Wilbur's Layer Cake

Since blogging about not blogging might attract the attention of the blog-cliché police, let’s focus on the job at hand. My relationship with Wilbur’s poetry says a great deal about the state of poetry today. During a freshman year world literature course, I read Wilbur’s translation of Racine’s play Phaedra. That was five and a half years ago, and in the interim, the work of Richard Wilbur, undoubtedly among the greatest by a living poet, was never brought to my attention.

Sadly, the poetical canon is quickly being sealed off as if it is already full. I have very little hope of the likes of Wilbur and Hecht being studied in a hundred years. Even today, to pass as well-read, or at least well-informed about literature, you don’t need to know much of anything written in verse after 1950.

Jazz is headed the same way, incidentally. There is no need for an avid music fan to know anything about jazz after Miles Davis and John Coltrane; it is a marginal element of our culture. As a fan of both, I feel like a cultural fossil. Perhaps there is a museum that will put me on show, where I could stand in dark jeans and a black turtleneck. My weight would lie firmly on my right foot, right hand akimbo, left hand groping vaguely at my facial hair. My forehead would be held in an eternal crinkle, a less-intense take on Rodin. They would insist upon me donning a beret, and a stale espresso would slowly evaporate on a nearby table.

But if I’m going to be entombed in a dusty display case, who on earth will appreciate Richard Wilbur? Who will stop to think about how he manages to capture the juxtaposed moments of life that are too subtle to make their way into pop songs? For the time being, I’m still here.

The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.


This poem provides proof that we still need poets to observe and unpack the smaller moments in life. In “The Beautiful Changes,” Wilbur desperately needs the worldly language held in the two similes that occupy the first two stanzas. What is unexpected and somewhat challenging in this first poem is the way Wilbur balances these similes. In the first stanza, the experience tangible to the reader occupies the literal half of the simile. Wilbur relies on us being able to picture the watery walk that opens the poem.

In the second stanza’s simile, the title of the poem has occupied the literal position of the simile, even though it cannot possibly be literal to the reader; the images of the chameleon and the mantis appear vividly, making this simile something more like a generalization followed two specific examples.

This literal, observable, imaginable material forms the base layer of the poem. What makes Wilbur such an effective poet is that he builds more personal and unconventional material on top.

The addressee of the poem occupies the next layer, since the images of her, first her shade, then the way she holds roses, cannot be glimpsed by the reader. In particular, we should struggle with the way he nouns his nouns. (We can do it too, Mr. Wilbur!). By that I mean he uses the noun “valley” as a verb. It is precisely this sort of thing that we will miss if we stop reading poetry. Nobody save the poet can reshape language such.

As we come to the top of our Wilbur layer cake, we arrive at the title, the generalization if you will. This top layer bookends the poem (I did it again, Mr. Wilbur!) in that you cannot ignore the title. The title of the poem exposes us to this top layer before we even begin reading. Then, when we reach the end, we find the summary of the previous two layers. Its success derives from Wilbur’s exclusive use of abstractions here. From “the beautiful changes / In such kind ways” to the end of the poem, I defy you to find a word that you can draw a picture of. Sure, you could draw an example of something changing, of something beautiful, of something being sundered, of wonder; but you cannot capture the essence of any of these abstractions.

Wilbur then gives us an abstract thesis in his title which he expands upon at the end of the poem. Layered underneath, he stacks examples of this thesis according to their ability to be understood by the reader who doesn’t have the benefit of being a close personal friend of Mr. Wilbur and the addressee of this poem. This poem deserves to be called a poem because it combines unique, metaphorical ideas with a practiced, rhetorical structure to produce a clear, organized reading experience.

Over the course of this entry, I have found that the beautiful has changed for me as well. Under the light of examination, an elegant poem has transformed into a meticulously crafted poem that yet keeps its cards close to its chest. It does not want to tell us how organized, how planned it is. Instead, it flashes in front of our eyes a handful of fascinating images that grab our attention and help us to believe that we know something of what Richard Wilbur meant.