'Won for Once Over the World’s Weight'

I drove past a young man in a parking lot juggling what appeared to be crescent wrenches, three or four of them, I think. I regret not stopping but I had groceries melting on the back seat. He had attracted an audience of a dozen or so. Juggling is a metaphor for everything I’m unable to do, whatever requires grace and coordination – dancing, for instance, and writing poetry. I’ve never known athletic envy. I don’t admire the guy who can catch a ball but I often wished I was the the guy on Ed Sullivan who juggled plates, spinning one on the end of a stick. The graceless-looking W.C. Fields was a gifted juggler. Joseph Epstein, I’m told, juggles. William Hazlitt celebrated “The Indian Jugglers” while acknowledging his own sense of inadequacy: 

“The hearing a speech in Parliament, drawled or stammered out by the Honourable Member or the Noble Lord, the ringing the changes on their common-places, which any one could repeat after them as well as they, stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself: but the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this! Nothing. What have I been doing all my life! Have I been idle, or have I nothing to shew for all my labour and pains! Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?”

 

Richard Wilbur closes “Juggler” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950) with this stanza, a tribute to the purest form of art for art’s sake:

“If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands

In the dust again, if the table starts to drop

Through the daily dark again, and though the plate

Lies flat on the table top,

For him we batter our hands

Who has won for once over the world’s weight.”