CPR - The Bright Underside of Every Dark Thing: Richard Wilbur

E-mail this site to a friend.

more than 100 reviews,
interviews, and articles.

	$6 per month
	$18 per year

Richard Wilbur is one of the few major poets of whom it may be said that his modesty is the greater part of his gift. I do not speak of the garden-variety reticence we often attribute to formal verse. Apologists for rhyme and meter sometimes portray those devices, not without reason, as embankments the sea chafes. The thrill is in the salt spray, a taste of deep reserves withheld. Others, less enamored with fixed verse forms, view them as artifices that hold chaos at bay—with all the heft and polish of a storm window.

When I mention reticence or modesty or reserve in connection with Wilbur, I need not invoke these tired arguments. The quality I want to trace in his work is distinct, though at times indistinguishable, from his technical mastery. We find it in some of his most memorable lines—“obscurely yet most surely called to praise” or “that slight uncertainty which makes us sure” or, in that beloved poem for his daughter, “The Writer,” when he describes a starling’s baffled flight, waiting

… humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

In such poems, humility before language is his inspiration, doubt of self-expression his Muse.

This doubt, though ever-present in his poems, never begets despondency. It serves instead as a necessary condition for gratitude—and grace. Randall Jarrell, in a speech he gave at the Library of Congress to mark “50 years of American poetry,” grafted Wilbur onto the end of a long, rolling mosaic that took in everyone from Edwin Arlington Robinson to Robert Lowell. With so much of Wilbur yet unwritten, Jarrell pronounced: “He obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.” Jarrell continued: “It is this compulsion, and not merely his greater talent and skill, that differentiates him so favorably from the controlled, accomplished, correct poets who are common nowadays.”

Jarrell was wrong, in one important respect. There is in Wilbur nothing of the hankering sense of duty or rigid obligation that words like “obsessively” and “compulsion” imply. Wilbur’s display of “the bright underside of every dark thing” is less an optimist’s version of OCD than a tour of discovery from poem to poem. The speaker of these poems is awed into eloquence, is movingly surprised by their ability to hold multiple truths. Where another poet might settle for the frisson of such ambiguities, Wilbur resolves them into a panoptic vision, as in the late poem about a kaleidoscope. In deference to his twin stars—playfulness and invention—Wilbur uses the poem’s title to name both the word “toy” and the kaleidoscope’s creator.

Sir David Brewster’s Toy

In this tube you see

At the far end a batch of

Colored-glass debris—

Which, however, grows

Upon reflection to an

Intricate pied rose,

Flushed with sun, that might,

Set in some cathedral wall,

Paraphrase the light.

Now, at the least shake,

The many colors jumble

And abruptly make

The rose rearrange,

Adding to form and splendor

The release of change.

Rattle it afresh

And see its coruscating

Flinders quickly mesh,

Fashioning once more

A fine sixfold gaudiness

Never seen before.

Many prophets claim

That heaven’s joys, though endless,

Are not twice the same;

This kaleidoscope

Can, in that connection, give

Exercise in hope.

Wilbur’s vision is no artificially imposed order, but a voluntary identification with the things of the world, an intelligence he describes as “mother-wit” in the poem “April 5, 1974”:

There was a subtle flood of steam

Moving upon the face of things.

It came from standing pools and springs

And what of snow was still around;

It came of winter’s giving ground

So that the freeze was coming out,

As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,

Relaxes into mother-wit.

Flowers, I said, will come of it.

It is not usual to consider Wilbur in the tradition of Sufi mystical poets or the Bhakti poets of Hinduism, and yet he shares with them the rapture that comes of devotion—a devotion made sweeter by longing for belonging. In Wilbur’s work, a comparable struggle takes place between doubt and mother-wit, with wit invariably the victor. Think of the starling in the poem, “The Writer,” previously quoted, and its triumphant escape from the bedroom window, and then listen to this poem, “The Mind”:

Mind in its purest play is like some bat

That beats about in caverns all alone,

Contriving by a kind of senseless wit

Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore;

Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,

And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar

In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection?

