Waiting for `Blind Delight'

Richard Wilbur is a poet I have always admired more than enjoyed. Technically, he is a master, a craftsman like the late Anthony Hecht, who could take on any subject, in any form, at any length. That may be a partial explanation for why my mind tends to skid over his poems, like a giraffe on ice. The surface is so dazzling, so artfully polished, I’m unable to gain traction long enough to peer into the depths, assuming there are any depths. That sounds condescending, and that’s not how I intend it. In his poems, prose and interviews, Wilbur seems so reasonable, polite and well-adjusted. That’s all in contrast to Hecht, a poet of his generation, whose technical pyrotechnics seem at war with the inhumanity that is often his subject. That tension, not merely the high level of accomplishment, is why I so frequently return to Hecht’s poems and why they remain reliable sources of pleasure and consolation. To put it bluntly, Wilbur’s poems are nearly always pleasant but they seldom threaten to change me, or even stay with me very long. It says something that I’ve been reading him for 40 years but have never committed any of his lines to memory.

The first of the 13 new poems Wilbur placed at the start of Collected Poems 1943-2004, “The Reader,” is a useful example:

“She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.
Onward they come, the orphans reaching
For a first handhold in a stony world,
The young provincials who at last look down
On the city’s maze, and will descend into it,
The serious girl, once more, who would live nobly,
The sly one who aspires to marry so,
The young man bent on glory, and that other
Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does
What will become of them in bloody field
Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times
She sees their first and final selves at once,
As a god might to whom all time is now.
Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps
She meets them this time with a wiser eye,
Noting that Julien’s calculating head
Is from the first too severed from his heart.
But the true wonder of it is that she,
For all that she may know of consequences,
Still turns enchanted to the next bright page
Like some bright Natasha in the ballroom door –
Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,
The blind delight of being, ready still
To enter life on life and see them through.”

The theme is one I have often addressed – an older reader returning to the books of his or her youth, with the attendant sense of double vision. The books the woman in the poem reads seem to be the great novels of the 19th century – Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and less defined titles that suggest, to this reader, Austen and James. The re-reader’s perspective, with the advantage of knowing the outcome of the plot, resembles a deity’s. The point, the “true wonder,” is that the smitten reader will persevere with a lengthy narrative despite the absence of conventional suspense, will still turn “enchanted to the next bright page.”

I am reminded of an observation made in another 19th-century novel -- George Eliot's Daniel Deronda:

"Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -- in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures."

I have no argument with anything in Wilbur's poem. In fact, it recapitulates my own frequent experience of rereading, and I do like the final two lines. They are, as I said above of Wilbur, “pleasant.” But, they leave me unchanged and teach me nothing new. I am waiting for the sensation of “blind delight.” I am waiting for his exaltation of the "sold fact."