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Showing posts with label richard wilbur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label richard wilbur. Show all posts

Monday, October 14, 2013

ModPo 2013 #38 The Brilliant, Burning Negative Plath: On Wilbur's "Cottage Street, 1953"

Image of Sylvia Plath reported missing in 1953 from news.frrole.com.


Richard Wilbur, "Cottage Street, 1953"

Framed in her phoenix fire-screen, Edna Ward
Bends to the tray of Canton, pouring tea
For frightened Mrs. Plath; then, turning toward
The pale, slumped daughter, and my wife, and me.

Asks if we would prefer it weak or strong.
Will we have milk or lemon, she enquires?
The visit seems already strained and long.
Each in his turn, we tell her our desires.

It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless.

I am a stupid life-guard who has found,
Swept to his shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned,
And stares through water now with eyes of pearl.

How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.

And Edna Ward shall die in fifteen years,
After her eight-and-eighty summers of
Such grace and courage as permit no tears,
The thin hand reaching out, the last word love.

Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to live,
Shall study for a decade, as she must,
To state at last her brilliant negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.


[The following note has been provided by Richard Wilbur:] "Edna Ward was Mrs. Herbert D. Ward, my wife's mother. The poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was the daughter of one of Mrs. Ward's Wellesley friends. The recollection is probably composite, but it is true in essentials."

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I've always been intrigued by Sylvia Plath. I find her more interesting than Richard Wilbur! Ha! But this was a very interesting poem. This is the poem from the "successful," stable poet eyeing the damaged (but free!) poet that was Sylvia Plath.

As mentioned in the video discussion, it's hard to tell if he was putting down the resulting poems of Plath. There is that word, "free" but right beside it are two potential negatives: "helpless," and "unjust." Helpless might be the refusal to be helped. I get that. But unjust? There was a suggestion that this might imply unjustified. In my own opinion, I think freedom (with all those costs) was worth the price.

Wilbur himself says that the "refusal," the "brilliant negative" was too large, way too large for the "slight genteel chat." I might say the same for the slight and cadenced genteel poem versus the wild wailing of "Lady Lazarus."

Wilbur talks about Edna Ward's grace and courage, privileging the long (and long suffering) life over this inexplicably drowned girl who sees life as a sentence ("condemned to live"). I can imagine the same puzzlement and helplessness that anyone might have over someone who is mentally ill. But being depressed and mentally ill is different from being the writer of poems that capture the pain of that existence.

No, Richard Wilbur, "the published poet in his happiness" and the "genteel chat" and the niceties and comforts of traditional meter and rhyme will not be enough. At least not for as great and haunted a poet as Plath.


ModPo 2013 #37 Challenging The Limits of Subject Matter: On Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad"

Image from ebeysoman.hubpages.com .


Richard Wilbur, "The Death of a Toad" (1950)

               
                  THE DEATH OF A TOAD

       A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
   To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
   Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
      Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
          Low, and a final glade.

       The rare original heartsbleed goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
    In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
    As still as if he would return to stone,
        And soundlessly attending, dies
           Toward some deep monotone,

       Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia^Rs emperies.
    Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
    In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
        To watch, across the castrate lawn,
            The haggard daylight steer.

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This was a funny poem. It was mentioned several times in the video discussion that this is a satire given its over-the-top rhymes and high diction for such a lowly topic as a toad. At the turn of the poem, there is also mention of a mock heroic crossing towards "Amphibia's emperies" (like the Norse gods). There was also mention of how suburbia is the perfect setting for this satire, given that suburbia itself is an artifice.

I asked the question to myself several times: what's at stake? Other than a humorous look at the death of the toad, what else could this poem be contributing? It's hard to fathom. I liked the idea of "art for art's sake" being floated in the discussion. However, it wouldn't have been humorous or satirical if it were. It would just have been a display of ability. Is it making fun of the genre the way that Bishop's poem did? Whereas Bishop spells out what he thinks of traditional poetry, is Wilbur criticizing the imagists for their freedom of subject matter? Was he implying that freedom in subject matter would result in this elevation of the toad (or the elevation of some white chickens)? Was he implying that there is a limit to "absolute freedom in the choice of subject?"

Perhaps, it's that. But he chose the traditional form to mock this freedom. One might say that they (traditional form and absolute freedom in subject matter) really don't go together/ work together.

All in all, poor toad!


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