The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save

That in the very happiest intellection

A graceful error may correct the cave.

His last line recalls a poem by Delmore Schwartz. There the line is: “In dark accidents, the mind’s sufficient grace.” Schwartz’ poem is titled “The Beautiful American Word, Sure,” and, indeed, “sure” is one of Wilbur’s favorite words—but for him it has always a hard-won usage. Even the syntactical unfolding of his dependent clauses, with relative pronouns “which” or “who” or “that” often leading a stanza or line, is characteristic of Wilbur’s search for unity, a stripping bare of surface differences.

His quest for interrelatedness may be a form of idealism, but he is shrewd enough to know the limits of metaphor. Wilbur may be a devotional poet, in other words, but his subservience is subversive. “Odd that a thing is most itself when likened,” he says in a blank-verse poem called “The Liar.”

It is something in us like the catbird’s song

From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning

That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,

Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant

Of the first springs, and it is tributary

To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut

That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron

Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof

Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre,

Or of the garden where we first mislaid

Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting

Out of what cognate splendor all things came

To take their scattering names….

Like all great liars, poets are frequently running into debt, but at least they acknowledge that debt—to the “cognate splendor” from which “all things came”—and their gratitude makes them more generous than literal truth-tellers.

In “An Introductory Note” to his recent Collected Poems, Wilbur recounts Wallace Stevens saying, “‘I like all my poems.’ Every poet has moments of feeling that way,” Wilbur writes, “moved by gratitude for all the times he got something decently said, or hoped to have done so, and could in conscience add another poem to his manuscript. That, I think, is the mood in which a collected poems—as opposed to a sternly winnowed selected—should be assembled.” Consequently, he explains, “nothing has been thrown out, and any changes of wording are too few and too slight to mention.”

It is we in turn who must be grateful for a humility that admits children’s poems and translations, song lyrics and riddles, along with more well-known offerings. His poetry for children, though in itself delightful, can be read as a primer for understanding Robert Frost’s dictum, “poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.” The book-length sequences “Opposites” and “A Few Differences” enact those tricks of reversal.

Reading the children’s poems as they appear at the end of the Collected, one is tempted again to quote Frost, “This was no playhouse, but a house in earnest.” Just how serious the stakes can be is illustrated not only by Wilbur’s famous lines from “The Writer”: “It is always a matter, my darling/Of life or death, as I had forgotten”—but also in such poems as “Statues” and “Leaving,” dark poems about children playing. I will end with two short poems that describe the absence of play, and what that would mean for this poet, not to speak of what it would mean for all of us. From “Opposites”:

Because what’s present doesn’t last,

The opposite of it is past.

Or if you choose to look ahead,

Future’s the opposite instead.

Or look around to see what’s here,

And absent things will not appear.

There’s one more opposite of present

That’s really almost too unpleasant:

It is when someone takes away

Something with which you like to play.

And here is another poem, this one a translation, that can be read as a late companion piece to Wilbur’s frequently anthologized poem about a boy and a snowman, “Boy at the Window.” The original is by the Bulgarian poet, Valeri Petrov.

A Cry from Childhood

Why must it come just now to trouble me,

This sudden, shrill, and dreamlike cry

Of children calling “Valeri! Valeri!”

Out in the street nearby?

It is not for me, that distant childhood call;

Alas, it is for me no more.

They are calling now to someone else, my small

Namesake who lives next door.

Though such disturbances, I must admit,

Are troubling to my train of thought,

I keep my feelings to myself, for it

Would be comical, would it not,

If, from his high and studious retreat,

A gaunt old man leaned out to say

“I can’t come out” to the children in the street,

“I’m not allowed to play.”

We may thank Richard Wilbur for a modesty that allows him to keep returning, again and again, to play with us poor street-children.