[Kate Benedict]

Yes but pigeons are easier to catch!

I feel called to add a few more Richard Wilbur poems to the discussion:

Boy at the Window

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.
------

April 5, 1974

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter's giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

-----



[This message has been edited by Kate Benedict (edited January 26, 2001).]

[RCL]

Kate, thanks for posting Wilbur's snow man poem, which captures, to my mind, the fear that even simple, perhaps self-made, things can induce in a child--just as Stevens' snow man shows it induced in adults. Neither is sentimental to me.

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Ralph

[Alan Sullivan]

Regarding "April 5, 1974"...I kidded Wilbur once that he should have gone right ahead and said "frost" instead of "feeze." Of course he preferred the indirection.

"Boy in the Window" doesn't just skirt sentimentality, it plunges right in and romps, with melodrama in its first stanza, personification in its second. Then there's the ending, and the steel of irony, which has only whispered in the sheath, is drawn halfway out. "So much fear." But whose fear? Suddenly the reader can invert everything and wonder whether the snowman is in fact a stand-in for a child who holds too much apart, and whose parents fear for him.

Thanks for posting these.

Alan Sullivan

[KennethWhite]

Although I am only familiar with a few of his works, I do recall reading portions from Christopher Smart's Jublilate Agno, where he would go as far as to personify his cat as a servant of the Lord. I do believe that God has created all things in the universe for His own sovereign purpose and glory. Yet, it is quite interesting how Smart describes his pet as he who "keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary...counteracts the Devil." It sounds, at least to me, that he lends sentimental traits to his cat by proclaiming "for he knows that God is his Saviour" (I didn't know that animals had to be redeemed from their sins). Anyway, I just found this interesting.



[This message has been edited by KennethWhite (edited January 26, 2001).]

[drchazan]

For me, this is the basic distinction between sentimental and sentiment:

Originally posted by Charles Albert:
If a poet hasn't taken me to the same emotional intensity that he is expressing, then I call the piece sentimental.

Of course, the way to get there isn't easy to find. When working on my poem "The Red Jacket" I had to chop off many sentimental parts to try to find the honest core. The problem for me was that the only thing I had to go on that was "real" was the feeling I felt in my dream when I tried the jacket on and it was too small.

But poets don't have to personally feel the thing they are writing about - but they have to feel strongly about the subject and be able to observe with a keen eye and empathy. Without that, I don't think any poet can bring their readers to that level of emotional intensity.

The link to the thread from the alt.arts.poetry.comments newsgroup (here or somewhere else on these boards) was excellent and enlightening for me. I suggest it be looked at by all new and experienced poets.

(Thanks for this thread, people - I'm enjoying it very much.)

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One person's opinion.
Davida Chazan

[wendy v]

Kate, Boy at the Window is the only poem, of all the poems I've insisted on reading to my poetry-hating husband, that he's utterly enjoyed. I was surprised then, but had forgotten about it -- and you've reminded me of it, so I thank you. (A thread on why so many intelligent readers thoroughly dislike poetry might be a good thread for future. (Just a seed Alan might consider planting when things are slow around here.)) A sort of "Can Poetry Matter" in practical terms might be interesting.

Meantime, since this thread is dwindled and is sort've turned into a Wilbur love fest of sorts, and since somebody mentioned the most lovely Barred Owl, and since it does contain, coincidentally,(?) rhyming couplets, and since it will give me great pleasure to type it out, I'm posting it for those who haven't purchased Mayflies. If anyone can tell me how he brings L6's repetition to an actual change in pitch, I'd give them fifty cyber dollars. If rightly listened to, indeed. Let it be noted that I am NOT reduced to groupie behavior and tugging on Alan's sleeve to ask, WHAT WAS HE LIKE ???


A Barred Owl
Richard Wilbur

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl's voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
"Who cooks for you?" and then "Who cooks for you?"

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

[Kate Benedict]

My observation about L6 will not be billable, I am sure. I think the magic derives from "and then" in that line. Though the phrases are identical, those little words serve as a bridge, and a bridge goes from one place to another. The result, as you aptly put it, is a change in pitch or tenor. The separation of the two phrases also helps conjure up the actual owl cry as it hits the ear two times in a row, in a sequence of time. Brilliant.

About the two RW poems I posted: I'll state it outright now. I posted them because I feel they are almost spoiled by sentimentality -- that, in these two instances, RW did not achieve the fine balance (as he does in The Writer) of being both tender and pointed. Let me elaborate (even though I quail, for this is Richard Wilbur, after all, and I am not worthy).

In the poem about impending spring, after an onslaught of involving, mysterious, even menacing images, the doggone sweetness of the final line hits with a resounding thud. It seems almost funny, and I doubt that humor was intended here. I think the problem is not the idea being stated (that the new life brought forth by spring is accomplished with violence) but the word "flowers" itself. Flowers, flowers -- it's a flowery word, and somewhat silly on the tongue and in the ear. The word just doesn't resonate anymore. It's been overused in Hallmark-caliber verse (where it rhymes, of course, with showers or bowers) and on Madison Ave ("Say it with flowers," a slogan of long duration). RW is a great enough poet to "buy back" a squandered, overused word, to be sure, but it doesn't happen here, I don't think.

Boy at the Window is so sweetly sentimental, it seems the poetic equivalent of vanilla pudding. A snowman weeping tears for the little boy who sculpted him! I think a certain idea was in the air around the time this poem was written -- the idea of "the tears of things." Michael, Alan -- perhaps one of you knows the origin of it? It was a favorite concept of one of my college professors. The older I get, the more I think "the tears of things" is an idea best left unexplored!

I liked this poem once, though -- enough to include it in a college paper about two poems that "animated the inanimate" (the other being James Dickey's The Sheep Child). RW is such a good poet that even his less-successful efforts usually contain much to admire.

[RCL]

As a footnote to your interesting discussion: I don't know when the "tears of things" was in vogue, but it's something Virgil said, "there are tears in all things." Without knowledge of its vogue and therefore necessary triteness, I posted one some months ago called "The Tears in All Things"--and no one called me on the image as I unfolded it (in couplets, yet!).

------------------
Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited January 28, 2001).]

[Alan Sullivan]

Kate, that final line of April 5, 1974 is a reference to Frost's "Spring Pools." I agree that Wilbur's line would seem impossibly treacly on its own. He is counting on readers to catch the reference, which is supposed to back off the poem to a safe distance of mild irony. The broader clue of "frost" instead of "freeze" might have helped the save the poem from this peril. If Able Muse had been around in 1974, perhaps someone would have alerted the author before publication. He would never change it now.

I agree with you about "and then." Who would think that two plain little words could do such a subtle thing?

Alan Sullivan

[Caleb Murdock]

Kate, of the two poems you posted by Wilbur, only the one about the snowman strikes me as sentimental -- in fact, Wilbur's heavy use of personification almost ruins it. Also, I don't think that even a small child is so unsophisticated that it would feel the emotions that Wilbur ascribes to the boy. Indeed, if the boy helped to make the snowman, he knows it is only made of snow and has no life.

Nonetheless, I accept the poem at face value and even like it. If such personification has meaning to Wilbur, I can go along with it.

It seems to me that Wilburs 1974 poem is about a natural phenomenon and nothing more, so I don't see how you can consider it sentimental. However, his final line is too derivative of Frost's "Spring Pools" (one of Wilbur's favorite poems), so much so that the poem is almost ruined by it.

I very much like the owl poem. It always pleases me to see an older poet producing excellent poetry; it gives me hope for my own future as a poet.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited January 27, 2001).]