sing
ing made" the world.
Ballet imagery is also used in the poem "Grace" to
capture the perfect, nonrational, spontaneous sense of syn
chronization of body, and earth that Nijinski was able to
achieve. Here Wilbur reverses the Biblical line and sees
"flesh made word," that condition which G. M. Hopkins
Ill
described in his Notebooks, and which Wilbur selects as the
epigraph of the poem:
"The young lambs bound As to the tabor's sound." They
toss and toss; it is as if it were the earth that flung
them, not themselves. It is the pitch of graceful agility
when we think that.
Wilbur offers a humorous counterpart to Nijinski in the
dining-car waiter who embodies this same grace:
One is tickled, again, by the dining-car waiter’s absurd
Acrobacy— tipfingered tray like a wind-besting bird
Plumblines his swinging shoes, the sole things sure
In the shaken train; but this is all done for food,
Is habitude, if not pure
(Poems. p. 219)
Nevertheless, Wilbur often uses ballet imagery for its
sheer descriptive beauty. Thus he speaks of "lightshifting
corn ballets" ("A Song") and he speaks of the poplar tree
as:
absolute danseuse,
W ind-wed and faithless to wind, troweling air
Tinily everywhere faster than air can fill,
Here whitely rising, there
Winding, there
Feinting to earth with a greener spill,
Never be still, whose pure mobility
Can hold up crowding heaven with a tree.
(Poems, p. 216)
In addition to architecture and dance, a third
112
recurrent image in Wilbur poems is that of wind and air.
Wilbur's world consists of minute particular which are gen
erally in motion and which are light and delicate by nature._
In the poems which focus upon wind and air, the imagery
moves beyond the descriptive level to the symbolic. Thus in
a poem such as "Attention Makes Infinity," the air symbol
izes the vast, perfect, nonearthly empires for which men's
j t
imaginations yearn. The poem, which is included in Wilbur's
I
'first published volume, seems in many ways a precursor of
j
"Love Calls Us to the Things of This World." The earlier
poem contrasts the ideal and the real and even uses similar
i
•images and diction; for example, both poems use white laun- ,
j I
dry; in the early poem the phrase "Contagions of the solid"
suggests the later poem's "The world's hunks and colors"; j
I
the early poem's "Let asphalt bear us up to walk in love"
suggests, in the later poem, both the grammatical form of
\
"Oh, let there be . . ." and the earthbound nuns who "walk
in a pure floating . . But ultimately the closest paral-
| J
lelism between the two poems is the image of the air sym
bolizing idealism, fantasy, dreaming.
In "A Dubious Night" the air becomes a vast, mysterious
repository for sounds of years past so that the ringing of
the town bell sets off echoes of fragmented memories within
113
the listeners:
A bell diphthonging in an atmosphere
Of shying night air summons some to prayer
Down in the town, two deep lone miles from here,
Yet wallows faint or sudden everywhere,
In every ear, as if the twist wind wrung
Some ten years’ tangled echoes from the air.
(Poems. p. 207)
The wind is probably the most active agent in Wilbur's
poetic world. In "For Ellen" it blows "viciously free." In
"After the Last Bulletins" the rising of the wind leads
Wilbur to use a series of verbs whose extreme force of ac
tivity is unusual in his generally subdued, quiet land
scapes :
And the wind rises. T h e wind rises and bowls
T h e day’s litter of news in the alleys. Trash
Tears itself on the railings,
Soars and falls with a soft crash,
Tum bles and soars again. Unruly flights
Scamper the park, and taking a statue for dead
Strike at the positive eyes,
Batter and flap the stolid head
(Poems, p. 73)
The image of the wind here is not used strictly as a
symbol of activity and movement; it is symbolic of transi
ence, the transience of human lives, of cities, of empires.
a., . — .
The wind scatters the news of the day as history and time
scatter human dreams, which like the "litter of news in the
114
alleys" must be swept away to make way for new dreams.
While the presence of wind is an energizing, vitalizing
force in human affairs, the absence of wind often holds the
threat of stasis. In "From the Lookout Rock," for example,
the absence of wind brings about an unbearable stillness, an
inactivity reminiscent of Part Two of "The Rime of the An-
icient Mariner," in which all the harmonious movement of life
*
I
jseems to have halted. In some respects Wilbur's poem would
I
‘ seem to be almost a conscious counterpart to Shelley's "Ode :
i
to the West Wind." In Shelley's poem the wind is the force
I
which transmits life:
0 Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, . . .
The wind is a force which fills the entire world: "Wild
spirit, which art moving everywhere"; it is the force which
produces the harmonies of life; and (like the wind in "After
the Last Bulletins") it ,is the force which blows away the
dead to make way for the living:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth'.
115
Wilbur's counterpart in "From the Lookout Rock" laments the
absence of the very qualities which Shelley proclaims: the
seed is denied its voyage and the dance of the seas, the
harmony of the entire world is brought to a halt:
Gods of the wind, return again,
For this was not the peace we prayed;
Intone again your burdened strain,
And weave the world to harmony,
Voyage the seed along the breeze,
Reviving all your former trade,
Restore the lilting of the trees
And massive dances of the sea.
(Poems. p. 16 0)
Listening to the wind die out, we notice a related
\
phenomenon, "the wide retreat of sound" ("From the Lookout
Rock"). Wilbur's world often possesses only muffled sounds
and frequently it is soundless. Generally, soundlessness is
o>2
appropriate to an atmosphere of meditation. But it is used
to achieve a variety of ends. In "Wellfleet: The House,"
the end is a mood of serenity and solitude which a densely
vined and overgrown oceanside house affords; in "Apology,"
the silence is a tribute of adoration; in "The Peace of
Cities" the soundlessness reflects the fear provoked by the
coming of the Luftwaffe. The soundlessness in "The Death of
a Toad" establishes a statue-like stillness and a mood of
i
deep reflection leading back into lost empires and even
116
prehistoric times. Having been mutilated by a power mower,
"The rare original heartsblood" of a toad
Spends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizcnings, flows
In the gutters of the hanked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,
Although soundlessness is a dominant image in Wilbur's
poetry, it is not always left unresolved. The wind dies
down in several poems and is frequently followed by complete
quiet and stasis. Such a moment occurs in the beginning of
"A Grasshopper":
But for a brief
M om ent, a poised m inute,
H e paused on the chicory-leaf;
Yet w ithin it
T h e sprung perch
Had tim e to absorb the shock,
Narrow its pitch and lurch,
Cease to rock.
A quiet spread
Over the neighbor ground;
N o flower swayed its head
For yards around;
T h e wind shrank
Away with a swallowed hiss;
Caught in a w idening, blank
Parenthesis,
Cry upon cry
Faltered and faded out;
Everything seemed to die.
(Poems, p. 29)
117
But then, as in human - affairs, generously and graciously
life begins to move anew. The static imbalance is overcome
7
and motion and sound resume:
Peace like a plague
Had gone to the world’s verge,
But that an aimless, vague
Grasshopper-urge
Leapt him aloft,
G iving the leaf a kick,
Starting the grasses’ soft
Chafe and tick,
So that the sleeping
Crickets resumed their chimes,
And all things wakened, keeping
T h eir several times.
In gay release
T h e whole field did what it did.
Peaceful now that its peace
Lay busily hid.
(Poems. p. 30)
Leslie Fiedler finds Wilbur's poetry seriously flawed
by the absence of sexual imagery:
; there is no sex: the insistent 111" and the assertion
of balls being considered apparently in bad taste.
: Wilbur is not really an epicene poet, much less a homo
sexual one; but the face which his poetry presents and
the voice in which it speaks seem de-sexed, or rather
"^Wilbur's poem seems related to Keats's "On the Grass
hopper and Cricket," which, like Wilbur's poem, reaffirms
that "The poetry of earth is never dead."
118
smack of that intersex which aged men and women alike
approach somewhat faster than they do death. ("Solu
tion, " p . 58)
First of all, Fiedler is quite wrong in setting up "the
assertion of balls" as a prerequisite for good poetry. And
second, while Wilbur does not deal with sexuality in human
relationships, his poetry is not lifeless and it is not
wholly sexless. His poetry does contain sexual imagery.
This imagery, however, is used as a reflection of a Life
Force. For example, consider the first section of "Two
Voices in a Meadow":
A Milkweed
Anonym ous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
W hite seeds are floating
O ut of my burst pod.
W hat power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.
(Poems., p. 5)
The milkweed yields to the great wind but assumes the power
of the wind by having her seeds scattered over the earth.
Sexuality as a life force is also suggested in "A Black
November Turkey." In this poem the turkey-cock embodies a
dignity and immortality strikingly suggestive of D. H. Law
rence's "The Fox" or "The Snake." The turkey-cock possesses
119
a force of mastery and a "timeless" handsome plumage which
affirms his divinity and render him superior to the "clock
ing hens." It is the sheer physical force and regal appear
ance of the turkey-cock which are his masculine glory. Even
i
a poem as calm and lyric as "Love Calls Us to the Things of
This World" contains sexual imagery: Wilbur speaks of "the
punctual rape of every blessed day" which is later echoed in
[the line "Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone." Or
I
■in a poem such as "A Voice from under the Table" the imagery
■is suggestive of Joycean sensuality:
And down by the selfsame water I have seen
A blazing girl with skin like polished stone
Splashing until a far out breast of green
Arose . . .
(Poems. p. 79)
■In .the same poem Wilbur presents several lines which seem a
direct condemnation of the dry academism with which Wilbur
I
!
himself is often charged:
I
I
Helen was no such high discarnate thought
As men in dry symposia pursue,
But was as bitterly fugitive, not to be caught
By what men's arms in love or fight could do.
(Poems, p. 80)
"Someone Talking to Himself" deals with the theme of
loss of innocence, and is explicitly sexual in imagery and
theme. Stanza 2 is the clearest example of this:
Oh, even when we fell,
Clean as a m ountain source
A nd barely able to tell
Such ecstasy from grace,
Into the primal bed
And current of our race,
W e knew yet must deny
T o what we gathered head:
T h at music growing harsh,
. T rees blotting the sky
A bove the roaring course
T hat in the summer's drought
Slowly w ould peter out
Into a dry marsh.
(Poems. p. 36)
We have seen what kinds of images Wilbur most frequent
ly employs: nature, music, wind and air, soundlessness.
How he works his images into the total poem is also impor
tant and revealing. Two related features of his imagery
which stand out are a fusion of opposites and a consistency
of texture.
The structure of many Wilbur poems, as discussed above
is often dialectical. It should follow that the imagery of
the thesis contrasts with that of the antithesis. And it
should also follow that the synthesis somehow combine these
two. This is precisely how Wilbur deploys his imagery in
many poems. In fact, the last stanza will often gather in
the previously separate images. "Lamarck Elaborated" will
serve as a clear illustration:
121
"The environment creates the organ"
T h e Greeks were wrong who said our eyes have rays;
N ot from these sockets or these sparkling poles
Comes the illum ination of our days.
It was the sun that bored these two blue holes.
It was the song of doves begot the car
And not the car that first conceived of sound:
T h at organ bloom ed in vibrant atmosphere,
As m usic conjured Ilium from the ground.
T h e yielding water, the repugnant stone,
T h e poisoned berry and the flaring rose
Attired in sense the tactless finger-bone
A nd set the taste-buds and inspired the nose.
O ut of our vivid am biance came unsought
A ll sense but that most form idably dim.
T h e shell of balance rolls in seas of thought.
It was the m ind that taught the head to swim.
N ew tonian numbers set to cosmic lyres
W helm ed us in w hirling worlds we could not know.
A nd by the im agined floods of our desires
T h e voice of Sirens gave us vertigo.
(Poems t p. 75)
, The first stanza of the poem takes the sun as its cen
tral agent, the second takes song, the third, water, and the
fourth, the sea. The fifth and concluding stanza then gath
ers in all of these images: the word "cosmic" suggests the
rays of the sun? "The voice of the Sirens" picks up the song
imagery of stanza 2; and "floods" picks up the water and sea
imagery of stanzas 3 and 4.
This same technique is employed in "Apology," in which
we see again several kinds of images discussed above: wind,
122
tree, flowers, fields, and silence:
A word sticks in the w ind’ s throat;
A wind-launch drifts in the swells of rye;
Sometimes, in broad silence,
T h e hanging apples distil their darkness.
You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair,
W ho come by the field-path now, whose name I say
Softly, forgive me love if also I call you
W ind’s word, apple-heart, haven of grasses.
(Poems. p. 93)
The poem first establishes the three central images and then
gathers them in by bestowing the essential beauty and mys
tery of their evocations upon the loved one to whom the poet
is speaking.
Wilbur's imagery also maintains a high degree of con
sistency of texture. Generally he avoids multiple images
and selects instead ingredients which easily mix and unite.
In "Love Calls Us" angels, bedsheets, laundry, soul, linen,
floating and habits all seem a mixed bag, but they are care
fully related in the poem's exposition of the body-soul
duality. And in "After the Last Bulletins"' founders, At
lantis, and noyade are all related to water, while another
group of words are related by suggesting motion and passage
of time: sliding, tears, soars, falls, rises, tumbles,
scamper, strike, batter, flap, scratch, twist, flail, beat,
123
i
bearing, cross, and footsteps.
i
| Several Wilbur poems maintain a high degree of unity
because they focus upon a single image: "All These Birds,"
I
Jof course, focuses upon birds; "'A World Without Objects Is
a Sensible Emptiness'" upon a camel; "Year's End" upon snow;
and "The Mill" upon a mill-wheel. In fact, a few of Wil-
!
bur's poems, such as "Stop" and "Exeunt," are strictly
jimagistic poems .
i But Wilbur, as we have seen, is not simply a descrip-
i
jtive, imagist poet. He is essentially a lyric, meditative
!
poet who is usually able to maintain the "difficult balance"
between image and idea.
CHAPTER VI
WILBUR'S THEORY OF POETRY
I Thus far I have examined the structural and technical
|
jaspects of Wilbur's poetry: form, rhyme, diction, imagery.
iBefore examining the thematic content of Wilbur's poetry, I
wish to deal more explicitly and extensively with Wilbur's
t
jtheory of poetry by examining his critical statements. He
-has not published a book of essays or a book on literary
(criticism, but has published sparkling essays on Poe, Emily
i
Dickinson, and A. E. Housman, several reviews of other
poets, and several essays explaining his own views on poet
ry. In this discussion I shall attempt wherever possible to
relate Wilbur's poetic theory to his practice, bearing in
mind his own warning about the dangers of such a procedure:
"Works of art can never be truthfully described as applica
tions of principles, but spring from imagination, a condi
tion of psychic unity" ("Genie," pp. 120-121).
Perhaps the first question any writer must deal with is
_________________ . 124
125
what shall be my subject matter? Some poets would limit
their choice of subjects. As Wilbur points out, Poe limited
himself to a quest for a restoration of "imaginative com
munion with the universal harmony."^ And Karl Shapiro, ac
cording to Wilbur, seems determined "to abolish the literary
and historical past to confine us to the modern city and
; 2
.declare the ruins off-limits." Rather than place any re-
(
[strictions on the poet as to choice of subject matter, Wil-
!
bur argues for the broadest possible latitude: "Ideally,
the 'subject-matter' of poetry should be limitless. For the
individual poet, however, limitation in subject matter seems
often to be a condition of power" ("Genie," p. 127). Never-
i
theless, Wilbur concedes universality of subject-matter to
toe an ideal state which no poet can achieve. In reality,
the poet selects subjects which he personally is most suited
to treat. For Wilbur this meant rejecting the modern city.
■He does not reject the literary and historical past, but he
does avoid the political and cultural present: "I do not
sympathize with the cultural historian who finds a poem
•^Introduction to the Laurel Series Poe (New York,
1959), p. 14.
2"Round About a Poem by Housman," The Moment of Poetry,
ed, D. C. Allen (Baltimore, 1962), p. 88.
126
'serious' and 'significant' because it mentions the atomic
bomb" ("Genie," p. 127):
I haven't written too many explicitly political or "so
cial" poems. "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran
Act," "After the Last Bulletins," "For an American Poet
Just Dead,"— and more recently "Advice to a Prophet,"
and "On the Marginal Way." I don't think I shall ever
again strike the note of the third poem mentioned, al
though some readers are very fond of railing and in
dicting in poetry; I have Robert Frost's preference for
writing about immedicable woes rather than merely com
plaining. Most political poetry is complaining and
speechifying, and doesn't come out of the whole and
| intricate self.^
Wilbur's self-imposed anchorage to the things of this
world is implicit in his introduction to the Laurel Poetry
Series edition of Poe. Speaking, in another place, on his
!own poems, Wilbur states that he favors "a spirituality
1
iwhich is not abstracted, not dissociated and world renounc-
I
jing. A good part of my work could, I suppose, be understood
Jas a public quarrel with the aesthetics of E. A. Poe" ("Own
I
Work," p. 66). By examining Wilbur's explanation of Poe's
I
jtheory and practice, we can see more clearly what Wilbur
believes poetic theory and practice should not be. Accord-
i
ling to Wilbur, Poe believes that "the imagination must be
j 3personai letter to me, October 14, 1966 (Appendix I).
Hereafter cited as personal letter.
127
^unconditioned; must utterly 'repudiate the things of this
Jdiseased Earth; must approach the ideal not merely through
,the real, but by negation of the real" (Introduction to Poe.
!p. 17). Wilbur's theory of poetry and the imagination is
virtually antithetical to Poe's:
It is the province of poems to make some order in the
| world, but poets can't afford to forget that there is
a reality of things which survives all orders great and
I small. Things ARE. The cow is there. No poetry can
l have any strength unless it continually bashes itself
against the reality of things. ("Bottles," p. 187)
i
Wilbur also disagrees with Poe about the ultimate ob
jective of poetry. Wilbur writes: "The poem, for Poe, is
not an effort to convert raw events into intelligible ex-
jperience" (Introduction to Poe. p. 34); rather it is to
jproduce a trance-like mood. "Sharpness and fulness of mean-
!
ing are, in Poe's theory, incompatible with poetry" (p. 33).
jThus Poe believes that "a suggestive indefinitiv.eness of
jmeaning" will help bring about "a definitiveness of vague
I
and therefore a spiritual effect" (p. 34). But to Wilbur
the poetic experience is not wholly trans-rational; it is
largely a process of ordering the disparate elements of
experience. Wilbur readily admits this cannot be fully
accomplished, but the attempt must be made.
Because Poe seeks to induce a vague, trance-like
128
effect, his words are necessarily vague and, of course,
Wilbur opposes this. Wilbur states there is little, if any,
jdenotative meaning to Poe's words. His poems assign words
j"no definite contextual meaning, [thus] the words cannot be
|
jpinned down" (p. 36). This to Wilbur is anathema. The
jclassicist Wilbur uses words not only for their current de
notations and connotations but for older meanings and root
i
jmeanings. The glory of poetry to Wilbur is that it enables
iman to see things minutely, precisely, specifically. Lan-
jguage should not cloud up reality and make it vague and
jdream-like; it should serve to bring it into clearer focus.
\
; In sum, Wilbur's quarrel with the aesthetics of E . A.
(Poe is that to Poe poetry serves "to express or induce not
jthe ordinary emotions of men, but a 'psychal' excitement
i
jappropriate to the mock destruction of this world and the
dim glimpsing of another" (p. 37). But to Wilbur, this
world is of extreme valuer it should be praised, lived in,
graciously appreciated in all of its beauties and contra
dictions .
