As Clive James said, Wilbur can write a killer-diller line. His poem begins “In her room at the prow of the house / Where light breaks” and then continues with the ship conceit in a masterful route. But then in a self-deprecating manner, he dismisses his figure as easy, and in the next five breathtaking stanzas narrates a tale of a trapped bird in quick language, ending in one to die for:
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
But he goes one stanza too far, returning to his “darling.” wishing “What I wished you before, but harder.” He tries too hard for the ending here. But that is Wilbur’s bane. He is an outrageously fine writer that often tries too hard to prove it. Those five stanzas about the bird are just Wilbur writing a magnificent poem. The last stanza is Wilbur playing the poet.
Kees is another story. His language is certainly not pretty. In fact it’s quite brutal at times. His poem begins harmless enough in the eyes of an innocent daughter, then descends slowly but surely into our hellish world, much as he fears his daughter will.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others’ agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
Ouch. But then comes Kees’ coup. If it’s poker these poets are playing, Richard has made a safe bet, one he has calculated carefully and placed with care and some flair. But Weldon bets the house, the farm, his savings account, and all his future descendants’ lives. For he finishes with literal nihilistic abandon, “These speculations sour in the sun. / I have no daughter. I desire none.”
And that is why Kees walks, though wild-eyed and awake with too many midnights of bourbons straight-up, away from the table much richer than Wilbur. But I'm not sure I'd like to walk with him; I wish Wilbur had won.
2 comments:
One of Wilbur's, the opening poem in Mayflies, that goes in just the opposite direction:
A Barred Owl
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.
For what it's worth (not much, since I don't know the whole poem), to me the Kees ending sounds like posturing rather than honesty. But then I don't think our world is hellish.
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