Tempered Consonants
Today is the 90th birthday of Richard Wilbur, arguably America’s greatest living poet. The Wall Street Journal has a handsome appreciation:
His productivity, never high to begin with, has slowed with age. He finishes poems at the rate that Antonio Stradivari constructed a violin. “I often don’t write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let’s say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper,” he told the Paris Review in 1977. “Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.”
He believes over time, though, that the joints in his verse have loosened up even as those in his body have stiffened. Whereas his family once seemed off-limits as a subject, last year’s “Anterooms: New Poems and Translations” opened with a tribute to his wife (“The House”) that was heartbreaking in its reticence.
“One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation,” he has said. Mr. Wilbur has met that challenge by holding himself to the strict, outmoded view that what can’t be described well maybe isn’t worth writing down.
Few things in American life are built to last. Mr. Wilbur’s poems and translations are an implausible anomaly. Wherever English is read, tomorrow and a century of birthdays from now, their example will still be inspiring veneration and dispensing comfort.
Though I find it hard to believe, I posted a stanza of one of my favorite Wilbur poems on this blog four years ago (on the feast of Saint Teresa). Here is the entire poem:
Teresa
After the sun’s eclipse
The brighter angel and the spear which drew
A bridal outcry from her open lips,
She could not prove it true,
Nor think at first of any means to test
By what she had been wedded or possessed.Not all cries were the same;
There was an island in mythology
Called by the very vowels of her name
Where vagrants of the sea,
Changed by a word, were made to squeal and cry
As heavy captives in a witch’s sty.The proof came soon and plain:
Visions were true which quickened her to run
God’s barefoot errands in the rocks of Spain
Beneath its beating sun,
And lock the O of ecstasy within
The tempered consonants of discipline.
I’d say six hours of staring at a blank sheet to wring out a couple of lines per day would be worth it if the lines were this good:
“And lock the O of ecstasy within
The tempered consonants of discipline.”
Thanks for this, Bob. I had forgotten your earlier posting about Wilbur. Bernini might have been proud of this poem!
Here’s a very good website about Wilbur: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/richard-wilbur
And here’s one of his best poems: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171796
“opened with a tribute to his wife (”The House”) that was heartbreaking in its reticence.”
So I had to go check and, by gosh, it really is:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2009/08/31/090831po_poem_wilbur1
Mark,
thanks so much for finding the poem — it is splendid!
If you’re poetically inclined and you don’t know about this program, the Academy of American Poets has a Poem-a-Day program. It’s thoroughly democratic in the variety of stuff it sends out — the poems aren’t just for everyone, they’re by everyone. But some of it is great, and today’s offering is Wilbur’s “The House”.
You can sign up for the service at the home site: http://www.poets.org/
I loved this bit: “I often don’t write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let’s say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper,” he told the Paris Review in 1977. “Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.”
It reminded me of an article in The Tablet some years back, about an archbishop of Canterbury — not Williams, but one of his recent predecessors (Carey???) — who told an interviewer that he said only one prayer — the Our Father — a day. When it was suggested to him by the skeptical interviewer that such a repetition couldn’t take him very long, his response was “But think of all the time spent getting ready to say the prayer.”
Thanks for the reminder about Wilbur’s birthday, Fr. Imbelli — the priest who preached at my first Mass used “Teresa” as the theme of the homily and so it’s been an important poem for me ever since!
It doesn’t get much better than Richard Wilbur. One of my favorite poems is his early “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” — the title is derived from Augustine’s Confessions.
Here’s an audio of Wilbur reading it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDWK0uWoM50
The O is common to both Dios and God, but long in Dios. The consonants around the O of Dios are the same of discipline, disciplino.
I don’t have enough mythology to understand the second stanza. Which island is this?
Kathy –
Circe’s?
Thank you, yes, the island with the all-vowel name: Aeaea.
I take it that there is a parallel berween the vowels in “Teresa” viz., e-e-a and those of “Aeaea” which works if we suppose that the “ae” represents an open e sound rather like the vowel in “get”. Does that seem plausible to anyone else? I do think that the two diphthngs in the name “Aiaia” came in later Greek to have that sort of an e sound.
Joseph G. –
In an article about historical accuracy in poetry and the war between poets and fact-checkers at magazines, the author offers an anecdote about Wilbur and The New Yorker:
“‘This magazine,’ New Yorker poetry editor Peter DeVries wrote poet Richard Wilbur in 1948, ‘is notoriously fastidious about points of fact. And we feel the same way about poetry, rightly or wrongly.’
“DeVries was asking Mr. Wilbur, who still publishes in the magazine, to change a line at the behest of a fact-checker. The poet refused, and so his poem, the first of his the magazine had warmed to, was refused.”
http://www.observer.com/http%3A/%252Fwww.observer.com/2011/daily-transom/whos-line-it-anyway-fact-checking-new-yorker-poetry%3Futm_medium%3Dpartial-text%2526utm_campa
(Should poetry be “accurate”?)
(Should poetry be “accurate”?)
I am not sure what that means as a generality. What interested me was how or in what sense the vowels of the lady’s name might add up to the name of an island. I came upon the answer I indicated and wondered if anyone else had similar thoughts.
Are the cartoons fact-checked, too?
I’ve read that Hopkins’ first poem (The Wreck of the Deutschland) was turned down by his Jesuit province’s monthly newsletter.
Joseph: I think you are reading correctly. Those are “the very vowels of her name.”
The New Yorker‘s poetry editors may have been “fastidious about points of fact” in the 1940s, but they were slacking off when they read the Billy Collins poem I blogged about here. In that case I do think it would have been a mitzvah for someone to have pointed out to Mr. Collins the error on which he’d premised his poem. (More importantly, in the process of checking, they might also have discovered that the whole idea, complete with factual error, was apparently cribbed from another writer.)