Wilbur's quarrel with Poe is expressed in his poem
"Clearness":
129
There is a poignancy in all things clear,
i In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning.
; Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water
W e fall to imagining prodigious honesties.
And feel so when the snow for all its softness
Tumbles in adamant forms, turning and turning
Its perfect faces, littering on our sight
The heirs and types of timeless dynasties.
In pine-woods once that huge precision of leaves
Amazed my eyes and closed them down a dream.
I lost to mind the usual southern river,
Mud, mist, the plushy sound of the oar,
And pondering north through lifted veils of gulls,
Through sharpening calls, and blue clearings of steam,
I came and anchored by a fabulous town
Immaculate, high, and never found before.
This was the town of my mind’s exacted vision
Where truths fell from the bells like a jackpot of dimes,
And the people’ s voices, carrying over the water,
Sang in the ear as clear and sweet as birds.
But this was Thule of the mind’s worst vanity;
N or could I tell the burden of those clear chimes;
And the fog fell, and the stainless voices faded;
I had not understood their lovely words.
(Poems. p . 145)
The poem can be read as a condensed statement of Wilbur's
essay on Poe. Wilbur sympathizes with Poe's desire for
"clear" visions, for purity. This desire leads him "to
imagine prodigious honesties," with the word "imagine" mean
ing to invent, fabricate. Wilbur then develops this desire
and selects a key motif and several words from the Poe
storehouse. The motif is the voyage. In his essay on Poe,
Wilbur says of Poe's dream-voyages: "they are all one story
130
of the mind's escape from corrupt mundane consciousness into
visionary wholeness and freedom . . (p. 23). Wilbur pre
sents this voyage in lines 11-16. The town that the Poe-
jfigure arrives at is, appropriately, 1 1 immaculate, high, and
never found before," a.wholly unreal town like "The Domain
of Arnheim" or the valley in "Eleonora." Wilbur's poetic
voyage is Poe-like in that it begins from a dream and, in
moving from the mundane to the ideal, "veils are lifted."
Frequently Poe's journeys are via water, as in "The Voyage
of Arthur Gordon Pym," and "Clearness" follows this conven
tion, too.
|
| Wilbur, however, prepares the reader for the final
i
'stanza's rejection of this vision. That he calls the vision
i
\a "dream" establishes its unreality. Second, he states that
t
i
in his dream he "lost to mind the usual southern river";
i"lost to mind" reinforces the irrationality of this dream
voyage. Third, the fabulous town was "never found before."
'And finally, "We fell to imagining prodigious honesties"
t
picks up the word "fall" and, as mentioned above, uses
"imagining" in the sense of fabricating.
The final stanza clearly presents Wilbur's quarrel with
IPoe; the town "was Thule of the mind's worst vanity," Thule
being a reference to Poe's "Dream Land." Poe's rejection
131
of this earth emanates from both naivete and vanity, from
jhis view that man can construct a better world than the one
he has been graced with:
By the refusal of human emotion and moral concern, by
the obscuration of logical and allegorical meaning, by
the symbolic destruction of material fact, by negating
all that he could of world and worldly self, Poe strove
for a poetry of spiritual effect which should seem "the
handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God,"
and move the reader to a moment of that sort of harmo
nious intuition which is to be the purifying fire of
i Earth and the music of the regathering spheres. There
, has never been a grander conception of poetry, nor a
more' impoverished one. (p. 39)
For poetry must be grounded in concrete reality if it is not
i
^to evaporate into pure abstraction, as Wilbur believes hap-
i
|
pens in Poe's poetry. When such evaporation occurs, as the
i
{last line of "Clearness" states, we can only respond by say-
'ing "I had not understood their lovely words."
Wilbur believes that poetry must deal with concrete
! ■
reality, and the poet must keep a proper distance between
himself and his subjects:
I don't advertise my actual private life or project
torment . . . I vote for obliquity and distancing in
the use of one's own life, both because I am a bit
reserved and because I think these produce a more
honest and usable poetry. (personal letter)
Wilbur also implicitly deals with the question of what
the poet's voice should be. Here Wilbur's theory is simple
132
and persuasive: the poet's voice must be consistent and
honest. Unless the poet is consciously juxtaposing two or
jmore voices in a single poem, as in "Two Voices in a Mea-
Idow, " the poem must present a single sensibility. The poet
!
(must do this, theorizes Wilbur, lest he sacrifice control
|and order to chaos. Thus Wilbur takes John Frederick Nims
Ito task for his poem "Arbiter Elegantiarum" since Wilbur
i
i
Ifeels Nims loses control and becomes two or three disparate
[voices depending on how many objects he is describing. Thus
jNims fails to make a meaningful, consistent statement. J3e-
I
■cause he loses control, when Nims tries "to reconcile the
I
!
jpart of him which reads Petronius and the part of him which
i
sits receptive in juke joints . . . he sounds not like him
self, not like an intact sensibility, but like Petronius and
4
a juke-box."
Wilbur believes the poet must also be honest. This
means the poet may not simply borrow prefabricated words
and phrases of a particular tradition; if he is to operate
jwithin a given tradition he must bring to that tradition the
I
freshness of his individual voice. Such a freshness, Wilbur
^(Rev. of John Frederick Nims's A Fountain in Ken
tucky ). Poetry. 77 (November 1950), 107.
133
argues, is one of Emily Dickinson's great virtues, for she
refused to use submissively the vocabulary she inherited
.from her Calvinist background:
i
I
j To be sure Emily Dickinson . . . wrote in the metres of
hymnody, and paraphrased the Bible, and made her poems
turn on great words like Immortality and Salvation and
Election. But in her poems those great words are not
merely being themselves; they have been adopted, for
expressive purposes; they have been taken personally,
and therefore redefined.
Wilbur's poetry reveals a similar characteristic: a refusal
to submissively accept the vocabulary of the Christian tra
dition, even though he is -sympathetic. Like Emily Dickinson,
jRichard Wilbur has grown up in a Christian tradition, and he
has stated that "my view of things, though not steady, is
I
!
some sort of Catholic Christian" (personal letter). The
r
tentative nature of this statement indicates an uncertainty
i
I
'suggestive of Emily Dickinson. And though Wilbur feels him-
'self to be within the Christian tradition, he too refuses to
t "
I
'embrace wholly the vocabulary of that tradition:
I don't . . . make much use of Christian doctrine or
symbol. This is because I cannot bear to borrow the
voltage of highly-charged words, as Edith Sitwell did
^"Sumptuous Destitution," in Emilv Dickinson, ed.
Richard B. Sewell (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963), p. 127.
; 134
in her post-conversion poems full of lions and suns
and crosses. (personal letter)
i
i
i
It is interesting to note that while Wilbur has been
accused of lacking a poetic personality (see p. 3 above),
and while Wilbur has stated "I've always agreed with Eliot's
assertion that poetry 'is not the expression of personality
'but an escape from personality,'"^ it is precisely the pro
jection of personality which Wilbur admires in other poets.
|He admires, as we have seen, Emily Dickinson for personaliz-
i
ing the vocabulary of the Christian tradition; he admires
Robert Graves for his personal voice; "The main power [in
jGraves], especially when one reads him in bulk, is . . . an
i 7
impression of personality"; he criticizes C. Day Lewis's
Poems 1943-1947 for lacking a unique vision, for expressing
a sort of conventional good will but a lack of sentiments
! 8
personally arrived at; he admires Marianne Moore for her
personal treatment of orthodox moral thought; and he be-
I
I
lieves Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour," a poem "in which the
1 ^In The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, ed.
^Anthony Ostroff (Boston, 1964), p. 19.
j 7"Robert Graves' New Volume," Poetry. 87 (December
1955), 177.
i
| Between Visits," Poetry. 74 (May 1949), 116.
135
ipoet sheds all personae (including the prophetic) and speaks
j
for himself,",to be an "extremely fine poem" (Artist and
Critic. pp. 85, 87).
Wilbur's agreement with Eliot's statement and his ad
miration for personal poets does not represent a contradic
tion. Personality is extinguished in a good poem in the
|sense that the good poem offers the poet an escape from the
i
jfragmented, inconsistent dullness of his private, personal
life. As Wilbur writes, the good poem brings "'the whole
isoul of man into activity,' and we look in the poem . . .
j
for signs of passion, intellect, judgement, and the harmony
lof these faculties." Thus paradoxically poetry is an escape
I
from the limitations of an incomplete personality through
the reaching toward or the communication with a more pas
sionate, intelligent, moral, and harmonious personality.
The ultimate value of poetry for Richard Wilbur is
that, for both the poet and the reader, participation in the
poetic experience is a liberating and humanizing process.
If the poem is successful, that is, if the poet speaks from
his "whole soul," the reader is totally grasped by the idea
and feeling which grasped the poet, and both poet and reader
are lifted for a moment from the limited and ego-centered
conversations of daily events to a dialogue with the Muse.
136
Like Robert Graves, Wilbur believes that "A poem is ad
dressed to the Muse":
It is one function of the Muse to cover up the fact that
poems are not addressed to anybody in particular. Dur
ing the act of writing, the poem is an effort to express
a knowledge imperfectly felt, to articulate relationships
not quite seen, to discover some pattern in the world.
It is a conflict with disorder, not a message from one
person to another. ("Genie," p. 123)
Since the poem is not a message between two people, it es
capes and we with it, the inevitable selfishness which im
perfect man brings to his conversation with his imperfect
!
i
ifellows. For the address to the Muse is solely one of love,
I
[and it captures its participants for a moment in an act of
I
pure reverence. "Surely," writes Wilbur, "that is the main
I
feeling we have about any real achievement, that it permits
9
us to forget ourselves."
A poem enables us to transcend ourselves in another
[crucial way. Certainly one limiting aspect of the human
I
condition is routine, dull, inflexible, comfortable inertia-
bred sameness. Man is compelled to seek order, and this
compulsion is part of his glory, but when he convinces
^"The Heart of the Thing" (rev. of Marianne Moore's
Like a Bulwark), The New York Times Book Review. November
111, 1956, p. 18.
137
himself he has arrived, when he refuses to admit new ideas
and feelings into his ordered world, he dies. And the poet
i
|argues Wilbur, acts, in Marianne Moore's phrase, "like a
bulwark" against this temptation; the poet continually
"wrenches things awry," refusing to allow us to solidify,
keeping us fluid. The poet and his work function like Wil-
jbur' s "Juggler." For human nature is like a ball which
i
"will bounce, but less and less":
I
It's not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
So in our hearts from brilliance,
Settles and is forgot.
I
It takes a poet, or as Wilbur's poem says, "It takes a sky-
blue juggler with five red balls / To shake our gravity up.
And for this poet, this juggler, "we batter our hands / Who
has won for once over the world's weight." Man is like the
world's weight; he is so much mass which, like the ball,
resents resilience and settles down, bounces less and less,
until the poet comes and begins his juggling act.
i
i
! One sees a wizard of a poet tossing his words in the air
J and catching them again--what a grand stunt I Then sud-
I denly one may be astonished to find that the poet is not
[ simply juggling cups, saucers, roses, rhymes and other
random objects, but the very stuff of life.
Wilbur makes it clear, however, that in juggling the
! stuff of life the poet is not primarily a philosopher:
Poets are often intelligent men, and they are entitled
to their thoughts, but intellectual pioneering, and the
construction of new thought-systems, is not their spe
cial function. Aeschylus' Oresteia was not a contribu
tion to Athenian legal theory? Dante's Commedia gave
us no new theology; and Shakespeare's history-plays
added no fresh concepts to the political thought of his
age.
What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from
abstraction and submerge them in sensibility; it embod
ies them in persons and things, and surrounds them with
a weather of feeling. ("Own Work," p. 67)
The poet, with his ability to sharpen our focus, to discover
jhitherto unseen correlations and correspondences, to create
vivid, precise images, is able to bring the abstraction
"love" down to the things of this world. This is the es
sence of Wilbur's theory. We shall now examine this theory
! in practice.
■*-°Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean, p. 670.
CHAPTER VII
; THE COSMOS
Richard Wilbur has said, "My view of things, though not
steady, is some sort of Catholic Christian . . ." (personal
I
|letter). And though there is an implicit Christian quality
i
!in Wilbur's thought, it is also catholic in its cosmological
|
jscope. In fact, many of Wilbur's poems suggest an affinity
jto the thought of a Catholic palaeontologist, Father Teil-
jhard de Chardin, who writes:
Considered in its physical, concrete reality, the stuff
of the universe cannot divide itself but, as a kind of
gigantic atom, it forms in its totality the only real
indivisible . . . the cosmos in which man finds himself
caught up constitutes, by reason of the unimpeachable
wholeness of its whole, a system, a totum and a quantum:
a system by its plurality, a totum by its unity, a quan
tity by its energy; all three within a boundless contour.'*'
Man is caught up in a similar cosmos in Wilbur's poetry.
• * ~The Phenomenon of Man (New York, 1959), p. 43. Here
after referred to as Phenomenon.
140
The plurality of his universe has been discussed with ref
erence to his choice of subject matter and his technique of
balancing the variety of life's opposites. This plurality
is immediately apparent, for example, in this stanza from
"Conjuration":
As curtains from a fatal window blown
The sea’s receding fingers terribly tell
Of strangest things together grown;
All join, and in the furl
O f waters, blind in muck and shell,
Pursue their slow paludal games.
(Poems., p. 116)
Concerning energy, Teilhard writes that 1 1 there is no concept
more familiar to us than that of spiritual energy, yet there
is none that is more opaque scientifically" (Phenomenon. p.
62); Teilhard is certain of the reality of this energy:
The impetus of the world, glimpsed in the great drive of
consciousness, can only have its ultimate source in some
INNER principle, which alone could explain its irrevers
ible advance toward higher psychisms. (p. 149)
Now Teilhard does not deny the importance of outside stim
uli :
Far be it from me, let me say once again, to deny the
important, indeed essential, role played by this his
toric working of material form. As living beings, we
feel it in ourselves. To jolt the individual out of
his natural laziness and the rut of habit, and also
from time to time to break up the collective frameworks
in which he is imprisoned, it is indispensable that he
should be shaken and prodded from outside. What would
141
we do without our enemies? (pp. 148-149)
Wilbur gives poetic assent to this concept in "The Giaour
and the Pacha":
(Eugene Delacroix, 1856)
The Pacha sank at last upon his knee
i And saw his ancient enemy reared high
; In mica dust upon a horse of bronze,
The sun carousing in his either eye,
Which of a sudden clouds, and lifts away
The light of day, of triumph; and the scene
Takes tenderly the one already dead
With secret hands of strong and bitter green.
As secretly, the cloak becomes aware
O f floating, mane and tail turn tracery;
Imbedded in the air, the Giaour stares
And feels the pistol fall beside his knee.
“Is this my anger, and is this the end
O f gaudy sword and jeweled harness, joy
In strength and heat and swiftness, that I must
N ow bend, and with a slaughtering shot destroy
The counterpoise of all my force and pride?
These falling hills and piteous mists; O sky,
Come loose the light of fury on this height,
That I may end the chase, and ask not why.”
(Poems, p. 187)
Without his enemy— "The counterpoise of all my force
and pride"— the Giaour is threatened with purposelessness
and stasis.
Nevertheless, it is not only the external, as Teilhard
says, "the without," which impels change and evolution; it
is the internal, "the within" which explains the "irresist
142
ible advance" of life. This spirit "within" can be felt in
poems like "Driftwood" and "Junk" and particularly in "Seed
Leaves":
Here something stubborn comes,
Dislodging the earth crumbs
And making crusty rubble.
It comes bending double
And looks like a green staple.
It could be a seedling maple,
Or artichoke, or bean:
That remains to be seen.
Forced to make the choice of ends,
[ The stalk in time unbends,
; Shakes off the seedcase, heaves
I Aloft, and spreads two leaves
' Which still display no sure
j And special signature,
j Toothless and fat, they keep
, The oval form of sleep.
j The plant would like to grow
1 And yet be embryo;
Increase, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast, and climb
To the tip end of time
With all of space to fill,
Like boundless Yggdrasill
That has the stars for fruit.
But something at the root
More urgent than that urge
Bids two true leaves emerge,
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
143
2
And starts to ramify.
Ralph Mills refers to this "within" quality of Wilbur's
poems in a slightly different way, stating that his poems
are charged with the "knowledge that the familiar and vis
ible are enriched by the unknown that lies just under the
surface" (C .A .P .. p. 167). Such an enrichment is to be
found in Wilbur's "A Hole in the Floor":
for Rene Magritte
T h e carpenter’s made a hole
In the parlor floor, and I’m standing
Staring down into it now
At four o ’clock in the evening,
As Schliemann stood when his shovel
Knocked on the crowns of Troy.
A clean-cut sawdust sparkles
On the grey, shaggy laths,
A nd here is a cluster of shavings
From the time when the floor was laid.
T hey are silvery-gold, the color
Of Hesperian apple-parings.
Kneeling, I look in under
W here the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
W ith bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
W here its parallels w ill meet.
T h e radiator-pipe
Rises in m iddle distance
Like a shuttered kiosk, standing
W here the only news is night.
Here it’ s not painted green,
As it is in the visible world.
^The New Yorker. April 4, 1964, p. 42.
144
For G od’s sake, what am I after?
Some treasure, or tiny garden?
Or that untrodden place,
T h e house’s very soul,
W here tim e has stored our footbeats
A nd the long skein of our voices?
N ot these, but the buried strangeness
W hich nourishes the known:
T hat spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
A nd the whole dangerous room.
(Poems. pp. 15-16)
And it is this spirit "within," this unknown force "that
lies just under the surface," which gives all matter, all
of life, its essential unity. In "From the Lookout Rock"
Wilbur expresses this unity, invoking the gods of the wind,
after a moment of stillness, to "return again":
And weave the world to harmony,
Voyage the seed along the breeze,
Reviving all your former trade,
Restore the lilting of the trees
And massive dances of the sea.
Teilhard writes of the unity of the cosmos: "The far
ther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of
increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded
145
by the interdependence of its parts" (Phenomenon. p. 44).
Wilbur too sees an interdependence of life's parts. This
'interdependence extends from low forms of life, as in the
i
i
jabove stanza from "Conjuration," to higher forms of animal
life, as in "Beasts": "The ripped mouse, safe in the owl's
talon, cries / Concordance." It extends from human and
animal interrelationships, as in "The Pardon," where a boy
asks his dead dog to forgive his inability to accept death;
i
|to human relations, as in "The Beautiful Changes," "June
1
jLight," or "Place Pigalle." And it encompasses the inter
dependence of the past and the present, as in "Mined Coun
try," "Year's End," or "Natural Song" (which I quote here
in full since it is not included in Wilbur's collected
Poems:)
The slow acquirements of the air
Have levitated Carthage now;
Its storms are dancing overhead,
Its morseled glory must endure,
And let the wind blow anyhow,
The freshest gusts from anywhere
Settles our streets with all the dead.
The natural is never pure.
The winds are traders, and the flood
Shares with the shore, and turns to take
Whatever land has littered there.
Washing the drowned it does not cure
But scatters death, whose fingers rake
The tides that carry off his blood:
For all refreshment is to share,
___________The natural is never pure.
146
Though cities are in smoke refined
The fire must stink of what it burns,
The dungy charnel earth can wear
A bright and wheaten chevelure,
And nothing after pureness yearns
Except the vileness of the mind,
Which would be sole, and cease to share.
The natural is never pure.
