Asides
Sugar Maples, January by Richard Wilbur
Anterooms
Year's End by Richard Wilbur
Love calls us to the Things of this world
Advice to a Prophet
Two Voices in a Meadow. (first poem in 1961 "Advice to s Prophet"
Poetry podcast. Poem
by Wilbur “Two Voices in a Meadow,” chosen by Stephen Mitchell.
The pattern and meter express what the meaning is... Mitchell and Muldoon talk of it as a
"painterly poem of surrender with a Tao note of joyful effort in living". The stone is just as spiritual
as a Holy man... like a dead body, it accepts with equal equanimity being put on a throne or thrown
into a gutter.
sensitivity of inner ear… like Milton, Stevens,
Wilbur understood that giving oneself over to something beyond oneself is a
pre-requisite to writing a great poem… giving up the ego to the "great wind" –
inspiration – spirit… (anonymity… given to translator…it is not about who did the translation, but whether it is "well done". With Wilbur's witty translations, there is always a hint of Wilbur however...)
I see in my Collected Poems (1943-2004) many poems marked 12/2/2010
Blackberries for Amelia
A Barred Owl
This Pleasing Anxious Being
Valeri Petrov: A Cry from Childhood
On Having Mis-identified a Wild Flower
Some Riddles from Symphosius
For W. H. Auden
Ode to Pleasure
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Sent to Group:
Sent to Group:
About Wilbur’s poems, one reviewer for The Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”There are so many to choose from!
**
Asides -- just like the theatre... the seasons' long sentence (and note how the poem is one long sentence!) the "upswept" gold of larch, then the willow (two w's) drooping branches of yellow (yet another w) --
like visual arches that make a contrast of open and closed parentheses . The last leaves we can imagine scattered, as yet more parentheses. The music, and form enhance a sense of watching a play The the enjambments, the embraced rhyme, the metric pulse is all carefully staged, but like good theatre, does not seem artificial, but rather fully engages us iwith its enchantments.
Sugar Maples: January. I love the rhythm of the first sentence spread over two couplets. Then... the more percussive sound (sap/tap) imagining time moving on from January to the Spring rising of sap.
The calm of things being how they are on the moment...
Anterooms paints a waiting seen -- the sundial, uncovered... from snow... and time, becomes something to ponder -- how it can freeze... or melt, "hasten by" or stop. How an instant can dilate...
fool us thinking long years are brief. I love that he brings in the word "belief" -- how we struggle
with the circle of life where the idea of once was, and no longer, can be revived in memory or
"cobwebbed pane of dream.. " The dark reminds me of Dante going down through circles of Hell...
living and dead meet without surprise.
Some felt the sundial is the poet speaking.
Two Voices in a Meadow is another delight of sound, repetitions, contrasts... over/under the crib of God; the contrast of questions: "What power had I" followed by the bravado of the milkweed
claiming the field; "Why should I move", which sounds arrogant, is followed by a meditative
reflection about desire. Two fatalisms participating with destiny... accept, assert, surrender?
The milkweed calls on wind... the stone accepts where chance would have it... the former
like the innocent child filled with hope; the latter, a wise philosopher...
The poem calls forth the nativity scene... anonymous as cherubs... casual as cow-dung...
heaven and earth around the "crib of God". I love the title... the set up of living plant,
and settled stone.
Year's End. This poem has a muting quality about it... I love how the noun, "down" becomes a
verb of snow coming down, soft as down... the soft sibilance... he paints "shapen atmosphere"
without us needing to see details... From there to the "stilling" of life: leaves caught in the ice;
ferns becoming fossils; Pompei buried in ash frozen in time... The lesson: sudden ends of time...
need to be considered... tapestries of afterthought rhymes with "we fray into the future, rarely wrought". All is muffled, the sound of a buried radio... and the bell unable to carry the sound -- as if bell and snow wrangle together.
The Beautiful Changes:
Three times we hear this... in the title, the first line of the 2nd stanza, and the end words
of the 2nd line of the final stanza.
We do not know from the title if it is a question of changes that are beautiful... or that beautiful
in and of itself is subject to change. By the end of the poem, we understand that beauty is not
static. Throughout the poem, there is a lovely communion with nature -- .. a sense of psalm
23...
Lucernes? the romantic Swiss town on a lake? or perhaps a skylight?
Who is "you" ? Is it a love poem? to nature? to a sense of God as the beloved,
is the you in the final stanza an actual lover... ? Or "the beautiful".
It is a complex poem... how do you read "for a moment all that it touches back to wonder"
That's a terrible power --to want to "sunder" all that was touched back to wonder" and yet, the changes happen "in such kind ways"...
and why lose // for a moment
And yet, that would be overthinking the poem. There seems to be something magical about
beauty that is captured... and perhaps knowing that it is never possessed... there is something
about wonder--- about things that layer into more things -- a communion, as in shared union...
Man Running --
could be a film... visually runs... great sounds... scared, stumbling, crumples... clatteringly,
we darkly cheer him... one with him...
only to arrive at a reminder about survival -- where we came from, as naked prey.
brilliant!
The Baroque Wall- Fountain: sound, (water patters on stones its own applause leads Wilbur to
think of what men are or should be if this fountain "display the pattern of our aretê). water spilling every stanza, with all the rococo details of baroque... and we sense the pleasure... with the very wish of water to waterfall... reversed!
the transformation in the final two stanzas, leaves me with the sense of having spent hours walking
by this fountain, steeped in its pleasures so beautifully rendered.
