By DONALD DeMARCO
“Publishing a book of poetry,” said Don Marquis, a poet of distinction in his own right, “is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
Poetry seems sadly out of place in a fast-paced world that is dominated by technology. The poet is not lauded in our time and his passing occurs with little public fanfare. Yet, poetry, as Robert Frost reminds us, “is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” What is so vitally important can be so easily neglected. We might add that it would impoverish us not to know what our contemporary poets are trying to tell us.
Richard Purdy Wilbur, a name that should be more familiar to Americans, was born on March 1, 1921 in New York City. He graduated from Amherst College and Harvard University. His marriage to Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward in 1942 lasted until her death in 2007 and produced four children. He was appointed the Second Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress in 1987, won the National Book Award in 1956, twice received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1957, 1989), and was the U.S. Poet Laureate for 1987-1988.
He passed away on October 14, 2017 at 96 years of age in a nursing home in Belmont, Mass.
Despite his many accolades, his poetry never assumed the kind of public attention that Robert Frost gained when he read his own poetry at President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration. It is the bane of a poet, distinguished to his peers as he may be, that he labors within a rather small circle. And if he is a Christian poet and shuns the sensational, that circle is smaller still.
As a Christian, his faith was not broken by either his wartime service on the front lines in Europe or by the influence of campus leftists where he taught at Amherst College, Smith College, and Wesleyan University. He remained his own man, persisting in the use of traditional forms, though they elicited scorn from some of his more radical colleagues.
I used some of Wilbur’s poems with my students to help them understand how ordinary experiences can be a source of spiritual illumination. Or, as one writer put it, “Wilbur is a great poet who extracts lucid epiphanies from compressed moments.”
His Juggler is set in the context of the tension between gravity and grace. It is easy for us to be “down,” disheartened, discouraged, and even depressed. “It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls to shake our gravity up.” We are seekers of grace in a world dominated by gravity. But the juggler, a person who is not accorded high social rank, reminds us that our destiny is to follow the path of grace. Consider a ball that bounces less and less. It is not a “light-hearted” thing. Falling is what it loves. It is not like us who are light-hearted beings and were made for higher things. The juggler concludes his sensational act of gravity defiance to wild applause. He is victorious in his own small, but important way:
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.
In his poem C Minor, he is asking his readers to live each day with courage and faith. C Minor is the key in which Beethoven wrote his Fifth Symphony, the most angst-ridden of the nine. It is dark and turbulent. But it is also victorious. The Morse Code for the letter V is three dots followed by a dash. Royal Air Force flyers would rap this letter on the bar when ordering a drink. It was a rhythmic imitation of the first four notes of the symphony.
C Minor is a symphony worth listening to, but, the poet asks, when? Should it be during breakfast, “While bran flakes crackle in the cereal bowl”? Such an incongruity would be a disservice to the listener as well as to Beethoven. We need to be properly disposed to glean the benefits of the Fifth Symphony. We must deserve it.
And so, we should “let the day begin at hazard.” We should face the day and let it affect us one way or the other. We should not shield ourselves from life by armoring ourselves with artificial courage. “Shall a plate be broken?” “A new thing understood?” God has His own plan for our day.
There is nothing to do with a day except to live it.
Let us have music again when the light dies
(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it
Something to organize.
The American poet Dana Gioia has said that Richard Wilbur is the finest poet of his generation and the greatest American Christian poet since T.S. Eliot.
Wilbur once remarked: “I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, could have said the same thing.
If Wilbur’s Christian faith was not explicitly evident in his poems, it was more than evident in other facets of his life. As part of a toast at his eldest son’s wedding, he stated: “St. John tells how Cana’s wedding feast / The water pots poured wine in such amount / That by his sober count / There were a hundred gallons at the least. / It made no earthly sense unless to show / How whatsoever love elects to bless / Brims to a sweet excess / That can without depletion overflow.”
We offer our modest fanfare to the passing of a modest man.
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