In nature is no purity
The virgin and the anchorite
Are masoned of eternal death,
And when another death shall raze
Their walls of mind, then shall a flight
Of sole and soured powders flee
Refreshed upon the wind's old breath
j And fall throughout the vital maze.3
Again we notice the unity, or interdependence of parts in
Wilbur's cosmos as well as the plurality and energy.
For Teilhard de Chardin, the single most important fact
jof the cosmos is the purposive evolution of a transcendent
life force reaching its current apogee in human conscious
ness: "for man has discovered that he is nothing else than
evolution become conscious of itself" (Phenomenon. p. 220).
This is a daring and sweeping concept of the cosmos, but
Wilbur's poetic vision is often equally imaginative. Ralph
Mills has said that "there is little of the ascetic mystic
in Wilbur's temperament . . ." (C .A .P .. p. 167), but there
3American Scholar. XVIII (Winter 1948-49), 76-77.
147
is certainly a mystical strain to his poetry. Wilbur is in
some ways deceptive; his highly formalized verse gives the
impression of a careful, conservative mind. Yet the vision
contained within his poetic forms is often radical and
catholic: he envisions a universe similar to Teilhard's—
a universe of plurality, energy, and unity. And like Teil
hard, Wilbur does not see only biological or material unity,
he sees spiritual unity. Teilhard writes that for the
materialist nature is opaque, while for the mystic nature is
translucent. Wilbur's poetic universe is translucent.
Light shines through, for example, the October Maples [in]
Portland:
T h e leaves, though little tim e they have to live,
W ere never so unfallen as today,
And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve
T h e very light from which time fell away.
A showered fire we thought forever lost
Redeems the air. W here friends in passing meet,
T hey parley in the tongues of Pentecost.
Gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street.
(Poems, p . 24)
And in "A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness,"
Wilbur urges his soul to turn from the world of illusion
back to the translucent things of life, to spirit embodied,
to the "light incarnate'1:
148
Turn, O turn
From the fine sleights of the sand, from the long empty oven
Where flames in flamings burn
Rack to the trees arrayed
In bursts of glare, to the halo-dialing run
Of the country creeks, and the hills’ bracken tiaras made
Gold in the sunken sun,
W isely watch for the sight
Of the supernova burgeoning over the bam,
Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’ s right
Oasis, light incamare.
(Poems. p. 117)
Wilbur's mystical strain is also apparent in "The Death
of a Toad" which, as George Abbe reads the poem, establishes
a striking affinity with Teilhard's views on evolution.
Abbe, without specifically referring to Teilhard, writes
that this poem "has given me, partly through the excellent
use of indirection, as much contact with the cosmic as any
I know":^
all life, human or animal, is related to and derives
from the same sources [and the poem] by implication
draws us back toward the original and primitive begin
nings, through stages of evolution, not only anthropo
logical, but spiritual . . . The toad represents a step
in the physical development toward man; not that that
makes man higher necessarily, but it is merely a fact
that creation has moved from one stage to another, and
it appears part of the conscious direction and will of
4You and Contemporary Poetry (North Guilford, Conn.,
1957), p. 73..
149
a Creator that we are evolving toward something, and
equality of all life, human, animal, vegetable— yes,
and material (for all substance is atomic-electrical,
and whatever that is, is God). We are all part of
beginnings, a binding love, implies the author (Wil
bur), that goes much further back than this world.
And that is our unifying, cosmic heritage. (p. 74)
'Robert Langbaum reads the poem in a similar manner and
■speaks of it as' paralleling a mystical poem of Richard
1
Eberhart, "The Groundhog":
I
i ' There is a . . . regression in Richard Wilbur's "The
Death of a Toad," where the toad who has been caught
i in a power mower pours his "rare original heartsblood"
back into the earth, lying "still as if he would re
turn to stone," dying "toward misted and ebullient seas/
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies."
We not only retrace the course of evolution back to
inanimate nature, but we are reminded of antique stat
ues ("The gutters of the banked and staring eyes," . . .
"the wide and antique eyes") and the death of gods.
In Richard Eberhart's "The Groundhog," the speaker sees
in the decaying corpse of a groundhog dead "In June,
amid the golden fields," first the ferocity of the
natural process, of the sun's "immense energy," and
finally the pathos of the whole history of civiliza
tion which the speaker has recapitulated in his suc
cessive responses to the fact of death.^
Certainly not all of Wilbur's poems are infused with
■mystical moments such as in "The Death of a Toad" or in "The
i
I
Pardon," where:
^"The New Nature Poetry," American Scholar. XXVIII
(Summer 1959), 335.
150
Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green).
But most of his poems are religious. As Ralph Mills points
out, critics frequently overlook the fact that Wilbur is a
religious poet, not "in any strict or doctrinal sense of the
word; rather, he is deeply concerned with an experience of
life and of the universe as sacramental— as possessing a
spiritual worth that shines on surfaces but also hides in
i
■recesses" (C .A .P . . p. 167). In a more quiet and gentle
t
voice, Wilbur's poetry expresses G. M. Hopkins's belief that
"the world is charged with the grandeur of God." And be
cause it is so charged, Wilbur's attitude toward life is
that of a man humbled by the mystery and magnificence of all
he observes. As George Abbe notes, Wilbur is even deeply
compassionate toward a creature so insignificant as the
%
dying toad: "the word 'sanctuaried' conveys the idea of the
sanctity of life, the divine nature of this destiny— for the
toad (for all manner of being), as for all people” (p. 75).
And though Wilbur disavows the use of religious ter
minology in his poetry, his sacramental, religious sensi
bility is widely apparent. His responsiveness to beauty is
not just a sense of aesthetic delight, though this is usu-
j
felly present. It is also inspired by the constant
awareness of the Divine at work in the mundane: as, for
example, in "October Maples, Portland," or "A Black November
Turkey," or "From the Lookout Rock." Mills writes that in
Wilbur's poetry, "the ugly and the commonplace are redeemed..*
by a hidden radiance" (C .A .P.. p. 163), and the following
lines from "Objects" clearly illustrate Mills's statement:
Oh maculate, cracked, askew,
Gay-pocked and potsherd world
I voyage, where in every tangible tree
I see afloat among the leaves, all calm and curled,
The Cheshire smile which sets me fearfully free.
(Poems, p. 195)
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATURE OF REALITY
"How can he be so damnably good-natured in an abomi
nable universe?" asks one literary critic.^ Other critics
have asked similar unsympathetic questions of Richard Wil-
i
bur. Their assumption seems to be that since our age has
Jfelt compelled to characterize itself as a "waste land"
I
|Where fear and trembling predominate, the poet is obliged
to reflect Anast in his work. Theodore Holmes, reviewing
Wilbur's latest volume, writes:
If Mr. Wilbur would fashion his poems from such stuff
of the heart as a lived-in experience, and not simply
the virtuosity of an intellectual mastery attained over
it, they would afford the reader a basis for giving
meaning to life.^
■^Hyam Plutzik, (rev. of Things of This World) . Yale
Review. 46 (Winter 1957), 295.
^"A Prophet without Prophecy," Poetry. 100 (April
1962), 39.
152.
The assumption here is that the poet is obliged to fill the
metaphysical vacuum which no one else seems able to fill.
What has not occurred to these critics, apparently, is that
Wilbur does project a sense of meaning, and that he does not
believe that poetry must be "personal" to be meaningful.
William Meredith, disagreeing with the Holmes review,
argues that Wilbur "explores the human capacity for happi
ness" and that Wilbur's latest volume is a strong assertion
|"that the universe is decent, in the lovely derivative sense
I
- 3
of that word." And as if to support Meredith's rebuttal,
I
Wilbur in the spring of 1966 delivered a lecture at Wooster
I 4
College entitled "The Arts and the Pursuit of Happiness."
In this lecture he acknowledged the difficulty the poet
!faces in attempting to transcend "that cultural disunity to
which he, because of his calling, is peculiarly sensitive"
(p. 22). Nevertheless, Wilbur claims such a transcendence
is possible and he offers Frost's "Birches" as proof:
"Frost's poem does justice to the world, to self, to
f
A Note on Richard Wilbur," Poetry. 100 (April 1962),
40.
^Reprinted as "Poetry and Happiness," Reflection: The
Weslevan Quarterly. I (Fall 1966), 13-24. Hereafter re
ferred to as "Happiness."
literary tradition, and to a culture (New England); it is
happy in all the ways in which a poem can be happy" (p. 24).
Many of Richard Wilbur's poems do similar justices.
Wilbur is aware of ugliness, but chooses to dwell on
i
the beautiful, to observe how "the beautiful changes," to (
smell, hear, taste, touch, see and rejoice in the things ofy
this world. He acknowledges "the prison of our days" but
seeks to teach "the free man how to praise." In fact, it is
praise which is the essential attitude of one of Wilbur's
finest poems, "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciar-
ra."
The poem compares the ornate fountain of the title with
the more austere, classical plainness of the fountains in
St. Peter's Square. And, as Wilbur states, "the poem pre
sents, by way of its contrasting fountains, a clash between
the ideas of pleasure and joy, of acceptance and transcend
ence" ("Own Work," p. 60). The Baroque fountain presents a
picture of "saecular ecstasy"; water gracefully falls from
the top pool to the third pool "and makes
A scrim or summ ery tent
For a faun-mcnage and their familiar goose.
Happy in all that ragged, loose
Collapse of water, its effortless descent
15 5
A nd flatteries of spray,
T h e stocky god upholds the shell w ith ease.
W atching, about his shaggy knees,
T h e goatish innocence of his babes at play;
His fauncss all the w hile
Leans forward, slightly, into a clam bering mesh
O f water-lights, her sparkling flesh
In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded sm ile
(Poems. p. 103)
The scene is happy and the happiness is that of "humble in
satiety." The faun and his menage are sustained by what
they are given. The water spills downward and they look
down to the earth they are given to live in. The fauness1s
"blinded smile" is "bent on the sand floor of the trefoil
pool"; she is not dissatisfied with this world, her flesh
sparkles "In a saecular ecstasy." The scene is intoxicating
to the viewer yet it is innocent and thoroughly pleasurable.
But men cannot accept such natural joy and we wonder
' since this all
Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall,
Must it not be too simple? Are we not
More intricately expressed
In the plain fountains that M adema set
Before St. Peter’s— the main jet
Struggling aloft until it seems at rest
In the act of rising, until
T h e very wish of water is reversed,
T hat heaviness borne up to burst
In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill
156
W ith blaze, and then in gauze
Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine
Illum ined version of itself, decline,
And patter on the stones its own applause?
(Poems. p. 104)
The question "Must it not be too simple?" really asks must
not the Baroque intricacy be too simple an explanation of
man; does not the classical simplicity of the St. Peter's
fountain more adequately express the complexity of his na
ture and aspirations? For rather than simply accepting the
saecular pleasures of this earth, the St. Peter's water
saints seek transcendence, seek to lift their natural heavi
ness to "a fine / Illumined version of itself." Wilbur has
spoken of "Birches" as a happy poem, for the tree "lets you
climb awhile toward heaven but then ‘dips its top and sets
you down again.'" And so does the St. Peter's fountain
reach toward the heavens "until / The very wish of water is
reversed" and the water must "decline, / And patter on the
stone its own applause." But Wilbur then raises a question
which takes him in a different direction from Frost's poem:
If that,is what men are
Or should be, if those water-saints display
The pattern of our aretd,
What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,
Spangled, and plunging house?
157
jHow are we to reconcile their pleasure with the qualita
tively different joy which the St. Peter's fountain repre
sents? How are we to reconcile saecular pleasure with
spiritual joy? Wilbur has stated:
It may be that the poem . . . arrives at some sort of
reconciliation between the claims of pleasure and joy,
acceptance and transcendence; but what one hears most
in it is a single meditative voice balancing argument
and counter-argument, feeling and counter feeling.
("Own Work," p. 62),
I
; I would say that the poem does achieve a reconcilia
tion, in the person of St. Francis. For looking upon the
iFaun menage— -"at rest in fulness of desire / For what is
|
;given"— Francis would have seen in this "No trifle, but a
shade of bliss— "; that is, a trace, a reflection of
That land of tolerable flowers, that state
As near and far as grass'
Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand
Is worthy of water: the dreamt land
Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.
Francis would have seen in the Baroque fountain the perfect
joy, the unity of Being, the humble love of what is given
toward which imperfect man aspires and which inspiration
i
tthe St. Peter's fountain embodies. Francis in his selfless
love and piety would have seen that the spirit which led to
the fashioning of the St. Peter's fountain was really
j 158
aspiring to the state which is captured by the Baroque foun
tain. For the scene of the Faun menage is
the dreamt land
Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.
Like the fauns who "do not tire of the smart of the sun,"
Francis does not tire of the given elements of lifer he
llives in "sister snow." In short, Francis would have seen
i
in the Baroque fountain the consummate joy for which imper
fect man hungers. Thus the reconciliation becomes clear:
transcendence demands acceptance, divine joy must be worked
out within the context of the world's pleasures.
Wilbur can be "so damnably good-natured" because he
does not see the world as being "abominable." Quite to the
I
(contrary, Wilbur finds the world full of delight. His poems
possess, as James Dickey states, a "quietly joyful sense of
celebration . . . [which] is sweet-natured, grave, gentle,
and personal to him as his own breath" ("Stillness," p.
490). Or as another critic has put it, Wilbur is "an in-
5
telligent man who has not lost the sense of wonder." What
then does he celebrate and what inspires his,sense of
^Frederic Faverty, "The Poetry of Richard Wilbur,"
j Northwestern University Tri-quarterlv. II (Fall 1959), 30.
159
wonder?
For one thing, natural processes exhilarate Wilbur.
Reality to him is dynamic; it is in constant motion, con
stant flux, and this sheer kinetic quality of nature excites
him. I am baffled by those who see Wilbur as an impersonal
nature poet, for it seems obvious to me that using language
to celebrate the staggering fact that wind rises and blows,
that vines and trees grow, that birds fly, is a very per
sonal and human activity. Perhaps some critics confuse the
quiet voice of Wilbur ^with the reality his poems celebrate.
Certainly his world is anything but quiet or timid or unob
trusive:
So sun and air, when these two goods war together,
Who else can tune day's face to a softest laugh,
Being sweet beat the world with a most wild weather,
Trample with light or blow all heaven blind with chaff.
(Poems, p. 200)
Wilbur's world has its moments of soundlessness, but it is
almost never motionless. The dance of life is without end:
Poplar, absolute danseuse,
Wind-wed and faithless to wind, troweling air
Tinily everywhere faster than air can fill,
Here whitely rising, there
Winding, there
Feinting to earth with a greener spill,
Never be still, whose pure mobility
Can hold up crowding heaven with a tree.
(Poems. p. 216)
16 0
The dynamic quality of Wilbur's reality has profound
.personal implications: man is not separate from the natural
Jworld; he lives in it and its essence is his essence.
j
Though men may yearn for stasis, only the dull and the dead
■may have it:
And only the dull are safe, only the dead
Are safe from the limitless swell and the bitter seethe,
‘ The sea's lumbering sigh that says it carries
i So many stars and suns, and yet will wreathe
[ A rock with webs of foam and maidenhair.
, (Poems, p. 203)
|This desire for safety is manifest in "Caserta Garden,"
jwhich presents man's desire to wall up life— to create
I
[simple patterns within the garden and fountains:
i
I
To fall through days in silence dark and cool,
And hear the fountain falling in the shade
Tell changeless time upon the garden pool.
And to dwell within this artificial reality shapes its in-
|
habitants' views:
A childhood by this fountain wondering
Would leave impress of circle-mysteries:
One would have faith that the unjustest thing
Had geometric grace past what one sees.
(Poems, p. 223)
And if one were to question the reality of this walled-in
world "They'd say, 'But this is how a garden's made,'1 1 an
attitude reminiscent of Frost's antagonist in "Mending Wall"
I 161
who affirms "good fences make good neighbors." But while
the "cherished flowers" within the garden "dream and look
i
not out / And seem to have no need of earth or rain" while
this "dreaming" goes on, life goes on without. The poem
takes on added meaning when one learns that Wilbur was in
spired to write the poem after observing a walled-in garden
in Italy while he was on leave from the front line in World
|War 11.^ The garden, for all its quietness and symmetry, is
I '
i
simply not the world which man has inherited:
The garden of the world, which no one sees,
; Never had walls, is fugitive with lives;
1 Its shapes escape our simpler symmetries;
There is no resting where it rots and thrives.
By contrast, the impending disruption or cessation of
the dynamic motion is the subject of "The Giaour and the
IPacha." Delacroix's painting, much like Keats's Grecian
Urn, freezes the dynamic counterpoise of the created fig
ures. Wilbur, however, attempts to penetrate the thoughts
i
and feeling of one of the protagonists as he nears his goal.
His realization that consummation is imminent, Wilbur sug
gests, is actually terrifying, for the Giaour realizes that
i
the source of his passion and energy is about to be
®From a private tape recording.
162
destroyed, that the dynamic balance which creates motion is
about to be upset:
“Is this my anger, and is this the end
O f gaudy sword and jeweled harness, joy
In strength and heat and swiftness, that I must
N ow bend, and with a slaughtering shot destroy
The counterpoise of all my force and pride?
These falling hills and piteous mists; O sky,
Come loose the light of fury on this height,
That I may end the chase, and ask not why.”
(Poems. p. 187)
Wilbur not only celebrates the dynamic nature of real
ity, but expresses delight in particularities, in oddities,
in rarities of this world. One poem celebrates the dura
bility and life-saving reliability of the "Potato"? another
celebrates the purpleness of the eggplant, that is, "The
Melongene"; and still another praises the sheer uselessness
and ridiculousness of "The Walgh-Vogel," that is, the ex
tinct dodo. As Dudley Fitts has said, in Wilbur's poems
"there is a tremendous amount of excitement? the concentra
tion upon physical detail, the analogical play, the amused
perception of the extraordinary in the most humble and hum-
7
drum 'donnees'."
7(Rev. of Advice to a Prophet). New York Times Book
Review. October 29, 1961, p. 16.
163
8
As many critics have pointed out, Wilbur's view of
reality offers several direct parallels with that of Wallace
Stevens. Wilbur himself has stated: "I'm sure that my
enthusiasm for Stevens, circa 1948-1952, has affected my own
work although I can't say just where" (personal letter).
"Just where" similarities become influences I too cannot
say, but a discussion of these similarities may sharpen our
focus on Wilbur's poetry. Curiously, Wilbur claims to be
i
^disenchanted with Stevens for the very reasons for which
critics frequently criticize Wilbur:
Of late I have found his work too undramatic, connois-
seural, and inconclusively ruminative, but still pick
it up with pleasure and may have another spell of en
chantment, in time. For all his stress on the ding an
sich, I find him too hothouse subjective right now.
(personal letter)
It does seem that Wilbur's earlier poetry (The Beautiful
Changes. 1947 and Ceremony. 1950) bears a greater resem-
I
blance to Stevens than his last volume (Advice to a Prophet.
1961), which Wilbur sees as "a departure in the direction
O
Macha Louis Rosenthal, The Modern Poets (New York,
1961), p. 253; Babette Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time, p. 284?
Ralph Mills, C . A . P . . pp. 161-162; Francis Warlow, "Richard
Wilbur," Bucknell Review. VII (May 1958), 225-226, 228-231;
George Greene, "Four Campus Poets," Thought, XXXV (1960),
227; James Southworth, "P.O.R.W.," p. 26.
