Author Richard Wilbur Poem Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Author Richard Wilbur Poem - Essay ExampleWe need to appreciate too that the anterior quotation continues to note that the beautiful things if they had not been in you would have had no being at all. and The charms of the literal world are the work of God too, and this is what Wilbur explores in the poem. It amounts, as the critic Paul Cummin says, to a civilise man quietly and honestly acknowledging the beauty of the world and of the human spirit (Cummin, 39).The situation posed at the set out of the poem is a bewildering mixture of the comic and the exalted. We are asked to imagine someone waking in the morning, and in the half-conscious state seeing the washing on the line as a flight of angels. The engine block which hoists the washing line also drags open the eyes of the tranquillityer, whose disposition would prefer to remain in the holy world of dreams. This is the first example of Wilburs subtle use of expressions both literally (the pulley on the washing line) and m etaphorically (suggesting the effort involved in bringing the eyes to focus on the genuine world rather than the spiritual). ... Yet laughter is denied by the solemnity and serenity of the diction. The sleeper is spirited from sleep, as if awakening is a metaphysical experience. The soul is astounded, perhaps by the abruptness of things and the emergent confrontation with the heavenly. It stands outside the body for a moment, literally in ecstasy, bodiless and simple, facing the awe-inspiring, and beginning to delight in its freedom from the merely physical. It is a moment of exaltation the morning is awash with angels - a pun, surely, which again puzzles our responses.Nor is the comic/serious collision brought to a quick and safe end. The angels now appear garbed in bed-sheets blouses smocks as the washing flaps on the line. The surging motion makes it appear that they are move up together in calm swells, ecstatic and miraculous movements, appropriate to celestial beings of hal cyon feeling, hinting at the miraculous bird of myth which could charm the winds and the waters. The motion looks as if they are expressing the deep joy of their neutral breathing, the joy of those who live in Elysium, whose personalities no longer plague them, and whose breathing reminds us of the origins of the word spirit. The metaphorical/literal balance continues even further, as the angels who are really washing seem, as angels should, to be flying in space, moving at terrible speed and being ubiquitous. Their miraculous ability to move at great speed and yet remain in the identical place is like white water. And finally the wind dies and they swoon down, and the illusion (if that is what it was) is gone. The soul shrinks, as it realizes that the physical cannot really be ignored or escaped. The critic Peter