`A Thing Is Most Itself When Likened'

Some poems are simply opaque, whether intentionally or because of the reader’s inadequacy. If intentionally, they are probably not worth a second effort. Poets who revel in obscurity and the sense of superiority it brings are like guests at a dinner party who insist on speaking a language they know you cannot understand. In The Sense of Beauty (1896) George Santayana says “no respectable writer is voluntarily obscure in the structure of his phrases—that is an abuse reserved for the clowns of literary fashion.”  Some poets, however, teach us how to read their poems and reward our persistence. They are collaborative in the best sense, working with us, slowly revealing their secrets. Eliot and Stevens are this sort of writer (though much of Stevens remains opaque to me—probably my failing), as is early Edgar Bowers. With time, bafflement turns to dim understanding and an occasional glow of pleasure. For the other sort of poet, as Santayana says, “The descent is easy from ambiguity to meaninglessness.” Think of Pound, Charles Olson, much of Zukofsky. Too much work for too little payoff. 

Richard Wilbur is not customarily judged a difficult poet, resistant to understanding. But neither does he ascribe to simple-minded literalism. One of his best poems, and one I can’t claim to comprehensively understand, is “Lying” (New and Collected Poems, 1987). Its blank verse is at once conversational and flexible enough to carry substantial philosophical freight: 

“Not that the world is tiresome in itself:

We know what boredom is: it is a dull

Impatience or a fierce velleity,

A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,

To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,

We invent nothing, merely bearing witness

To what each morning brings again to light.” 

The passage, by the way, describes precisely my early responses to the poem. “Fierce velleity,” a fruitful oxymoron, resulted from wounded pride, a feeling that I ought to understand “Lying” instead of merely feeling attracted to its seductive inaccessibility. Remarks Wilbur makes in an interview encourage me to go on rereading the poem: tiresome in itself:

We know what boredom is: it is a dull

Impatience or a fierce velleity, A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude, To make or do. In the strict sense, of course, We invent nothing, merely bearing witness To what each morning brings again to light“The main thing that `Lying’ has to say is that we can’t create another reality, because all things are inevitably part of the `cognate splendor’ of the original creation and its development. The busy-ness of the poem (Ralph Ellison once told me `Man, you are riffing in this one.’) consists of one metaphorical proof after another that all things are of one nature.”

Elsewhere, Wilbur says “Lying” is “a bombardment of proofs that the world is one.” And one of the ways we apprehend the world’s unity in multiplicity is to generate metaphors, comparing one thing to another. For the metaphor-minded, the world is bottomlessly, rewardingly rich, like the best poems: “Odd that a thing is most itself when likened.”