164
of the dramatic" (Artist and Critic, p. 20). However, this
departure is not extreme and there is a great enough con-
I
jtinuity in Wilbur's poetry to generalize about all four
I
Wilbur volumes in comparison to the Stevens canon.
Unlike those modern poets who perceive reality through
a mystical attunement with a Life Force (Dylan Thomas, Theo-
!dore Roethke, or D. H. Lawrence), or poets who came to know
reality through the cultivation of an innate moral sense
j(Yvor Winters or Robert Penn Warren), or poets for whom
I
[
knowledge is the product of personal and psychological suf
fering (Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath), Wilbur and Stevens
perceive reality as an encounter of the imagination and the
'external world. Wilbur and Stevens are both intellectual,
meditative-poets concerned with observing, defining, order
ing the natural lands cape and _then drawing^ or suggesting
analogies for human existence. Neither poet is personal in
I-"'"
the sense of a Robert Frost or W. B. Yeats--that is, neither
Wilbur nor Stevens projects a poetic persona. Roy Harvey
i
Pearce writes:
Stevens' worldliness and sophistication, his consterna
tion in the face of his "innocence," leads him in the
end to write with a curious kind of "philosophical" im
personality. We seek for a maker, but in vain;, for we
165
9
find only the making.
In the absence of the persona the central role in both Wil-
i
bur and Stevens is played by craftsmanship and the imagina
tion .
Both Wilbur and Stevens acknowledge that reality is
dynamic, changing and seemingly chaotic, and both turn to
the imagination to discover and impose order upon this
reality. Although Wilbur differs from Stevens in holding to
f'some sort of Catholic view of things" (personal letter), he
t
1
Idoes not seek order by turning to the Church for a frame of
|
reference; he turns to his own imagination.
| Stevens and Wilbur reflect a "rage for order," and in<#
f
!this are thoroughly twentieth-century poets. Both have in
herited a world no longer certain of traditional beliefs.
For Stevens, the gods which used to give order to men's
jlives have vanished: "The death of one god is the death of
' ■ 10
'all." Wilbur may not find the Christian god vanished but
he does not find orthodox Christian symbolism an adequate
^The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961),
p. 380. Hereafter referred to as Continuity.
^Collected Poems (New York, 1964), p. 381. Hereafter
referred to as C,P.
166
frame of reference. Nor does he find any sustenance from
'his culture:
i
j one cannot deny that in the full sense of the word cul-
j ture— the sense that has to do with the humane unity of
a whole people— our nation is impoverished. We are not
an articulate organism, and what most characterizes our
life is a disjunction and incoherence aggravated by an
intolerable rate of change. It is easy to prophesy
against us. Our center of political power, Washington,
is a literary and intellectual vacuum, or nearly so;
the church, in our country, is broken into hundreds of
sorry and provincial sects; colleges of Christian foun
dation hold classes as. usual on Good Friday; our cities
bristle like quartz clusters with faceless new buildings
of aluminum and glass, bare of symbolic ornament because
they have nothing to say; our painters and sculptors
despair of achieving any human significance, and descend
i into the world of fashion to market their Coke-bottles
and optical toys; in the name of public interest, high
ways are rammed through old townships and wildlife
sanctuaries; all other public expenditure is begrudged,
while the bulk of the people withdraw from community
into an affluent privacy. ("Happiness," p. 21)
i
The key problem which Wilbur and Stevens face is, as
Wilbur states above, "an intolerable rate of change." Man
has come to believe that reality is in constant flux, that
everything changes, that nothing abides. Yet man finds him
I
Iself hungering for order, for fixity. But fixity is unat
tainable. Man remains "helplessly at the edge" (Stevens,
b .P .. p. 430), excluded from that center around which every
thing would organize itself in neat concentric circles.
In Stevens's "Idea of Order at Key West," the water is
167
dark, "ever-hooded," void of any inherent meaning:
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves . . .
It becomes meaningful only when human language imposes order
on "the meaningless plungings of water and wind":
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind:
But it was she and the sea we heard.
However hard he tries to "'piece the world together' (C .P ..
11
192), it evades his attempts to order it." Wilbur ac
knowledges this same problem in his poem "An Event." Ob
serving a group of birds against the sky, he notes:
T hey roll
Like a drunken fingerprint across the skyl
Or so I give their image to my soul
U ntil, as if refusing to be caught
In any singular vision of my eye
Or in the nets and cages of my thought,
T hey tower up, shatter, and madden space
W ith their divergences, are each alone
Swallowed from sight, and leave me in this place
Shaping these images to make them stay:
M eanwhile, in some formation of their own,
) T hey fly m e still, and steal my thoughts away.
(Poems, p. 106)
■^J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (Cambridge, 1965),
p. 232.
168
And not only does reality "escape our simpler symmetries"
("Caserta Garden"), it frequently catches men in between
the pull of opposite forces: of sentient man against un-
conscious nature, of animal exis,t.ence against intelligence, - * s s s &
,
'of mind against passion and appetite, of innocence against
experience, of life and death, of love and hate.
Stevens and Wilbur have both confronted such a reality
and, to a degree, have formed a similar response and similar
values. In their search for order they have turned to the
human imagination as a means of delivery from chaos and
i
'emptiness. To Stevens the human imagination must draw upon
its own resources to supply the light which organized re
ligion previously supplied. Therefore the imagination is
the sovereign power: "After one has abandoned a belief in
i
bod, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's
12
redemption"; "What we see in the mind is as real to us as
what we see by the eye" (P.P.. p. 162); "Man is the imagina
tion or rather the imagination is man" (P.P.. p. 172); "The
imagination is the liberty of the mind and hence the liberty
of reality" (P.P.. p. 179). For Stevens, "Things as they
•^Wallace Stevens, Ppus Posthumous (New York, 1957), p.
158. Hereafter referred to as P.P.
169
are" not only "are changed upon the blue guitar," they take
their meaning from the blue guitar. Art, language, poetry,
song create reality by defining it. In Stevens's "The Idea
of Order at Key West" the imagination fashions the endless
variety of life into its own order and in so doing creates
the only reality there is for that individual imagination:
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Similarly in Wilbur's "My Father Paints the Summer," the
poet's father creates his own reality. The rain forces the
summer guests of the shore hotel indoors where they sigh,
"Is this July?"
They talk by the lobby fire but no one hears
For the thrum of the rain. In the dim and sounding halls,
Din at the ears,
Dark at the eyes well in the head, and the ping-pong balls
Scatter their hollow knocks
Like crazy clocks.
But like the singer at Key West, Wilbur's father becomes
"the single artificer of the world" in which he paints:
170
But up in his room by artificial light
My father paints the summer, and his brush
Tricks into sight
The prosperous sleep, the girdling stir and clear steep hush
Of a summer never seen,
A granted green.
(Poems, P. 198)
The sea in Wilbur's "The Beacon" is also dark and perplex
ing, but as in Stevens's poem, it is the beacon, the human
artifact intruding into the darkness which gives order to
the universe. The human soul is disturbed by the darkness
of the "gordian waters." But the beacon, like Alexander's
sword, cuts through the perplexing depths of the ocean.
Rail
At the deaf unbeatable sea, my soul, and weep
Your Alexandrine tears, but look:
T he beacon-blaze unsheathing turns
T he face of darkness pale
And now with one grand chop gives clearance to
Our human visions,
(Poems, p. 81)
Neither Stevens nor Wilbur consistently believe that
the only reality is the imagination. Both insist upon the
necessity of grounding the imagination in concrete reality.
According to Stevens, "All of our ideas come from the natural
world: trees-umbrellas" (P.P.. p. 163) and "Imagination
applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagi-
171
nation applied to a detail" (P.P.. p. 176). Similarly,
Wilbur argues that "A World Without Objects Is a Sensible
Emptiness." In this poem Wilbur personifies the idealistic,
illusionary habits and desires of his mind as camels who can
go for long periods without a drink of real water. Wilbur
addresses these "connoisseurs of thirst, / Beasts of my
soul who long to learn to drink / Of pure mirage," and he
warns them that "those prosperous [mirages] are accurst /
That shimmer on the brink / Of absence; . . ." Having
issued this warning, he urges them to turn back to reality,
to seek not the isolated abstraction of pure spirit, but the
embodied spirit, the "light incarnate":
Turn, O turn
From the fine sleights of the sand, from the long empty oven
Where flames in flamings burn
Back to the trees arrayed
In bursts of glare, to the halo-dialing run
Of the country creeks, and the hills’ bracken tiaras made
Gold in the sunken sun,
W isely watch for the sight
Of the supernova burgeoning over the bam,
Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’ s right
Oasis, light incarnate.
(Poems, p. 117)
The imagination is not only a means of ordering real
ity, it is a source of immense delight. Both Stevens and
Wilbur see this earth as ppssessing lush beauties and they
172
derive immense pleasure from observing and ruminating over
jthe particulars of life. In "Sunday Morning" the subject
"she" finds delight "in pungent fruit and bright, green
wings"; the sounds of the birds, the tastes and smells of
the flowers, trees and fruits fill her with a passionate
serenity. Wilbur's "The Terrace" offers several parallels
to "Sunday Morning." "We" of "The Terrace," like "she" of
"Sunday Morning," find the natural world a great feast for
the senses. Wilbur's poem is an extended metaphor in which
the mountains, air, stream, flowers, and sun are the food
for the senses. Yet Stevens's "she" knows that "Divinity
must live within herself" and Wilbur's "we" "Knew we had
eaten not the manna of heaven / But our own reflected
light." Furthermore, both poets are so thoroughly grounded
jon this earth that they question the possibility of exis
tence apart from it. Stevens's
She says, I am content when wakened birds
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and the warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?
And Wilbur's "we" at the end of a sensuous meal find the
meal to be so real that "We were the only part of the night
that we / Couldn't believe." Roy Harvey Pearce summarizes
Stevens's "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" and "The Bota
nist on Alp" as stating "that whereas others seek heavenly
things, the wisest among us admit that we are condemned to
rich perceptions of earthly things . . .1 1 (Continuity. p.
385). To Wilbur, the necessity of restricting ourselves to
"rich perceptions of earthly things" is not a condemnation;
it is a privilege. Furthermore, earthly things are not
simply objects to provoke the subjective imagination; they
possess an essential integrity which points to a transcen
dent power.
| There are, however, significant differences between
Wilbur and Stevens. While Wilbur shares Stevens's celebra-
i
i
tion of the imagination, he does not deify it. The quicken
ing of the imagination for Wilbur is not an end in itself,
Jit is a means to the greater end of human relations. By
Contrast Stevens's preoccupation with the imagination:
leads him to a curious dehumanization. It urges (or
forces) him in the end to purify his poems until they
are hardly the poems of a man who lives, loves, hates,
! creates, dies. They are the poems of a man who does
nothing but make poems. (Continuity. p. 380)
CHAPTER IX
THE HUMAN CONDITION
Although critics have accused Wilbur of preciosity, I
think it is clear that his poetry reflects a tough-minded
iconfrontation with the timeless problems of human experi
ence. To Wilbur, the cycle of love begetting life followed
I
jinevitably by death is each man's inheritance. This, ac-
I
cording to Francis Warlow, is Wilbur's message:
It is human wisdom to accept this cycle, to joy in the
given, to order one's thirsts and hungers, physical and
spiritual, to affirm and give thanks for the gift of
life in the face of inevitable death. (p. 233)
"Beasts," "Still, Citizen Sparrow," "Ballade for the Duke of
I Orleans," and "A Voice from under the Table" all reveal
Wilbur affirming and praising man and life in the face of
imperfection and inevitable death.
Beasts in their major freedom
Slumber in peace tonight. T h e gull on his ledge
Dreams in the guts of him self the moon-plucked waves below,
And the sunfish leans on a stone, slept
By the lyric water,
In which the spotless feet
Of deer make dulcet splashes, and to which
T he ripped mouse, safe in the ow l’s talon, cries
Concordance. Here there is no such harm
And no such darkness
As the selfsame m oon observes
W here, warped in window-glass, it sponsors now
T he werewolf's painful change. T urning his head away
On the sweaty bolster, he tries to remember
T he mood of manhood,
But lies at last, as always,
Letting it happen, the fierce fur soft to his face,
Hearing with sharper ears the w ind’ s exciting minors,
T h e Igaves’ panic, and the degradation
Of the heavy streams.
M eantime, at high windows
Far from thicket and pad-fall, suitors of excellence
Sigh and turn from their work to construe again the painful
Beauty of heaven, the lucid m oon
A nd the risen hunter,
Making such dreams for men
As told w ill break their hearts as always, bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
U nbridled waters.
(Poems. pp. 95-96)
176
The poem divides into three sections. The first,
stanzas 1 and 2, establishes the natural freedom of beasts.
They are not cruel, evil or corrupt; they are what they are.
Their behavior is not inconsistent or ambiguous: "The
Lipped mouse, safe in the owl's talon, cries / Concordance."
jThe next two stanzas present the contrasting figure of man,
who lacks the "major freedom" of beasts; that is, man has
conscious choices and, paradoxically, is limited by the fact
that he must choose. Yet his choices are not wholly free;
his painful change to a werewolf is "sponsored" by the self
same moon that controls the waves and slumbering sunfish.
Man too is a creature of nature. Man does, Wilbur quali-
jfies, have some control over his primitive urges; his change
I
'from man to werewolf does not just happen— he "lets" it
i
happen. And he enjoys the heightening of certain senses he
now experiences as a man-beast: "the fierce fur soft to his
face, / Hearing with sharper ears the wind's exciting mi-
Inors ."
i
I
"Meantime," in the third section— stanzas 5 and 6--the
•men who aspire to transcend their beast-like inclinations,
the "suitors of excellence," the artists, the visionaries
seek "to construe again the painful / Beauty of heaven."
The irony is that the dreams they make for men
177
As told will break their hearts as always, bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
Unbridled waters.
Wilbur is not bitter or despairing over this ironic situa
tion. It is man's imperfection which gives, him the possi
bility of importance. It is both man's fate and his bless
ing that he must work out his destiny amid imperfection and
ambiguity. His "minor" freedoms are far more significant
than the "major freedoms" of beasts.
"Beasts" suggests another paradox when set in contrast
with "Still, Citizen Sparrow." For while the former affirms
that the "suitors of excellence" often break men's hearts
and bring corruption, bring "monsters into the city," in the
latter the man the conventional consider corrupt is of the
greatest benefit to society:
Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call
Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air
Over the rotten office, let him bear
The carrion ballast up, and at the tall
Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you’ll see
That no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s height,
N o wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight;
He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free,
The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you
W ho dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he
Devours death, mocks mutability,
Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.
/
178
Thinking of Nonh, childheart, try to forget
H ow for so many bedlam hours his saw
Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw,
And the slam of his hammer all the day beset
The people’s ears. Forget that he could bear
T o see the towns like coral under the keel,
And the fields so dismal deep. T ry rather to feel
H ow high and weary it was, on the waters where
He rocked his only world, and everyone’ s.
Forgive the hero, you who would have died
Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide
T o Ararat; all men are Noah’ s sons.
(Poems. p. 150)
Wilbur contrasts the vulture— free, autonomous, fright
ening, cruising "at the tall / Tip of the sky"— with citizen
sparrow, who is conventional, ordered by societal patterns,
"who darts in the orchard aisles." The vulture who "Devours
death, mocks mutability, / Has heart to make an end, keeps
nature new" parallels the maintenance men of the public
parks in "After the Last Bulletins," the men who remove the
daily trash, giving people a fresh start each day.
In the second part, Wilbur compares the vulture to Noah
who, like the vulture, ignores the restrictions of conven
tionality and has the courage to acknowledge the reality of
death and to bring in new life. Such heroes, Wilbur writes,
are the fathers of all men. James Southworth describes the
paradox of the poem: "the sometimes crooked politician is
of more worth to society than citizen sparrow" ("P .0.R.W.,"
179
p. 28). But this is not the central idea. Wilbur'is ex
pressing the necessity of man's accepting the imperfection
and mutability of life, of having the courage to reject easy
certainties, and of venturing to the new and the unknown.
Paradox is also at the center of Wilbur's "Ballade for
the Duke of Orleans . . . who offered a prize at Blois,
circa 1457, for the best ballade employing the line 'Je
raeurs de soif aupres de la fontaine.'"
Flailed from the heart of water in a bow,
H e took the falling fly; my line went taut;
Foam was in uproar where he drove below;
In spangling air I fought him and was fought.
T hen, wearied to the shallows, he was caught,
Gasped in the net, lay still and stony-eyed.
It was no fading iris I had sought.
I die of thirst, here at the fountain-side.
Down in the harbor’s flow and counter-flow
I left my ships with hopes and heroes fraught.
T en times more golden than the sun could show,
Calypso gave the darkness I besought.
Oh, but her fleecy touch was dearly bought:
A ll spent, I wakened by my only bride,
Beside whom every vision is but nought,
A n d die of thirst, here at the fountain-side.
W here does that Plenty dwell, I ’d like to know,
W hich fathered poor Desire, as Plato taught?
O ut on the real and endless waters go
Conquistador and stubborn Argonaut.
W here Buddha bathed, the golden bowl he brought
Gilded the stream, but stalled its living tide.
T h e sunlight withers as the verse is wrought.
I die of thirst, here at the fountain-side.
180
E N V O I
Duke, keep your coin. All men are born distraught.
A nd w ill not for the world be satisfied.
W hether we live in fact, or but in thought,
W e d ie of thirst, here at the fountain-side.
(Poems., pp. 39-40)
The first stanza is narrated by a fisherman who re
counts a struggle with a fish. The struggle is described
with active verbs and is exciting and lively: "Foam was in
uproar," and the air was "spangling." At this point the
intent of the poem is unclear. Wilbur employs the complex,
highly stylized ballade form to present the mundane picture
of a fisherman in action. Is the poem mock-heroic, as we
were led to believe in the opening of "Junk"? The answer
is, of course, no. The poem becomes increasingly serious,
moving from a common fisherman to Ulysses to Buddha. After
the first four lines the paradox begins to emerge. The
fisherman had not anticipated the stillness and "stony-eyed"
motionlessness of the captured fish. In lines 4 through 7
Wilbur moves from the weariness of the struggling fish to
his capture, his gasping, and his death. Like Wilbur's
Giaour, the fisherman is made distraught by the loss of his
opponent, "the counterpoise of all my force and pride." He
had not sought the death of the fish— probably a rainbow
181
trout: "It was no fading iris I had sought." The fading
jcolor of the dying fish whose eyes are becoming lifeless and
"stony" contrasts with the glittering brilliance of the
"spangling air" during the lively struggle. The fish dies
of thirst by the shore and the fisherman experiences the
death of life's dynamic? once his goal has been achieved it
is empty and no longer desired. Both fish and fisherman
|"die of thirst, here at the fountain-side."
Ulysses is the narrator of stanza 2. This is, however,
the dissatisfied and unfulfilled Ulysses of Canto XXVI of
Dante's Inferno and the restless, bored Ulysses of Tennyson
rather than Homer's hero. Wilbur recreates the paradox of
Ulysses's dissatisfaction with Penelope once he has regained
her. Ulysses lies beside her recalling his past adventures
and longing for such a future. The stanza suggests lines
94-99 of Canto XXVI of The Inferno:
not fondness for my son, nor reverence
for my aged father, nor Penelope's claim
to the joys of love, could drive out of my mind
the lust to experience the far-flung world
and the failings and felicities of mankind.^
■^In classical mythology, Iris was a messenger of the
gods, regarded as the goddess of the rainbow.
^Trans. John Ciardi (New York. 1954), p. 223.
