`Displays of Cool Fire'

The calendar says spring and in Houston that means warm days, blue skies and blessedly low humidity. Also, ubiquitous lizards and toads. Male green anoles perform a push-up like motion and flare their reddish dewlaps. Herds of toads move out of the way in the morning before sunrise as I walk to the curb to fetch the newspaper. The dove chorus saws away in the oaks. Mosquitoes hum, and opossums and squirrels skitter along the power lines. Even in our suburbanized city neighborhood, life throbs away. “Praise in Summer” is the second-to-last poem in Richard Wilbur’s first collection, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947): 

“Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,

As sometimes summer calls us all, I said

The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;

I said the trees are mines in air. I said

See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!

And then I wondered why this mad instead

Perverts our praise to uncreation, why

Such savor’s in this wrenching things awry.

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange

The world to know it? To a praiseful eye

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange

That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,

And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?” 

Almost uniquely among our better poets, Wilbur is “called to praise.” I don’t remember a phrase or line of complaint, but Praise in Summer” is a self-critique. Creation needs no embellishment, yet the urge to create and praise lingers and grows stronger. In “Five Favourite Poetry Books” (Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, 2014) Clive James includes Wilbur’s Poems 1943-1956 (in which The Beautiful Changes is collected), along with titles by Yeats, Frost, Auden and Larkin. James likens his impact on his contemporaries to the arrival of a “rococo asteroid, burning up their air with his displays of cool fire.” On March 1, Wilbur turned ninety-four.