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Mayflies

The Heart's Crayon

In 1988 Richard Wilbur, then poet laureate of the United States, published New and Collected Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize. It was the second time that Wilbur had received the honor, having won a Pulitzer in 1956 for his book Things of this World, the title poem of which many consider to be one of the finest American poems of the century. Since then, Wilbur, who will turn 79 this year, has been a quiet force, slowly working on the 20 poems and eight translations that make up his newest book, Mayflies. These new poems exhibit Wilbur's thoughtful pace, steadily and carefully pursuing their objects without a misplaced word or struggled cadence. With Mayflies, Wilbur has returned to center stage, and it has been well worth the wait.

The time between books will come as no surprise to longtime Wilbur fans, who are a patient lot by necessity. Prior to New and Collected Poems, his most recent book was The Mind Reader, published in 1976. Since his first two books, separated by a mere three years, Wilbur has worked at an average rate of one book of poems per 8.3 years, a reliable if not fleet stride. Wilbur's poems are so finely wrought that they must be written slowly, over time. Wilbur may be the finest poet of formal verse writing in English in the latter half of the 20th century. He has a tremendous ear, and his musicality has the delicate balance of song and speech that is the very basis of poetry. Throughout the mutations that the poetic form has undergone in America since Whitman, and even more so since the 1960s, Wilbur has remained one of the few major poets who even attempt to write metrical rhyming verses. As he puts it, "I have no case whatsoever against controlled free verse. Yet I think it is absurd to feel that free verse — which has only been with us in America for a little over a hundred years — has definitively 'replaced' measure and rhyme and other traditional instruments."

The themes in Mayflies are common to Wilbur. He is always concerned with the effect of thought and feeling on the physical world. Wilbur is a humanist — behind his poetry there lurks a world that, unenhanced by human passion and aim, lies before us pale and lame, an incomplete and mysterious place that means nothing. In "A Digression," he chronicles a moment in which a writer, having just dropped a manuscript in the mail, wanders down an unfamiliar street and slips from the tether of purpose that holds him to the world. His soul, "proposing nothing," sees nothing, only

            ...an obstructive storm

      Of specks and flashes that will take no form,

      A roiled mosaic or a teeming scrim

      That seems to have no pertinence to him.

      It is his purpose now as, turning 'round,

      He takes his bearings and is homeward bound,

      To ponder what the world's confusion meant

      When he regarded it without intent.

One would think that Wilbur, as a poet, might be accustomed to feelings of purposelessness. But what makes the poem more than just a complaint is his impersonal, world-aware, and formal tone. This poem is not about what it feels like to have nothing to do but wander aimlessly; it is about what the world is beneath the meaning we ascribe to it.

Another poem, "At Moorditch" (the title comes from a line in Shakespeare that Wilbur says "seemed a good name for the sort of hospital where people are treated for depression"), faces the same unmade world, but this time not out of purposelessness but desolation. There are two voices in the poem, Wilbur's, or Wilbur's surrogate, and a commanding "voice of lock and window-bar." Being told to confront things as they "really are," Wilbur responds,

       "Things have," I said, "a pallid, empty look,

       Like pictures in an unused coloring book."

The voice, which comes now from the "sad hallways," insists, asserting that the "scales have fallen from your eyes," and former impressions of delight were all folly. Still Wilbur holds his ground in humanism, stating,

      "This cannot be the world," I said. "Nor will it,

       Till the heart's crayon spangle and fulfill it."

Again, it is the activity of human thought and feeling that makes the world, whatever that is, into the world we know.

This common theme is there in the book's first poem, "A Barred Owl," which takes up the transformational powers of words. After comforting his daughter, who has wakened in the night to the hooting of an owl, by telling her that what she hears is a bird saying, "Who cooks for you?" the speaker reflects,

      Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,

      Can also thus domesticate a fear...

Or the poem about a bird flitting around the trees in a wood, "A Wall in the Woods: Cumington," which in many ways is a reflection on the mind thinking around the rules and bars of formal verse: The bird's flight is complicated by the tangle of trees in its path, but the complication requires the bird to be nimble, and in this it is free. The bird "perhaps says something"

      Of agility

      That is not sorrow's captive,

      Lost as it is in being

      Briskly adaptive...

With Mayflies, Wilbur reasserts himself as a truly great poet and probes, in beautiful poems that should be read out loud, many of the same ideas and questions and haunts that have interested him for years. The translations of Baudelaire, the Bulgarian poet Valeri Petrov, Mallarmé, Molière, and Dante are first-rate and stand beside Wilbur's own poems with more than just circumstantial relations. Mayflies is Wilbur at the top of his game — grace, agility, humor, seriousness, and rhythm all happily come together in this book. We can only hope that it will not be another 8.3 years until we hear from him again.

—Jacob Silverstein

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 96
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780151004690
  • Genres
  • poetry
  • Release date
  • 2000