182
Restored to his homeland and wife, the besought fountain of
I
■his journey, Ulysses's thirst for new experience is unalle
viated, "And [he] die[s] of thirst, here at the fountain-
side ."
Stanza 3 argues that it is not plenty that fathers de
sire, as Plato taught; it is deprivation. It is man's pre-
'dicament to want what he cannot have and to be dissatisfied
I
,with the plenty which he can. The stanza also plays with
i
the paradoxical relationship of gain and loss. In the story
|of Buddha's bathing in the stream, his golden bowl creates
the gain of a gilded stream, but the flow of the living
stream is arrested. Similarly the poet writing about sun
light gains his well-wrought poem but the reality of the
I
burning, warming sun is lost. The artist craves to capture
all reality in his creation; he seeks to become one with his
subject matter but, like the rain-dancer, he can only ap
proximate the rain. And the moment he fixes his reactions
I
I
I
in the art work he has lost the living reality: "the sun-
jlight withers as the verse is wrought."
In the Envoi Wilbur advises the Duke to "keep your
coin"; earthly treasure will not satisfy. When the Duke's
prize is won, the winner will only thirst for a new prize.
Wilbur then summarizes the essential paradox of the poem:
183
man was born distraught and satisfaction by its very nature
breeds frustration. Whether man lives in the world of fact,
i
‘ like the fisherman in stanza 1, or in thought, like the poet
and Buddha in stanza 3, or in both, like Ulysses in stanza
2, he "will not for the world be satisfied." And the prepo
sition "for" might also be read as meaning "by"; that is,
man thirsts but his thirst will never be satisfied by the
j
|Water of the world:
i
i We die of thirst, here by the fountain-side.
1
The paradox of the ballade calls to mind Wilbur's in
terpretation of Emily Dickinson's "Success is counted sweet
est." Wilbur accepts the usual reading of the poem that
"the defeated and dying soldier of this poem is compensated
i
by a greater awareness of the meaning of victory than the
I
|victors themselves can have; he can comprehend the joy of
isuccess through its polar contrast to his own despair"
("Sumptuous Destitution," p. 131). Wilbur then goes fur
ther:
At first reading, we are much impressed with the wretch
edness of the dying soldier's lot, and an improved under
standing of the nature of victory may seem small compen
sation for defeat and death; but the more one ponders
this poem the likelier it grows that Emily Dickinson is
arguing the superiority of defeat to victory, of frus
tration to satisfaction, and of anguished comprehension
to mere possession. What do the victors have but
184
victory, a victory which they cannot fully savor or
clearly define . . . (pp. 131-132)
STow while stanza 1 of Wilbur's ballade does not explicitly
argue "the superiority of defeat to victory," it does argue
that victory is an undesirable possession; what has the
fisherman gained but death and loss?
The discovery that the fisherman, Ulysses, and Buddha
make is the same discovery which Wilbur believes to be the
key to Emily Dickinson's poetry: "... she discovered that
!the soul has an infinite hunger, a hunger to possess all
things" (p. 132). Like the narrator of Wilbur's ballade,
[she discovered that an infinite hunger cannot be satisfied
in a finite world. According to Wilbur, "Emily Dickinson
elected the economy of desire"; finding herself in a state
of privation, she adopted the emotional strategy of assert
ing "the paradox that privation is more plentiful than
plenty" (p. 131). And although Wilbur has not fully adopted
Emily Dickinson's personal emotional strategy, he has, as in
the ballade, explored the theme of "sumptuous destitution"
in several poems.
The discovery Wilbur attributes to Emily Dickinson—
that the soul has an infinite hunger— is also the subject
I
,of his "A Voice from under the Table":
H ow shall the wine be drunk, or the woman known?
I take this world for better or for worse,
But seeing rose carafes conceive the sun
My thirst conceives a fierier universe:
A nd then I toast the birds in the burning trees
T hat chant their holy lucid drunkenness;
I swallowed all the phosphorus of the seas
Before I fell into this low distress.
You upright people all remember how
Love drove you first to the woods, and there you heard
T h e loose-mouthed w ind com plaining T h o u and T h o u ;
My gawky limbs were shuddered by the word.
Most of it since was nothing but charades
T o spell that hankering out and make an end,
But the softest hands against my shoulder-blades
O nly increased the crying of the wind.
For this the goddess rose from the m idland sea
A nd stood above the famous wine-dark wave,
T o ease our drouth with clearer mystery
A nd be a South to all our flights of love.
A nd down by the selfsame water I have seen
A blazing girl with skin like polished stone
Splashing until a far-out breast of green
Arose and with a rose contagion shone.
"A myrtle-shoot in hand, she danced; her hair
Cast on her back and shoulders a m oving shade.”
Was it some hovering light that showed her fair?
Was it of chafing dark that light was made?
Perhaps it was Archilochus’ fantasy,
Or that his saying sublim ed the thing he said.
A ll true enough; and true as well that she
Was beautiful, and danced, and is now dead.
H elen was no such high discarnate thought
As men in dry symposia pursue,
But was as bitterly fugitive, not to be caught
By what m en’s arms in love or fight could do.
Groan in your cell; rape Troy with sword and flame;
T he end of thirst exceeds experience.
A devil told me it was all the same
W hether to fail by spirit or by sense.
186
God keep me a damned fool, nor charitably
Receive me into his shapely resignations.
I am a sort of martyr, as you see,
A horizontal m onum ent to patience.
T h e calves of waitresses parade about
My helpless head upon this sodden floor.
W ell, I am down again, but not yet out.
O sweet frustrations, I shall be back for more.
(Poems. pp. 79-80)
The voice from under the table comes from the serio
comic narrator, a sensualist who, seeking to quench his
"infinite thirst" ("My thirst conceives a fierier uni
verse"), has literally drunk himself under the table, a
position which he humorously and euphemistically refers to
as "low distress." In stanza 2 the drunken speaker address
es the world of propriety and asks each sober person if he
can remember his days of youthful passion, the days when
even the wind sang your love's lament. For most of you, the
speaker observes, there has been no real passion since. To
you love has been nothing but a game of charades, an attempt
to play the game out and have it end. The speaker refers to
such people as "upright," and the pun contrasts the speak
er's horizontal position with the vertical pose of sober
propriety. The pun also indicates the poet's sympathy with
the drunken narrator's passionate quest for the unattainable
as opposed to the "upright" peoples' unadventurous conven
187
tionality. Such unadventurousness will not do for the nar
rator who recalls, in stanza 3, a vision of a Venus-like
i
girl he has seen and who inspires his thirst for a fierier
universe:
A blazing girl with skin like polished stone
Splashing until a far-out breast of green
Arose and with a rose contagion shone.
Wilbur then moves from his sensual, passionate speaker
to another speaker of like temperament--the seventh-century
Greek poet Archilochus. The first two lines of stanza 4 are
a translation of lines which Guy Davenport recently trans-
|
'lated as:
i
i
I
She held a sprig of myrtle she'd picked
And a rose
That pleased her most
Of those on the bush
And her long hair shaded
Her shoulders and back.3
i
'In the Davenport translation of Archilochus, Venus holds
both a sprig of myrtle and a rose. Wilbur divides the image
between his speaker and the Archilochus quote. In stanza 3
he describes the speaker's own vision of "a blazing girl"
who arose from the sea and "with a rose contagion shone."
3Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochus
Berkeley, 1964), p. 9.
■He then completes the original image by translating the
Archilochus image of Venus holding the myrtle shoot (the
flower held sacred to her). Having quoted Archilochus,
Wilbur questions whether it was light "that showed her
fair?" And did not her dancing and motion chafe the dark
ness and make light? Or perhaps she was simply a fantasy of
Archilochus. Perhaps she was just a poetic creation and not
jeven a vision. Whatever the answer, Wilbur writes, the poet
could not capture the living woman: "she / Was beautiful,
and danced, and is now dead."
Stanza 5 presents a third woman, not the speaker's
I
Ivision, nor Archilochus's fantasy or creation, but the liv-
1
]ing Helen— who "was no such high discarnate thought / As men
!
in dry symposia pursue"; the real Helen was of flesh and
life, not to be caught in "dry symposia." Yet the histori
cal image of her parallels the drunken speaker's_and Archi
lochus's visions--a vision
. . . bitterly fugitive, not to be caught
By what men's arms in love or fight could do.
Groan in your cell; rape Troy with sword and flame;
The end of thirst exceeds experience.
|The narrator then discloses that a devil once told him "it
was all the same / Whether to fail by spirit or by sense";
that is, "whether we live in fact, or but in thought" the
189
end is the same— we fail. The devil's implied conclusion is
that we should therefore resign ourselves to our sad lot.
But the narrator, in the final stanza, realizes that
the devil's voice is that of death and resignation. He re
jects this voice, preferring to be a fool: to pursue the
"bitterly fugitive"; to try to quench the infinite thirst;
to exult in the "sweet frustrations" of which life is com
posed .
Wilbur also treats the theme of loss of innocence with
paradox. As destitution can be sumptuous, so loss can bring
gain. For like Milton, Wilbur sees the Fall as fortunate,
the loss as beneficial. And Wilbur either explicitly or
implicitly treats the theme of loss of innocence in a tra
ditional Christian perspective. Wilbur does not, however,
minimize the reality or the seriousness of the Fall. Its
inevitability is clear in "Then":
Then when the ample season
Warmed us, waned and went,
W c gave to the leaves no graves,
To the robin gone no name,
Nor thought at the birds’ return.
Of their sourccless dim descent,
And wc read no loss in the leaf,
But a freshness ever the same.
The leaf first learned of years
One not forgotten fall;
Of lineage now, and loss
These lartcr singers tell,
19 0
Of a year when birds now still
Were all one choiriner call
C /
Till the unreturning leaves
Impcrishably fell.
(Poems. p. 115)
The first stanza deals with the past— "Then," the world
before the Fall, the world of childhood innocence. "Then,"
when the cycle of seasons occurred, "we" paid no attention
to the birth and death of trees and birds. In this world
"we" were innocent of death: "We gave to the leaves no
graves"; that is, we saw no need to commemorate the dead;
"we" gave "the robin gone no name" since "we" fully expected
him to return. At this point "we" were ignorant of the
mutability of living things.
We read no loss in the leaf
But a freshness ever the same.
That was "then." But now, in stanza 2, innocence and ig
norance have been lost. The leaf has learned that its fall
is permanent. Here Wilbur directly refers to the Christian
concept of the Fall. The leaf, and the poet, now know of
their lineage and heritage. They have learned they are
mortal and they have lost forever their youthful innocent
expectation of immortality. The poet imagines that today's
birds sing of this loss, that they sing in memory of other
birds "now still" who once "Were all one choiring call."
191
There is an oblique reference to the Resurrection in the
word "imperishably," which may suggest that the leaves have
fallen to mix with the earth and provide soil for new life.
But "imperishably" more directly asserts that mutability and
death are inevitable realities which man must confront.
"The Pardon" is a more hopeful poem than "Then," and
the beneficial aspects of the loss of innocence begin to be
more clear. The poem presents a young boy's gaining an
awareness of the reality of death-~in this case, the death
of his dog. His immediate response is to avoid looking and
to blame the dead creature:
My clog Iny dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honcysucklc-vinc.
I who had loved him while he kept alive
W ent only close enough to where he was
T o snifl the heavy honcysucklc-smcll
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies’ intolerable buzac.
W ell, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. M y father took the spade
And buried him.
But after a dream vision, the boy comes to realize the mor
tality of all creatures; he is sorry for his dead dog and he
asks "forgiveness of his tongueless head." He learns to
192
acknowledge that the "sad and strange" is part of man's
experience; and, finally, he learns to grieve:
Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging. I confess
I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flics,
And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started in to cry and call his name,
Asking forgiveness of his tongucless head.
. . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death’s pardon now. And mourn the dead.
(Poems, p. 118)
The fortunate aspect of this fall is that the boy is now
aware of imperfection and of the need for redeeming his past.
Now that he can mourn death, he more fully understands the
reality of life. He now knows that "the sad and strange"
are as much a part of the world as is the "kind."
"For Ellen," another Wilbur poem dealing with the theme
of loss of innocence, provides an interesting contrast with
G. M. Hopkins's "Spring and Fall":
F O R ELLEN
On eyes embarked for sleep the only light
Goes off, and there is nothing that you know
So well, it may not monster in this sea.
The vine leaves pat the screen. Viciously free,
The wind vaults over the roof with Mister Crow
To drop his crooked laughter in your night.
19 3
And morning’s cannonades of brightness come
T o a little utter blueness in your eyes.
You stagger goldcnly, bestowing blue;
Blue heal-all breaks the pavingstonc where you-
Expect it, and you laugh in pure surprise
At the comic cripple hurdling to his slum.
But sometime you will look at the lazy sun
Hammocked in clouds, dead-slumbering in the sky.
That casual fire will blister blue, and night
W ill strand its fears; then with a starker sight
And newer darker love, you will supply
The world of joy which never was begun.
(Poems. p. 222)
Both Wilbur and Hopkins look upon a child and prophesy sor
row and darkness. Hopkins writes:
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder . . .
And Wilbur writes to Ellen that "sometime," some time after
your fall from your present state of "golden" innocence, you
will come to look upon the world
with a starker sight
And newer darker love . . .
Hopkins, however, offers little consolation to Margaret and
the general tone of his poem is sad, while Wilbur concludes
with a tone of joy. The Fall for Wilbur is not a blight;
it is a fortunate event. For with sin, responsibility,
death, the Fall also brings about a "starker sight." And
against the new awareness, the new tragic sense of life,
194
life takes on far greater mystery and depth. Hopkins
prophesies to Margaret:
Ah', as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder.
Wilbur predicts the same for Ellen, but also adds the dimen
sion of a new love:
. . . then with a starker sight
And newer darker love, you will supply
The world of joy which never was begun.
This love transcends the Fall. The Fall occurs in time, but
the love and joy born out of the Fall transcend time; this
love and joy "never was begun."
The coexistence of love and death is constantly felt in
Wilbur's poetry. Each moment of life is a movement toward
death. Yet in the face of inevitable death there is the
possibility of redemptive love. This is clearly expressed
in "Someone Talking to Himself" (p. 36).
Even when first her face,
Younger than any spring,
Older than Pharaoh’s grain
And fresh as Phoenix-ashes,
Shadowed under its lashes
Every earthly thing,
There was another place
I saw in a flash of pain:
Off in the fathomless dark
Beyond the verge of love
I saw blind fishes move,
And under a stone shelf
195
Rode the recusant shark—
Cold, waiting, himself.
Oh, even when we fell,
Clean as a mountain source
And barely able to tell
Such ecstasy from grace,
Into the primal bed
And current of our race,
W e knew yet must deny
T o what we gathered head:
T hat music growing harsh,
Trees blotting the sky
Above the roaring course ,
T hat in the summer’s drought 6lJ> «c*2/ I
/ Slowly would peter out 1 1
O r-*Lo~T 3 , Into a dry marsh. c ^ j
T h e -fir-s-fc- s t a n z a s j u x t a p o s e s ^-t-he—Gy-eT-i-e— t i m e -
lessness, and the all-encompassinq nature of human love with
the inevitability of impending death. In characteristic ■
' t=>dcjvv
fagh-ion, Wilbur divides the-sstHan-za- into two parts. Part onemA~Ssv
presents the theme of lova, although, the counter-.theme of
\s,v 5s ^rckCi^a
d^'afh is contained ift-dsfees^P-horenri-x^-ima^e. '*©sra- i ir
|»Te xT*eHr
'laf-resh" ; it recurs in each 1?i*fe* and generation with the
“SCMoiO * s , s
regularity of the cyclic return of spring, -SB»d--i= f e s ! ! s ie—ail-
embracinp- 7--sh-adowi-nq"'l under—i-t-s— las-hes / Every earthly
jtfejng-." The ae-.e©j*d-f>ar«t of .sstah-fea? @j»ss develops the counter-
\5r>r I / a) ^
theme of death. This section begins with, *^’ aSSSE^si^o■fSpa*i^n, '
*€ * f > y
and moves through successive images of
" b-li-nd f i’ s’ Hes'r"--"a.-~s-feQn e=s-h e 1-f. . . T-und a "r.ecusan't—slrnrk " to
the monosyllabic foot at the start of the final line, which,
as Thom Gunn states, is turned to "barely submerged
196
terror." «
The second stanza offers a similar apposition of theme
and counter-theme, but here the two are more closely inter
twined. The first half again presents two lovers, but this
time their love is described explicitly in sexual imagery
and as a loss of innocence. Lines 7 and 8 then form a
transition to the counter-theme, which this time is de
scribed in images of sterility and which counterpoints the
sexual ecstasy of the first half of the stanza.
The third stanza weaves the theme and.counter-theme
into a fugal statement of the human condition:
Love is the greatest mercy,
A volley of the sun
T h at lashes all with shade*
T hat the first day be mended;
And yet, so soon undone.
It is the lover’s curse
T ill tim e be com prehended
And the flawed heart unmade.
W hat can I do but move
From folly to defeat,
A nd call that sorrow sweet
T h at teaches us to see
T h e final face of love
In what we cannot be?
( Poems. p. 37)
Wilbur "here acknowledges the ambiguities, sorrows, joys, and
^(Rev. of Advice to a Prophet), Yale Review. 51 (March
1962), 482.
197
paradoxes which characterize human experience. Love is
mercifully granted to man, yet it is soon undone; "Love is
the greatest mercy," yet those who love are restricted by a
| " flawed heart"; man can envision perfect love but he cannot
achieve it. What then is he to do? He must do the only
thing he can do: exult in the sumptuous while continually
experiencing destitution.
Not only must man face the inevitability of death, he
must face loneliness and incompleteness within life. Both
themes flow through the poem "Water Walker" (Poems, p. 174).
Wilbur again affirms the necessity of maintaining a balance
between conflicting forces. And again we see Wilbur rein-
I
forcing content with form. Each stanza has two parts
i
rhymed: A-X-X-A-B-X-X-B and the first five stanzas clearly
I
divide into two parts. The poem compares the life and work
of St. Paul with the caddis fly, and the poem's first person
i
narrator sees this analogy as reflecting the fundamental
dilemma of human experience.
The first four lines of stanza 1 present one aspect of
this dilemma: that is, the problem of belonging and yet not
belonging— the incompleteness which man not only suffers but
at times wills:
198
There was an infidel who
Walked past all churches crying,
Yet wouldn't have changed his tears,
Not for the smoothest-worn pew;
The ambivalence of this infidel, who belongs to the spirit
ual world yet who wills not to belong to the institutional
ized spiritual order of the world, reminds the narrator of
Caddis flies walking on spring-surface, water
walkers who breathe
Air and know water, with weakly wings
Drying to pelt and sheen;
And he concludes that
There is something they mean
By breaking from water and flying
Lightly some hours in air,
Then to the water-top dropping,
Floating their heirs and dying:
They are creatures of two worlds— of the water and the air:
they float their heirs on the water that they may breathe
the air. Their condition, Wilbur writes, is like
Paulsaul the Jew born in Tarshish, who when at bay on the steps
With Hebrew intrigued those Jewsotted Jews
Crowding to stone and strike;
Always alike and unlike,
Walking the point where air
Mists into water, and knowing
Both, with his breath, to be real,
Roman he went everywhere:
Paul lived in the Roman world yet was thoroughly steeped in
the traditions of the Jewish world. Then Saul the thorough
going Jew received his vision and broke from the constric
tions of his Jewish world and "instead / He carried Jew
visions to Greeks . .
