Alan, I agree that Wilbur's poem is not sentimental, but the questions is, What saves it? The image of the trapped bird, metaphor for the writer's soul or desire to express herself, is just aching to be used sentimentally, and it has been many times. How does Wilbur make it fresh? The short answser is that he's a mighty good poet, but inasmuch as this is where we muse on mastery rather than merely praise it, we must still wonder how he did it. By the time Frost wrote "A Leaf-Treader" autumn leaves had been used in almost as many poems as there are leaves in Vermont, usually meaning about the same thing, but Frost's poem works where the heaps of others don't. Let's figure it out, if it can be figured out.
Richard
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