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 earlier acknowledgment 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 material human 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 civilized man quietly and honestly acknowledging the beauty of the world and of the human spirit (Cummin, 39).The situation posed at the set-back 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 bloodline as a flight of angels. The pulley which hoists the washing line also drags open the eyes of the sleeper, whose soul would prefer to remain in the unsullied world of dreams. This is the first example of Wilburs subtle use of words both literally (the pulley on the washing line) and metaphorically (suggesting the effort involved in transport the eyes to focus on the material 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 sudden 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 dressed in bed-sheets blouses smocks as the washing flaps on the line. The inflate motion makes it appear that they are rising together in calm swells, ecstatic and wonderful movements, appropriate to celestial beings of halcyon feeling, h inting 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 impersonal breathing, the joy of those who live in Elysium, whose personalities no seven-day 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 hotfoot and being omnipresent. Their miraculous ability to move at great speed and yet remain in the same 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