The dual world of Paul and the caddis flies then help
the narrator to clarify his own predicament. He feels drawn
to the world of his childhood:
I’ ve been
Down in Virginia at night, I remember an evening door
A table lamp lit; light stretched on the lawn,
Seeming to ask me in;
I thought if I should begin
To enter entirely that door,
Saying, “I am a son of this house,
My birth and my love are here,”
yet he knows if he were to enter the door he "might never
come forth any more"; he knows he cannot return and immerse
himself in the comfortable enveloping sleepiness of the
past:
I saw the houses sleep
And the autos beside them sleeping,
The neat plots, the like trustful houses,
Minute, armoreal, deep;
The reminiscence of an "old man stitching a tent" then
reminds the narrator of Paul who, he speculates, could have
200
accepted his Jewish heritage and would then have been "loved
and revered"; instead, he chose loneliness and isolation;
instead,
He carried Jew visions to Greeks
For adoration or curses;
I For he
j Troubled them; whether they called him "babbler"
] or hailed him "Mercurios"
Here the poem's central theme of balancing opposites is re
flected in the structure of the lines— each line contains
opposites which Paul had to live within. To live in two
worlds and be stranger to both— this is the destiny of the
caddis fly; it was Paul's fate; it is the dilemma all men
must acknowledge and accept; to be
Stranger to both, and discover
j Heaven and hell in the poise
1 Betwixt "inhabit" and "know";
■A further balancing of opposites is presented when the nar-
jrator relates the contrasting fragments he carries in his
mind
I
i
I hold
Here in my head Maine's bit speech, lithe laughter of
Mobile blacks,
Opinions of salesmen, ripe tones of priests,
Plaints of the bought and sold:
He then asks himself:
201
Can I rest and observe unfold
The imminent singletax state,
The Negro rebellion, the rise
Of the nudist cult, the return
Of the Habsburgs,
All are futile gestures to impose a monistic scheme upon a
pluralistic universe. The narrator sympathizes with those
jwho would find a single solution for all life's complexi
ties . And he wonders if he himself can resist this tempta-
itiony he wonders if he can continue to maintain the balance
i
'between accepting the spirit which yearns for perfection
and rejecting those causes, those movements which facilely
|attempt to capture mystery, ambiguity, and contradiction
within the simple confines of doctrine.
Now he asks "what stays?"— what endures? What is of
lasting value? Only those who follow the example of Paul
and the caddis fly will learn the answer; only those who
reject simplistic and rigid views of reality and who learn
to accept the ambiguities and paradoxes of life; only those
who learn "how hid is the trick of justice." These people,
Wilbur writes, "cannot go home, nor can leave"; they can
only accept dilemma— "the dilemma, cherished, tyrannical."
Again, in the last three lines of the poem, form and content
are in perfect harmony. The word "dilemma" itself suggests
202
conflicting pulls— this conflict is here defined by the
words "cherished" and "tyrannical." The pulls of life's
polarities creates a dynamic tension which men "cherish,",
yet men also yearn for comfort and resolution and the "tyr
anny" of these polarities will not permit such comfort and
I
•resolution. He who learns this "despairs," though his very
despair causes him to "burn" with passion for life. • And
while this man
despairs and burns
Da capo da capo returns.
The cycle repeats itself in each life. The question
i
which then comes to mind is, "wherein lies my salvation?"
■It is enough merely to accept life's ambiguities? Wilbur
'offers an answer to this question. His answer is at once
simple and profound— his answer is that love is the salva
tion. Wilbur, I think, would agree with Thornton Wilder
that
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and
the bridge is love, the only survival, the only mean
ing .5
He would also agree with Yeats that
i
i
I
I
[ ^The Bridge at San Luis Rey (New York, 1955), p. 117.
203
Man is in love and loves what vanishes.
r *
What more is there to say?
Wilbur and Yeats, of course, have a good deal more to say.
i
And what Wilbur has to say is beautifully summarized in the
final stanza of "Sunlight Is Imagination." Here Wilbur
gathers together his awareness of transience, mutability,
jthe paradox of death in life, loss of innocence, and loss in
t
general, yet he is able to transcend these tragic realities
I
ito praise the variety and mystery of life and to honor the
1
jgift of love. He is able to love "that which vanishes" and
yet, like the narrator of "A Voice from, under the Table," to
say "Well, I am down again, but not yet out." For after
losing love, the poet praises man's ability to
I
i
choose
j to welcome love in the lively wasting sun.
As for the demands of love, Wilbur writes that "Love Calls
i 7
I
Us to the Things of This World."
j ^"1919," The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York,
1959), p. 204.
CHAPTER X
LOVE CALLS US TO THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD
The central idea in Richard Wilbur's poetry is the
i
I
necessity of maintaining a precarious balance between the
various polarities of life in which man finds himself
trapped. In presenting variations on this theme Wilbur is
careful to balance the various elements within a given poem.
^Chapter II of this work discussed balance in relation to
dialectical form; to meter and rhyme; Chapter III, in rela-
i > /
tion to diction; Chapter IV, to humor; Chapter V, to image
ry; Chapter VI, to Wilbur's theory of poetry; and Chapters
VII, VIII, and IX, to Wilbur's theory of the cosmos, reali-
jty, and the human condition.
I Most of these techniques and themes are balanced in
"Love Calls Us to the Things of This World." This poem has
been discussed at some length by Richard Eberhart, Robert
Horan, May Swenson, and Wilbur himself in The Contemporary
Poet as Artist and Critic, edited by Anthony Ostroff.
.204
2 05
Nevertheless, the poem is so dense and evocative that their
remarks are not exhaustive.
Summarizing the poem, Wilbur has written:
The title is a quotation from St. Augustine: "Love
Calls Us to the Things of This World." You must imagine
the poem as occurring at perhaps seven thirty in the
morning; the scene is a bedroom high up in a city apart
ment-building; outside the bedroom window, the first
laundry of the day is being yanked across the sky, and
one has been awakened by the squeaking pulleys of the
laundry-line. ("Own Work," p. 65)
L O V E C A L L S US T O T H E T H I N G S
OF T H I S W O R L D
T he 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
T he m orning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses.
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
N ow they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
W ith the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
N ow they are flying in place, conveying
T he terrible speed of their omnipresence, m oving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
T hey swoon down into so rapt a quiet
T hat nobody seems to be there.
T he soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but. laundry,
N othing but rosy hands in the rising steam
A nd clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
206
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
W ith a warm look the world’s hunks and colors.
T h e soul descends once more in bitter love
T o 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.'
(Poems, pp. 6.5-66)
The structure of the poem is clearly two-part or, as
discussed in Chapter II, dialectical. There is, however,
some argument about where the second part begins. The end'
of stanza 3, the halfway point, would seem a logical boun
dary, and this is where May Swenson divides the poem. She
sees the rhythm and imagistic action brought to a resting-
place at the very center of the poem— "That nobody seems to
be there." She also sees the first half as establishing the
soul-laundry metaphor while "the unique, and more mysterious
part of the poem is the lower half, where he [the poet]
reacts to his own metaphor, as an individual and as a repre
sentative of modern man" (Artist and Critic, p. 13). Miss
Swenson supports her argument by showing that in the second
half the sounds are heavier and more consonantal. Yet to
illustrate this she refers to the first two lines of stanza
2 07
5--just the place where I believe the second half begins.
It is true that the poem comes to a rhythmic pause at
the end of stanza 3, but the first theme that Wilbur is
i
(developing does not conclude until the end of stanza 4.
j
i
Perhaps stanza 4 could be regarded as a transition to the
counter-theme (or Part Two), but the fact remains that the
soul is still the focal point and the soul is expressing its
desire to remain apart from the body. Furthermore, "Yet"
!
provides a simple rhetorical division which opens Part Two
:and ushers in the counter-theme of the body.
I
I The theme and counter-theme have been described vari
ously as a split between the body and the soul, the spirit
jand the flesh, the soul and the world, utopia and reality,
I
I
|community and solipsism, heaven and earth, the spiritual
]
[and the secular, thought and action, and "the exalted and
i
the vulgar" ("Own Work," p. 64). The poem does bring the
two conflicting forces together in the second half but, as
Wilbur argues, they cannot be perfectly reconciled (see pp.
39-43 above)— at best they can only be "accepted" and kept
in a "difficult balance." But before examining how Wilbur
brings the two themes together, we must define them first
in isolation and then in contrast to each other.
' Part One develops the soul's desires through the
208
relationship of the soul and the laundry. It is the "cry"
of the laundry line which first rouses the soul from sleep.
And, like the laundry articles, it hangs for a moment sepa
rated from the body it must soon re-enter. Then the soul
notices the morning laundry which, as Robert Horan writes,
"is quickly enough metamorphosed to angels" (Artist and
Critic. p. 6) and an affinity is established between them.
i
( The soul would rather consort with these angels than with
jthieves and imperfect men. Both the soul and these angels
are floating in the wind and air, calling to mind an earlier
poem--"Attention Makes Infinity"— which also contrasts the
ideal and the real with the image of air symbolizing ideal
ism, fantasy and dreaming (see p. 112 above).
This intimate relationship, according to Horan, estab
lished through an overlapping of connotations applicable to
more than a single image is typical of Wilbur's sensitivity
to the overtones of language, and results in an instrument
both of ambiguity and of clarity:
Simple examples here, such as the relation of "soul" to
"spirited," "hangs," "bodiless" all prepare and echo the
image of clean wash itself hanging bodiless as an angel.
The dawn is "false" because it is premature, incomplete,
a thinly-bodied ghost. (p. 6)
The second stanza clarifies this relationship by focusing
209
upon the angels and demonstrating the kind of existence the
soul would like to lead. In stanza 1 the soul was presented
l a s hanging "bodiless and simple"; stanza 2 now describes the
quality of this state: it is delightful. The laundry, like
| t
,the soul, is 'freed from bodily restraint. And these "hosts
I
!of laundry," these angels, are able to enjoy gentle motion
I
i ,
iand peace: "Now they are rising together in calm swells /
fc>f halcyon feeling." The delightfulness of this state is
I
ilargely the result of its impersonality. There are no com-
j
!plex demands of community action or personal relations; it
jis a state of pure being. Thus in stanzas 1 through 4 there
;are ten state-of-being verbs, while Part Two (stanzas 5 and
i
i
6) contain only two.
"Halcyon feeling" is a perfect description of the qual-
i
ity of this state. The halcyon was supposedly able to charm
the wind and sea into quiescence at the winter solstice so
i
Ithat it might breed in a nest on the water. The image is of
I
i
Ian almost unreal stillness and peacefulness. The balance of
j
this image is in perfect keeping with the structural and
!thematic balance of the entire poem. Also the water image
'plays back on the "calm swells" of laundry articles rising
in the wind.
After examining the six drafts of stanza 1 which Wilbur
210
discarded (see Artist and Critic, pp. 20-21), the unity and
consistency of Part One is even more apparent:
(1)
My eyes came open to the squeak of pulleys
My spirit shocked from the brothel of itself
(2)
My eyes came open to the shriek of pulleys,
And the soul, spirited from its proper wallow,
Hung in the air bodiless and hollow
(3)
My eyes came open to the pulleys' cry.
The soul, spirited from its proper wallow,
Hung in the air as bodiless and hollow
As light that frothed upon the wall opposing?
But what most caught my eyes at their unclosing
Was two gray ropes that yanked across the sky.
One after one into the window frame
. . . the hosts of laundry came
(4)
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And the soul, so suddenly spirited from sleep,
Hangs in the air as bodiless and simple
As morning sunlight frothing on the floor,
While just outside the window
The air is solid with a dance of angels.
(5)
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As dawn light in the moment of its breaking:
Outside the open window
The air is crowded with a
| (6)
' 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 air is leaping with a rout of angels.
! Some are in bedsheets, some are in dresses.,
! it does not seem to matter
j In each revision Wilbur achieves greater clarity and
f
simplicity, and he establishes greater balance between the
I
body and the soul. Once it becomes clear that the tension
i
between the body and the soul is the poem's subject, then
i
iall the revisions become necessary and logical. This is
I
(particularly clear in line 2 of the first three revisions.
I
i
I
(The first version is ambiguous: is the soul its own
I
"brothel" or is the soul shocked from the "brothel" of the
body? Version two clarifies this somewhat by the phrase
"proper wallow"; the word "proper" suggests that the soul is
■momentarily transported from the location it normally and
rightfully occupies, namely the body. Also the word "prop
er" derives from the Middle English "propre," meaning "own";
thus Wilbur seems to be asserting that the body is the
212
suitable residence for the soul. Wilbur further clarifies
this initial ambiguity by changing from "spirit shocked from
the brothel of itself" to "Soul, spirited from its proper
jwallow." In the second version a non-corporeal entity is
transported from a material location, while the first ver
sion allows for a non-corporeal entity (spirit) to be
transported from another non-corporeal entity (soul)— which
is rather confusing. The confusion is removed in version
four, where Wilbur states that the soul is transported from
bodily sleep and is momentarily suspended in a bodiless
istate.
I
I
: It is crucial that this confusion be removed. The main
function of Part One is to present a world of perfect peace
and purity— a world inhabited by angels and desired by the
human soul. Later, in Part Two, the poet demonstrates that
these desires cannot be fulfilled, but it is necessary that
the theme be first developed before it is contrasted with
the counter-theme. Hence "brothel" and "wallow," which
represent earthly heaviness and imperfection, are out of
place in the utopian world of the angels and the bodiless
soul. Furthermore, "brothel" and "wallow" are too strong a
denunciation of the body. The body is the legitimate,
"proper" residence for the soul; it is not illegitimate, as
213.
"brothel" suggests. And although the soul cannot enjoy
|
j"pure dances" on earth, the nuns can "walk in a pure float-
l
ing" ; that is, the body does not condemn the soul only to
^wallowing. So Wilbur settles on the more neutral "sleep,"
which neither condemns nor praises the body and which allows
Wilbur to do both in Part Two.
Other revisions also show Wilbur working toward a more
junified spiritual atmosphere in Part One. In revisions two
'and three he has the soul hanging in the air "bodiless and
hollow." But "hollow" calls to mind a vessel or structure
or form that is empty; it connotes a substance emptied out
but still retaining its shape— which is inappropriate to the
soul. Wilbur's solution is "simple"; the soul hangs in the
air "bodiless and simple , . ." "Simple" is not only non-
corporeal but it also prepares for the contrasts of com
plexity and paradox of Part Two. For "simple" derives from
t
(
jthe Middle English and Old French meaning "uncomplicated"
and from the Latin simplus. meaning one multiplied by one
(sim- one + -plus multiplied by). In Part One the soul is
in a state of oneness. uncomplicated by the flesh-spirit
duality and the paradoxes of human experience.
Similarly, in line 5 Wilbur moves from "the air is
solid" to "crowded" to "leaping" to his final choice
"awash." "Solid" and "crowded" probably were rejected as
being too substantial. "Angels" are not "solid," nor do we
[think of them as possessing the heaviness or density of a
"crowd." And "leaping" suggests only a brief movement from
one grounded place to another, while "angels" permanently
reside in the air. Later in stanza 3, the angels move with
"terrible speed," but it is a fluid motion— "moving and
staying like white water"--and it is not a jerky, abrupt
I
bodily motion as "leaping" suggests. "Awash," however,
suggests gentle motion and prepares for such images as the
jlaundry in stanza 2, "white water" in stanza 3, "laundry"
jand "rising steam" in stanza 4, and "clean linen" in stanza
Wilbur also achieves greater simplicity and unity by
.moving from "hosts of laundry" to "dance of angels" to "rout
of angels" to his final choice, "awash with angels." "Rout
of angels" is poor. "Rout" suggests (1) a mob, herd,
throng; (2) wild noise, bellowing, bawling; and (3) defeat
in a state of chaos and wild confusion— all obviously in
appropriate to angels. "Hosts" itself suggests angels, but
the prepositional phrase "of laundry" obscures the angel
metaphor which is so crucial to the first part of the poem.
"Dance of angels" is the best of the rejected versions but
215
it does not set up the overtone series that Wilbur achieves
i
through "awash." And furthermore, the angels are not danc
ing? "they are rising together in calm swells / Of halcyon
|
jfeeling ..."
Wilbur also makes several other technical improvements
in his alterations. He improves the sound of line 1 by
selecting "cry" rather than "squeak" or "shriek." "Cry,"
although possessing the initial "k" sound, is more euphoni
ous than "squeak"— which contains two "k" sounds— or
"shriek," which like "squeak" contains a terminal "k" sound.
Also the initial "k" sound of "cry" is muted by the final
long "i" which blends into the succeeding vowel sound of the
next word. In addition, it is rather difficult to imagine
the soul being "astounded" by a "squeaking" sound.
"Shriek," however, is too sensational and is suggestive of
terror rather than astonishment. The terrifying connota
tions of "shriek" would have struck far too dissonant a note
in the otherwise harmonious first half of the poem.
Wilbur himself writes that "what I see now in these
drafts is a gradual moving away from too much objective de
tail, and a liberation of the rhythm toward the abruptness
of speech" (Artist and Critic, p. 20). The detail is ex
cessive because it focuses on the bedroom— "the wall
216
opposing," "morning sunlight frothing on the floor"— and the
laundry line— "two gray ropes . . — rather than the soul,
iwhich is the important subject. Also the detail brings the
scene into too clear focus: the soul has just been spirited
from sleep. Furthermore, the seven-word phrase "light in
the moment of its breaking" is wordy; "false dawn" is quite
sufficient. The phrase "in the air" in line 3 is also wordy
and is deleted.
As revisions two and three indicate, Wilbur originally
intended the poem to rhyme. But in the fourth revision he
dispenses with rhyme. Why? He may have felt that the rhe
torical pattern of rhyme did not permit him to achieve the
dramatic expression he sought. On this subject Wilbur
writes:
Until recently, I have inclined I suppose to avoid the
direct, dramatic expression of feeling, and to convey
j it through rhetoric or through hints imbedded in appar-
j ently objective description. My best poems seem to me
| to account somehow for my whole experience and to en-
i gage my whole nature. When sympathetic critics find
what seems to me a passionate poem merely "amiable,"
or are troubled by a sense of "fastidiousness or re
moteness," I hardly know what I can sensibly say. I
must concede the possibility, as all must, that I am
not a "whole soul." I must also wonder whether my
poetry may not be too indirect for its emotion to
transpire. What I must not do, I am sure, is to at
tempt a manner which might satisfy my critics; there
is nothing to do, in art, but to persevere hopefully
in one's peculiarities.
_____ "Love Calls Us" is, for me, a departure in the
217
direction of the dramatic. I am essaying the dramatic
on principle? it's just happening. (Artist and Critic,
p. 20)
J to give expression to this new impulse toward the dramatic,
!
I
Wilbur may have found rhyme an unnecessary encumbrance.
<
i
This possibility may be illustrated by his handling of the
first line in revisions one and two, three, and four. He
jfirst ends the line with "of pulleys," then in revision
jthree he switches to "pulley's cry." He has already decided
>
]that he wants "cry" rather than "squeak" or "shriek,"' so he
I
lis forced into piling up objective detail in order to rhyme
i
!"sky" with "cry." He is also forced into rhyming "opposing"
jwith "unclosing" and "wallow" with "hollow." The line
. two gray ropes that yanked across the sky," as men
tioned above, places improper emphasis on the laundry line
and the phrase "my eyes at their unclosing" is redundant,
since the first line has already stated "My eyes came open
. . ." Wilbur probably decided that to keep all this de
tail for the sake of rhyme and to try to find a rhyme for
"pulley" was obstructing his true purposes. So in version
j
;four he discontinues rhyming and returns to "cry of pul-
1
I
i
•leys ."
i
( In each alteration, in each new word choice Wilbur has
jwoven a more consistent fabric and has infused Part One with
greater spirituality and less corporeality so that Part One
will maintain a balance with Part Two. However, the coun
ter-theme is anticipated in Part One, stanza 4, with the
statement that the soul is "about to remember" all the
realities of human experience. In this stanza Wilbur as
serts that this waking process, this process of accepting
i
ithe world, the flesh, the secular, the vulgar is a daily
'occurrence for the soul:
i
I
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day.
j"The soul shrinks" today and every day from the punctual
!
violation of its peaceful innocence and suspension. The
soul begs to preserve its purity, its innocence: "Let ther
be nothing on earth" but imagination, spirit, bodiless
souls, nothing but "steam," "yet" this cannot be.
The development of the counter-theme, Part Two, begins
with stanza 5. Part Two, however, does not employ the uni
fied imagery and diction of Part-One. There are two' main
reasons for this: the subject matter of Part Two is the
imperfection of earth as opposed to the perfection of the
spiritual utopia longed for by the soul; and Part Two at-,
tempts to balance life's opposites. Hence, antithesis and
Iparadox supplant the reliance of the first part on extended
metaphor.
The imperfection of earthly existence, as discussed in
i
jChapter IX, is a basic principle of Wilbur's theory of the
nature of reality. The soul longs for perfect peace, for
"halcyon days," but it is condemned to live in this world
where perfect peace cannot be found, where the waters are
jnever wholly still. The soul longs for unity but must live
in strange diversity. This duality can be seen best by con
trasting the imagery and diction of Parts One—and—Tw.o. Part
One is organized around the two related images of’the soul
and the laundry; angels. In Part One the predominant color
is white, while Part Two contrasts the soul's vision of
unity with the diversity of earthly reality where there is
not one color, but "colors." The sunlight shines on "ruddy
gallows" and on the "dark habits" of nuns. Wilbur sympa
thizes with the soul's desire that "there be nothing on
earth but laundry," nothing but "clean linen," but this is
f
j
|not the nature of reality. Instead of the "deep joy of
| . . . impersonal breathing," the soul « must descend in
I
j"bitter love / To accept the waking body." The duality of
flesh and spirit cannot be transcended; man is both— he
cannot kill the one without killing the other. The soul
220
longs to "hang bodiless and simple," but it cannot have
I
simplicity; it is doomed to complexity and difficulty.
I
! Yet despite the diversity of reality, the imperfection
L>f earthly existence, the irreconcilability of opposites,
"Love Calls Us" is a happy poem. Both in theme and tone it
calls to mind Wilbur's theory of poetry and his statement
that Frost's "Birches" "does justice to the world, to self,
to literary tradition and to a culture; it is happy in all
jthe ways in which a poem can be happy . . ." ("Poetry and
Happiness," p. 24). The same can be said for "Love Calls
Us " :
When fully awake man must accept full responsibility,
the heaviness of the Fall, evil, the Adversary (thieves,
undone lovers, heavy nuns figure here). When half- or
dream-awake in false dawn man's delight is perfect in
the Platonically perfect angels and angelic vision, but
it seems crucial with Wilbur that the sure-to-come know
ledge does not overwhelm everyday reality with evil
pessimism, darkness or death, and that his view is opti-
1 mistic. The poem is also playful. Criticism should
not be too ponderous about it. The pleasure is in not
taking it too heavily; his sun does not overwhelm or
menace it but "acknowledges / With a warm look." We
can bask in the warmth.
Besides its happiness, "Love Calls Us" reveals a second
essential principle of Wilbur’s theory of poetry, as dis-
■*"Eberhart, Artist and Critic, pp. 4-5.
221
cussed in Chapter VI above. In "Love Calls Us" the soul
|longs for the kind of existence which Wilbur described as
sought by Poe. Like Poe's voyagers, the soul in "Love Calls
Us" seeks to "escape from corrupt mundane consciousness into
I
visionary wholeness and freedom" (see pp. 129-130 above).
[The soul longs for Thule but Wilbur brings it back to this
earth. He does not reject spirituality but favors "a spir-
i
rtuality which is not abstracted, not dissociated and world
i
renouncing" (see p. 126 above). "No poetry," Wilbur writes,
| " can have any strength unless it continually bashes itself
l
against the reality of things" (see p. 127 above and "Bot
tles," p. 187). And so Wilbur bashes the soul against the
I
5
"world's hunks and colors," thieves, nuns, and "lovers un-
I
I
done." In short, the necessity of the soul's clothing it
self with flesh each day is a metaphoric statement of Wil-
Dur's own theory of poetry. For as Wilbur has said, "what
poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from abstraction
and submerge them in sensibility" (see p. 138 above).
In addition to contrasting the single image of perfec-( S *g*jj£
lion of Part One with the multiple image of earthly imper-
i
i
■fection of Part Two, Wilbur presents the things of this
world by means of paradox and antithesis. Love is para-
- j 1
ioxically described as "bitter," and here a host of Wilbur
222
poems leap to mind: the bitter realization of Ulysses that
love once achieved cloys ("Ballade for the Duke of Or
leans"); the knowledge expressed in "Sunlight Is Imagina
tion" that we love and then must lose our love; the prophecy
is "For Ellen" that innocence is inevitably lost and is re-
ip laced by a "starker sight / And newer darker love." The
phrase "bitter love" also serves as a preparation for the
figures in the final stanza— each of whom reflects life's
iparadoxes .
I Stanza 6 begins with a reference to the soul-laundry
image— "Bring them down from their ruddy gallows";— "Them"
refers to the laundry and playfully pictures the clothes as
I
"hanging" on the laundry line like thieves on the gallows.
But the next line balances this humor by a reminder that
there are unfortunate thieves in this world and by a state
ment of Christian compassion. The opening three words have
overtones of "Let there be' light" and they suggest the
Christian idea that God cares for sinners: as Robert Horan
writes, the line is "an acceptance of the fact that the
i
sweating, ruined, half-penitent world must be clothed with
our compassion." The seeming paradox in the line "Let there
be clean linen for the backs of thieves" can be understood
best in the context of Christianity, which is so thoroughly
223
grounded in paradox. "Gallows" and "thieves" has sugges
tions of the two thieves of the Crucifixion. And this in
i
turn reminds us of Christ's attitude toward the harlots and
'other wretched people of his day. It may even be that Wil
bur is obliquely using Christ to exemplify the theme of his
jpoem. Love for mankind brought Christ to this world. In
I
part, it was a "bitter love" relationship, for he was be
trayed and crucified by imperfect man. Yet his perfect
*
balance between flesh and spirit, his selfless and all-
embracing love ultimately explain why there must "be clean
linen for the backs of thieves."
The next line, "Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
jundone," recalls other Wilbur poems presenting the paradoxi-
i
|cal theme of the necessary and fortunate loss of innocence,
ilhe verb "let" is both a statement of the inevitable and a
request. It is a request because only when the lovers learn
the reality of each other's imperfections as well as their
freshness and sweetness will they be able to bring their
love down from the gallows of spiritual abstraction to a
consummation in the flesh. The word "undone” acts as a full
cadence completing the chord struck by "the punctual rape of
every blessed day" in line 18. "Undone" is a word Wilbur
has used in two other poems which treat similar themes and
224
which can be read as amplifications of this single line in
"Love Calls Us":
Love is the g rent esc mercy,
A volley of the sun
T h at lushes all with shade.
T h at the first day be m ended;
And yet, so soon undone,
It is the lover’s curse
T ill tim e be com prehended
A nd the flawed heart unm ade.
W hat can I do but m ove
From folly to defeat.
A nd call that sorrow sweet
T h at teaches us to sec
T h e final face of love
In what w e cannot be?
("Someone Talking to Himself,"
Poems. p. 37)
N ow swings
The sky to noon, and mysteries run
To cover; let our love not blight
The various world, but trust the flight
Of love that falls again where it begun.
All creatures are, and are undone.
Then lose them, lose
With love each one,
And choose
To welcome love in the lively wasting sun.
("Sunlight Is Imagination,"
Poems. p. 210)
A third paradox is presented by the nuns:
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits, . . .
Even the "heaviest" nuns are able to "float." The nuns are
"heavy" in that the flesh-spirit duality is even more
225
difficult for them than for others. They who long so deeply
for spiritual purity, for white linen, must wear "dark hab
its," that is, they must live in this imperfect world and
i
must live with their own human imperfections. Yet, para
doxically, their very traditions, rituals, habits— as Robert
'Horan says, both "custom and costume" (p. 7)--enable the
nuns to "walk in a pure floating"— to find order and to
|accept the chaos and evil of the world without sacrificing
their own spirituality. They are able to keep the "diffi
cult balance."
The last two words express the poem in microcosm. The
first part of the poem presents one side of man— his vision,
f
his spirituality. The second part presents the imperfect
nature of man which severely limits his attempts to achieve
spiritual purity. Though he longs for pure spirit, he can
not escape the flesh. To somehow maintain a "balance" be
tween the two is the "difficult" fate he has inherited.
i
As the phrase "difficult balance" summarizes all that
goes before in "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,"
so does it capture the essential integrity and belief of
Richard Wilbur. In the vast number of his successful poems
we encounter a civilized man struggling to strike a "diffi
cult balance" between freedom and form, spontaneity and
226
tradition, between the religious aspiration contained in
the St. Peter's Fountain and the secular ecstasy contained
in "The Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra." He
jwill often give us a lovely picture of a beautifully sym
metrical garden, but he will never let us forget that
The garden of the world, which no one sees,
Never had walls, is fugitive with lives?
Its shapes escape our simpler symmetries;
There is no resting where it rots and thrives.
("Caserta Garden," Poems,
p. 224)
i
i
I A P P E N D I X E S
I
I
227
AP PE NDI X I
QUESTIONNAIRE TO MR. WILBUR
PERSONAL LETTER FROM MR. WILBUR
228
1. As I read your poetry I notice a general absence of ex
plicit references to Christian theology and yet your
poetry seems to present a rather orthodox view of man
and reality— that is, that man is neither brute nor an
gel, but partakes of both? that the Divine is neither
wholly transcendent nor wholly immanent but present in
both dimensions; that man is imperfect yet worthy of
celebration. If this is so, then why do you--who seem
so deeply aware of and respectful of Western traditions
— avoid explicit references to Christian symbolism, doc-
j trine, themes?
I
2. You have stated that some of your early poems "may at
moments have taken refuge from events in language it
self— in word-play, in the coinage of new words, in a
certain preciosity." Are you disturbed by any other
stylistic or thematic characteristic in your published
| poems? Are you currently striving to overcome any spe-
; cific weakness?
3. Are you dissatisfied with any particular poem for any
particular reason?
4. Several critics have accused you and other so-called
"academic" poets of evading the responsibility of deal
ing with the socio-political problems of our times. I
j have my own rebuttal for these critics, but I would like
I to know how you react to this.
i
I
5. What philosophers and theologians have made the greatest
impact on you? Do you think any particular works have
influenced you?
6. What poets, novelists, critics, men-of-letters do you
find yourself reading most?
229
230
7. As I read your complete poems I see many parallels with
Wallace Stevens: for example, spirituality without
God? a sense of the dynamic nature of reality; an im
pulse to reconcile opposites; a quest for order? the
perception of correspondences between man and nature;
■ the primacy of the imagination. Do you thing these
I qualities are too broad to establish such a parallel
ism? Do you think you have been directly influenced by
Stevens? By any other twentieth-century poets?
8. Do you think it far-fetched to say that the use of
traditional forms (in your poetry as well as others')
has a ritualistic quality: that is, that the use of
form itself is a ritualistic means of celebrating the
continuity of human experience? I ask this because I
feel that there is a universality in your poetry which
is absent in many modern poets who reject traditional
forms--perhaps there is some sort of cause and effect
relationship here. I ask this also because I sense
that your almost total self-restriction to traditional
stanzaic forms goes beyond your published explanations
— namely that form provides aesthetic distance, that it
provides a yardstick with which to measure deviation,
and so on.
9. One critic (Donald Hall) has said that suffering in
your poetry is always "understood and discussed but not
presented in the act." Other critics take you to task
for not expressing a tragic sense of life, for not pro
jecting anguish, torment, etc. And James Dickey in
cludes you in what he calls the "School-of-Charm" poets
who lack personality. What are your thoughts about
such criticism? Have you ever or do you anticipate
writing poetry that is more personal, confessional,
autobiographical?
10. Are you publishing another volume of poetry soon?
When?
11. Would you allow me to quote any of your answers in my
dissertation?
14 October 66
Dear Mr. Cummins ,
I've just had a note from Messrs. Davis, Baskin, and
Talbot, proposing that I tape a few poems for your use and
saying parenthetically, "This teacher was also a good friend
of ours.” It's clear.that you make a difference to your
students.
There's not actually much time today, as my wife and I
;are about to make a late-Friday-afternoon race for the moun
tains . But I'll see if I cannot blurt to some purpose and
achieve concision.
1) My view of things, though not steady, is some sort
of Catholic Christian, but I don't as you note make much use
of Christian symbol or doctrine. This is because I cannot
bear to borrow the voltage of highly-charged words, as Edith
Sitwell did in her post-conversion poems full of lions and
suns and crosses. It is seen through at last, as one sees
through the panoply of a stupid ceremony. Poetry full of
jready-made emotional value will also not represent the move
ment of the mind and heart toward understanding and clari
fication, and poetry has to be discovery rather than the
celebration of received ideas.
2) Am I currently striving to overcome any weakness?
I suppose I feel, just now, a little more than the usual
dissatisfaction, but I shall not know what dissatisfies me., ;
for certain, until I find by accident what will improve upon
it. I don't deliberately operate on my style. To be a
little more specific, one thing which now vexes me is an
inclination to think too readily in rhymes--the result, I
suspect, of translating 3,000-odd lines of Moliere into
couplets.
3) I am satisfied, up to a point, with all the poems I
haven't destroyed.
232
4) I don't think my poetry does avoid philosophical
matters, but I haven't written too many explicitly political
[or "social" poems. "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran
Act," "After the Last Bulletins," an earlier poem called
("For an American Poet Just Dead"--and more recently "Advice
Jto a Prophet" and "On the Marginal Way." I don't think I
[shall ever again strike the note of the third poem men
tioned, although some readers are very fond of railing and
indicting in poetry; I have Robert Frost's preference for
jwriting about immedicable woes rather than merely complain
ing. Most political poetry is complaining and speechifying,
and doesn't come out of the whole and intricate self. But I
[agree with my friend Andre du Bouchet that any full poetry
is bound to have an implicit political dimension.
| 5) Augustine. Thomas Traherne in his "Centuries."
Pascal. The first and third one feels in such a poem as
"Beasts."
j 6)1 read poetry in a general and open way, and enjoy
something in any able poet you might mention. I like novel
ists who write prose and write it well: Waugh, for example.
7) I'm sure that my enthusiasm for Stevens, circa 1948-
52, has affected my own work, although I can't say just
^7here. Of late I have found his work too undramatic, con-
noisseural, and inconclusively ruminative, but still pick it
{up with pleasure and may have another spell of enchantment,
•in time. For all his stress on the ding an sich, I find him
■too hothouse subjective right now.
! 8) I don't think I generally have a ritual intention in
jusing rhyme and meter, unless there is a kind of ritual
jwhich begets what it celebrates, having started in igno
rance. I don't make much use of "traditional forms" in the
! sense of writing sonnets, Spenserian stanza, villanelles,
and all that. I do use meters and rhymes most of the time,
but generally let the words of a developing poem choose
their own form.
9) I suspect that I have, rather often, expressed "a
tragic sense of life," but I don't advertise my actual pri
vate life or "project torment." The Berkeley Review pub
lished some remarks of mine on this subject a few years ago,
and the remarks were included in a book edited by Tony
Ostroff and called, roughly, The Poet as Reader and Critic.
I vote for obliquity and distancing in the use of one's own
life, both because I am a bit reserved and because I think
I
jthese produce a more honest and usable poetry,
j 10) I have perhaps one-third of a new volume, and can't
233
guess when I'll be ready to publish again. It looks as
though I were getting terribly choosy, and terribly anxious
not to repeat myself. I've never written quickly, and so
taon't fear that I'm drying up; but I'd be grateful for a
spate.
I 11) All these answers have been hastily given, but if
you'll make it plain that I was thinking on the typewriter
I shan't mind if the above is quoted.
With good wishes,
/s/ Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur
APPEN DI X II
STANZA FORMS AND RHYME SCHEME
234
235
I Short Title
'Page _ _ Stanza Form Rhyme Scheme
: of Poem J
121 Epistemology
186 The Peace of
Cities
25 Eight Riddles
131 Parable
180 Potato
182 First Snow in
Alsace
200 Sun and Air
207 A Dubious Night
Couplets
closed couplet
(iambic pentameter)
open and closed
Tercets
triplet (iambic
pentameter)
short terza rima
tristich
terza rima (iambic
tetrameter)
terza rima (irregu
lar meter)
terza rima (irregu
lar meter)
distich
A-A-A; B-B-B
Quatrains
6 Advice envelope stanza A-B-B-A
8 Junk tetrastich unrhymed
13 Puppets A-B-A-B
14 A Summer Morning a 5-b3-a4-■B4
19 She envelope A-B-B-A
21 Gemini A-A-B-B
22 The Undead tetrastich unrhymed
24 October Maples A-B-A-B
29 Grasshopper irregular form As -B3 -A3 -■B2
35 A Fire Truck idiosyncratic A-B-A-B3
38 In the Smoking Car A-B-A-B
42 To Ishtar tetrastich unrhymed
52 Fall in Corrales (the "A's" are
near rhymes)
A-B-A-B
54 Next Door irregular form x 5-a4-x 5~-A3
236
j Sifioxrt TiiiXo
■Page _ _ Stanza Form Rhyme Scheme
I of Poem J
63 Altitudes envelope A-B-B-A
68 Piazza Di Spagna irregular meter A-B-A-B
70 November Turkey irregular form X3 -A3-X5 -A3
72 Mind heroic quatrain
(iambic pentameter)
A-B-A-B
73 After the Last
Bulletins
irregular form x 5-a 5-x3-a4
. 75 Lamarck Elaborated A-B-A-B
77 Merlin Enthralled A-B-A-B
81 The Beacon tetrastich (lines
4 of consecutive
pairs of stanzas
rhyme)
X-X-X-X
83 Statues envelope A-B-B-A
■ 84
1
Looking into
History
1st 2 stanzas are
iambic pentameter;
3rd stanza is iambic
tetrameter
X-A-X-A
93 Apology tetrastich
97 Exeunt irregular form A3 -Bb -A4 -B3
100 Speech Repeal tetrastich
a3-b s-a4-b4 103 Baroque Wall
Fountain
irregular form
109 New Railway irregular form X3-As -X5 -A3
117 A World Without
Objects
middle 2 lines vary
between 5 and 6
stresses
a3-b-a-b3
118 The Pardon heroic quatrain A-B-A-B
119 Part of a Letter irregular form x 5-a4-x5-a3
125 Museum Piece long ballad X-A-X-A
128 In Elegy Season heroic quatrain A-B-B-A
129 Marche long ballad A4 -A4 -B4 -B4
133 Pity heroic quatrain A-B-B-A
138 Five Women Bath
ing
long ballad with
interlocking stan-
zaic rhyme (iambic
tetrameter)
A-B-A-B
141 The Terrace descending feet; 5,
4,3, 2 interlocking
stanzaic rhyme
X5-X4 -X3 -X3
237
Page
Short Title
of Poem
Stanza Form Rhyme Scheme
143 Problem from Milton heroic quatrain A-B-A-B
145 Clearness irregular meter—
interlocking stan-
zaic rhymes
x-x-x-x
150 Still, Citizen
Sparrow
irregular meter A-B-B-A
151 Wellfleet heroic quatrain A—B—A—B
153 Driftwood interlocking rhyme,
descending feet
X5 -x3 —X4 -x3
155 A Courtyard Thaw irregular iambic
tetrameter; some
iambic pentameter
A-B-A-B
156 Lament irregular meter A-B-A-B
157 Flumen Tenebrarum irregular A5 -B4-A5-B3
161 To an American
Poet
irregular A-B-A-B
177 Tywater in memoriam stanza
(iambic tetrameter)
A-B-B-A
178 Mined Country irregular meter,
interlocking stan-
zaic rhyme
X-X-X-X
183 First Snow irregular A-B-B-A
187 Giaour and Pacha heroic quatrain A-B-A-B
188 Up, Jack heroic quatrain X-A-X-A
I92r -'
A Song interlocking stan-
zaic rhyme
x5_x3-x4-x2
193 The Walgh-Vogel irregular (the last
stanza is 3 lines)
a5-b4-bs-a3
195 Objects irregular A-B-A-B
197 A Dutch Courtyard (iambic) a3-b5-b4 -a3
199 Folk Tune in memoriam stanza A4 -B- B4-A4
205 Superiorities some rhyme, but ir
regular (iambic
tetrameter)
X-X-X-X
206 A Simplification irregular meter A-B-A-B
208 L1 Etoile iambic pentameter X-A-X-A
211 & interlocking stan-
zaic rhyme
X-X-X-X
213 .The Regatta in memoriam stanza A-B-B-A
Page
Short Title
of Poem
Stanza Form Rhyme Scheme
218 Attention irregular alterna
tion of iambic tet
rameter and penta
meter
A-B-B-A
223 Caserta Garden irregular meter
Cinquains
A-B-A-B
65 Love Calls Us pentastich
Beasts pentastich
173 Cigales pentastich
184 Place Pigalle irregular form A-B-B-A-B
191 June Light irregular form A-B-B-A-B
219 Grace interlocking stan-
zaic rhyme
Sixains
A—A—B C B
15 A Hole in the
Floor
unrhymed
76 A Plain Song irregular form A5-B3-B3-c 5
C4 -A3
98 Marginalia irregular meter unrhymed
106 An Event speech cadence A-B-A-C-B-C
116 Conjuration A-B-A-C-B-C
122 Castles and Dis
tances
A-B-C-A-C-B
130 Juggler speech cadence A-B-C-B-A-B
132 The Good Servant A5—B5-A3—B3
c3-c3
135 Year's End stave of six
(iambic pentameter)
A-B-B-A-C-C
136 The Puritans irregular meter A-B-B-C-B-C
137 Grasse A-B-A-C-B-C
144 A Glance from the
Bridge
iambic pentameter A-B-A-C-B-C
148 Beowulf iambic pentameter A-B-B-C-A-C
239
I Short Title o - U
■Page ^ Stanza Form Rhyme Scheme
I of Poem
152 Death of a Toad essentially iambic A4-A6 —B5—C5 -
b4-c3
165 He Was irregular meter A-B-C-B-C-A
166 A Smile for Her
Smile
A-B-C-A-C-B
167 Ceremony A-B-C-A-B-C
185 Violet and Jasper iambic pentameter A-B-C-B-C-A
189 In a Bird Sanctu
ary
speech cadence A-B-C-B-C-A
194' The Melongene a 5-b3-a3-c 5-
b3-c2
198 My Father Paints A5— B5— A2— B3-
c6 -c2
215 Bell Speech iambic pentameter A-B-B-C-B-A
222 For Ellen speech cadence A-B-C-C-B-A
226 The Beautiful irregular meter A-X-A-B-X-B
Changes
Septets
134 The Sirens
201 Two Songs
A-B-C-B-A-C-B
A-A-B-C-B-B-C
Eight-line Stanza
5 Two Voices in a
Meadow
iambic trimeter X-A-X-A-X-B-
X-B
47 Another Voice iambic trimeter A-B-A-B-C-D-
C-D
56 A Christmas Hymn iambic trimeter 2 rhyme words
per stanza
69 John Chrysostom iambic trimeter A-B-C-D-D-B-
C-A
79 A Voice from common octave A-B-A-B-C-D-
under (iambic pentameter) C-D
88 Digging for China irregular and
limited rhyming
240
Page
Short Title
of Poem
Stanza Form Rhyme Scheme
99 Boy at the Window mixed brace A-B-B-A/
C-D-C-D
101 All These Birds A-B-C-C-A-B-
D-D
115 Then X-A-X-B-X-A-
X-B
120 La Rose des Vents iambic dimeter A-A-X-B-X-A-
X-B
159 From the Lookout
Rock
iambic tetrameter A-B-A-C-D-B-
D-C
174 Water Walker a transitional line
between each stanza
rhymes with B of the
preceding stanza
A3 -X3 -X3 -A3 -
B8 -Xs -X4 -B3
216 Poplar, Sycamore x4-a6 -b5-a3 -
As -B4-C5-C5
217 Winter, Spring a-b-a-c-b-d-
C-D
Nine-line Stanza
209 Sunlight Is Imagi
nation
rhyme scheme
varies in
each stanza
27
36
107
108
Shame
Someone Talking
A Chronic Condi
tion
The Mill
Long Poems
33 lines
42 lines, heavily
trochaic trimeter
16 lines
33 lines
unrhymed
rhymed, but
all three
stanzas are
different
A-B-A-C-B-D-
C-E-F-C—D-F-
E-C—G-G
blank verse
'Page
Short Title
of Poem
Stanza Form Rhyme Scheme
146 Games One
147 Games Two
203 The Waters
221 Lightness
25 lines (alternat
ing dimeter and
trimeter)
29 lines
39 lines
36 lines
A-B-B-A
C-D-D-C
E-F-F-E
G-H-H-G
I-J-J-I
K-L-L-K
same pattern
as Games One
irregular
r hymi ng s chane
A-A-B-B-C-C-
etc.
Miscellaneous
32 The Aspen and
the Stream
9 Junk
a dialogue contain
ing:
sixains:
quatrains:
Anglo-Saxon,
alliterative
A-A-B-B-C-C
A-B-A-B
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
242
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Book-length Studies of Modern Poets
and Richard Wilbur
Abbe, George. You and Contemporary Poetry. North Guilford,
• Conn.: Author-Audience Publications, 1957.
I
Cambon, Glauco. The Inclusive Flame. Bloomington: Indiana
| University Press, 1963.
I
i . Recent American Poetry. Minneapolis: Uni
versity_of Minnesota Press, 1962.
Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms.
! New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1957.
j __________________ . Poetry in Our Time. New York: Anchor
i Books, 1963.
Dickey, James. The Suspect in Poetry. Madison, Minn.: The
Sixties Press, 1964.
Donoghue, Denis. Connoisseurs of Chaos. New York: Mac-
j millan, 1965.
I
Ehrenpreis, Irvin, ed. American Poetry. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1965.
Hungerford, Edward, ed. Poets in Progress: Critical Pref
aces to Ten Contemporary Americans. Evanston: North
western University Press, 1962.
Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 195 3.
t
243_
244
Kazin, Alfred. Contemporaries. Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1962.
Kuntz, Joseph M. Poetry Explication. Denver: Alan Swa1-
( low, 1962.
Linenthal, Mark, ed. Aspects of Poetry. Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1963.
Miles, Josephine. Eras and Modes in English Poetry. Berke
ley: University of California Press, 1964.
Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality. Cambridge, Mass.:
The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press,
1965 .
Mills, Ralph. Contemporary American Poetry. New York:
Random House, 1965.
__________ . ed. On the Poet and His Craft: Selected
! Prose of Theodore Roethke. Seattle: University of
j Washington Press, 1965.
i _____________ . Richard Eberhart. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1966.
__________ . Theodore Roethke. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1963.
National Poetry Festival: Held in the Library of Congress.
October 22-24, 1962— Proceedings. Washington, D. C.:
Library of Congress.
Nemerov, Howard, ed. Poets on Poetry. New York: Basic
Books, Inc., 1966.
Ostroff, Anthony, ed. The Contemporary Poet as Artist and
Critic. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry.
Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Rahv, Philip. Image and Idea. Norfolk: New Directions,
1949.
245
Rosenberg, Harold. The Tradition of the New. New York:
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Rosenthal, Macha Louis. The Modern Poets. New York: Ox
ford University'Press, 196 0.
Ishapiro, Karl. In Defense of Ignorance. New York: Random
House, 1952.
____________ , and Robert Beum. A Prosody Handbook. New
York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Southworth, James G. More Modern American Poets. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1954.
Staples, Hugh. Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962.
Stepanchev, Stephen. American Poetry since 1945. New York:
Harper and Row, 1965.
•Wright, George. The Poet in the Poem. Berkeley: Univer-
1 sity of California Press, 1962.
Journal Articles on Wilbur and Contemporary
American Poetry
American Scholar. XXVIII (Summer 1959). Issue on contem
porary American poetry.
Asselineau, Roger. "Les Fleurs de verre de Richard Wilbur,"
Critique. 161 (October 1960), 844-848.
Barksdale, Richard K. "Trends in Contemporary Poetry,"
Phvlon. XIX (1958), 408-416.
Ciardi, John. "Our Most Melodic Poet," Saturday Review.
August 18, 1956, pp. 18-19.
Cole, Thomas. "Wilbur's Second Volume," Poetry. 82 (April
1953), 37-39.
246
Conquest, Robert. "Mistah Eliot— He Dead?" Audit. I (1960),
ii, 12-17.
Dickey, James. "The Death and Keys of the Censor," Sewanee
I Review. LXIX (Spring 1961), 318-332.
!
______________ . "The Stillness at the Center of the Target,"
Sewanee Review. LXX (Summer 1962), 484-503.
Drake, Leah B. "New Voices in Poetry," Atlantic Monthly.
199 (June 1957), 76.
Eberhart, Richard. Rev. of The Beautiful Changes. New York
! Times Book Review. January 11, 1948, p. 4.
!
'Faverty, Frederic E. "The Poetry of Richard Wilbur," North
western University Tri-Quarterlv. II (Fall 1959), 26-
30.
Fiedler, Leslie. "A Kind of Solution: The Situation of
Poetry Now," Kenvon Review. XXVI (Winter 1964), 54-79.
Fitts, Dudley. Rev. of Advice to a Prophet. New York Times
Book Review. October 29, 1961, p. 16.
Flint, F. Cudworth. "Seeing, Thinking, Saying, Singing,"
Virginia Quarterly Review. XXXV (Spring 1959), 310-320.
Foster, Richard. "Debauch by Craft: Problems of the Young
er Poets," Perspective. XII (Spring-Summer 1960), 3-17.
Fraser, G. S. "Some Younger American Poets," Commentary.
XXIII (May 1957), 457-459.
Golffing, F. C. "A Remarkable New Talent," Poetry. 71
(January 1948), 221-223.
_______________ , and Barbara Gibbs. "The Public Voice: Re
marks on Poetry Today," Commentary. XXVII (July 1959),
63-69.
Greene, George. "Four Campus Poets," Thought. XXXV (1960),
223-246.
247
Gregory, Horace. "The Poetry of Suburbia," Partisan Review.
XXIII (Fall 1956), 545.
Gunn, Thomas. Rev. of Advice to a Prophet. Yale Review. 51
(March 1962), 482.
Hall, Donald. "'Ah, Love, Let Us Be True': Domesticity and
History in Contemporary Poetry," American Scholar.
XXVIII (Summer 1959), 310-319.
_. "Claims on the Poet," Poetry, 88 (September
1956), 398-403.
_. "The New Poetry," New World Writing. VII
(April 1955), 231-247.
Hester, Sister Mary. "'Juggler1 by Richard Wilbur," English
I Journal. 54 (December 1965), 880-881.
Holmes, Theodore. "A Prophet without Prophecy," Poetry. 100
i (April 1962), 37-40.
I
Jerome, Hudson. "Poets of the Sixties," Antioch Review. XIX
I (Fall 1959), 421-432.
i
i
Kunitz, Stanley. "News of the Root," Poetry. 73 (January
1949), 223.
Langbaum, Robert. "The New Nature Poetry," American Schol
ar. XXVIII (Summer 1959), 335.
Meredith, William. "A Note on Richard Wilbur," Poetry. 100
(April 1962), 40.
Myers, John A., Jr. "Death in the Suburbs" [explication of
"To an American Poet Just Dead'], English Journal. LII
| (May 1963), .377-379.
i
I
Plutzxk* Hyam. Rev. of Things of Thus World. Yale Review.
46 (Winter 1957), 295.
Schwartz, Delmore. "The Cunning and the Craft of the Un
conscious and the Preconscious," Poetry. 94 (June
1959), 203.
248
Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "Literalist of the Imagination,"
Christian Century. 75 (March 19, 1958), 344.
Southworth, James G. "The Poetry of Richard Wilbur," Col
lege English. XXII (October 1960), 24-29.
Warlow, Francis W. "Richard Wilbur," Bucknell Review. VII
(May 1958), 217-233.
Whittemore, Reed. "The Two Rooms: Humor in American
Verse," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature.
V (Autumn 1964), 186.
Williams, William Carlos. "Some Hints toward the Enjoyment
of Modern Verse," Quarterly Review of Literature. VII
(November 1953), 172.
Poems. Critical Reviews, and Articles
by Richard Wilbur
Wilbur, Richard. "Between Visits" (rev. of C. Day Lewis's
Poems 1943-1947). Poetry. 74 (May 1949), 114-117.
I ________________ . "The Bottles Become New Too," Quarterly
Review of Literature. VII (November 1953), 188-192.
________________ . "The Genie in the Bottle," Writing Poetry.
ed. John Holmes. Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1960, pp.
120-130.
_________________. "The Heart of the Thing" (rev. of Marianne
Moore's Like a Bulwark). New York Times Book Review.
November 11, 1956, p. 18.
_________________. introduction to the Laurel Series Poe.
New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1959.
_________________. "On My Own Work," Shenandoah. VII (Autumn
1965), 57-66.
_________________. "On Robert Lowell's 'Skunk Hour'" in The
Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, ed. Anthony
Ostroff. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964.
249
Wilbur, Richard, ed. Poems by William Shakespeare. Balti
more: Penguin Books, 1966..
. The Poems of Richard Wilbur. New York:
| Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., n.d.
j _________________ . "Poetry and Happiness," Reflection: The
Weslevan Quarterly. I (Fall 1966), 13-24.
. "Poetry and the Landscape," The New Land
scape . ed. Gyorgy Kepes. Chicago: Paul Theobald and
Co., 1956.
. Rev. of John Frederick Nims1s A Fountain
in Kentucky. Poetry. 77 (November 1950), 105-107.
. "Robert Graves' New Volume," Poetry. 87
(December 1955), 175-179.
. "Round About a Poem by Housman," The Mo
ment of Poetry, ed. D. C. Allen. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1962.
. "Sumptuous Destitution," Emilv Dickinson.
ed. Richard B. Sewell. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Pren-
tice-Hall, Inc., 1963.
Poems of Wilbur not Published in
! The Poems of Richard Wilbur
!"Complaint," New Yorker. January 23, 1965, p. 36.
!
"A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson, on the Occasion of His
Refusal of Peter Hurd's Official Portrait," The New
York Review. April 6, 1967.
j"Natural Song," American Scholar. XVIII (Winter 1948-49),
| 76-77.
I
"Proof," Atlantic Monthly. 213 (March 1964), 62.
|
|"Rillons, rillettes," New Yorker. January 29, 1966, p. 28.
250
"Seed Leaves," New Yorker. April 4, 1964, p. 42.
"Under Cygnus," Nation. December 19, 1966, p. 675.
"We," Poetry. 73 (December 1948), 127-128.
"Weather Bird," Poetry. 73 (December 1948), 129-130.
Recordings of Wilbur Reading His Own Works
'Poems of Richard Wilbur. A private tape recording conducted
for Paul Cummins at Wesleyan University, October 19,
1966. Poems include: "Juggler," "Giacometti," "Water
Walker," "Tywater," "Folk Tune," "The Beautiful Chang
es," "Caserta Garden," "The Walgh-Vogel," "The Death of
a Toad."
The Poems of Richard Wilbur, read by the author. Spoken
Arts. Library of Congress, New York.
Anthologies of Poetry
i
I
'Allen, Donald M. The New American Poetry 1945-1960. New
York: Grove Press, 196 0.
Brinnin, John Malcolm, and Bill Read, eds. The Modern
l Poets: An American British Anthology. New York:
| McGraw-Hill Co., 1963.
I
'Ciardi, John, ed. Mid-Centurv American Poets. New York:
Twayne, 1950.
lElliott, George P., ed. Fifteen Modern American Poets. New
York: Rinehart, 1956.
Engle, Paul, and Joseph Langland, eds. Poet's Choice. New
York: A Delta Book, 1966.
Hall, Donald, ed. Contemporary American Poetry. Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 196 3.
251
Hall, Donald, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, eds. New
Poets of England and America. New York: Meridian
Books, 1957.
Kessler, Jasha, ed. American Poems: A Contemporary Collec
tion . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1964.
Leary, Paris, and Robert Kelly, eds. A Controversy of
Poets. New York: Anchor Books, 1965.
Lowenfalls, Walter, ed. Poets of Today; A New American
Anthology. New York: International Publishers, 1964.
Martz, William J., ed. The Distinctive Voice. Palo Alto:
Scott, Foresman and Co., 1966.
I
Rodman, Selden, ed. 100 Modern Poems. New York: Mentor
Books, 1951.
Shapiro, Karl, ed. American Poetry. New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell Co., 1960.
j 9
\
Wain, John, ed. Anthology of Modern Poetry. London:
Hutchison and Co., 1963.
Wright, David, ed. Midcenturv English Poetry 1940-1960.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965.
Miscellaneous Works
Alvarez, A. The School of Donne. New York: A Mentor Book,
1967 .
Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de. The Phenomenon of Man. New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959.
Ciardi, John. How Does a Poem Mean? Cambridge, Mass.,
1959 .
Davenport, Guy, trans. Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments
of Archilochus. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1964.
252
Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy. New York: Pocket
Books, Inc., 1954.
Leishman, J. B. The Art of Marvell's Poetry. London:
Hutchison and Co., 1966.
Lowell, Robert. Lord Wearv's Castle and The Mills of the
Kavanauahs. New York: Meridian Books, 1964.
________________. Near the Ocean. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1967.
Roethke, Theodore. Words for the Wind. Bloomington: The
Indiana University Press, 1965.
Shapiro, Karl. Poems: 1940-1953. New York: Random House,
1953 .
jStevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Alfred
| Knopf, 1964.
J
I _________________ . Opus Posthumous. New York: Alfred
| Knopf, 1957.
I
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge at San Luis Rey. New York:
Pocket Books, Inc., 1955.
Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems. New York:
Macmillan, 1959.

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