'There Is Brio Enough Here'

A word I’ve always liked is brio. It sounds like the name of a commercial product, floor wax or an energy drink. We have an Italian restaurant in Houston called Brio. My Italian dictionary translates it as “zest” and the OED gives “liveliness, vivacity, ‘go.’” It suggests enthusiasm, always a positive quality in prose and verse when it sounds natural and unforced – the opposite of lethargy.

I stumbled on it again in a 1948 book review by Dudley Fitts: “There is brio enough here, and to spare; but there is a tendency to sag, to go unkempt.” The headline in The Saturday Review is “Brio Unbounded” and the book is question is The Ego and the Centaur (awful title), the first poetry collection by Jean Garrigue. Overall, Fitts doesn’t like the book, despite its occasional brio.

Encountering Fitts (1903-68) again unexpectedly sent me to Richard Wilbur’s “For Dudley” (Walking to Sleep, 1969). Fitts was a poet, teacher and translator from the Greek. Wilbur (1921-2017) wrote the poem after the death of his friend. It begins:

“Even when death has taken

An exceptional man,

It is common things which touch us, gathered

In the house that proved a hostel.”

 

The speaker is visiting the dead man’s house. On his desk he finds an incomplete sentence, “Not to be finished by us, who lack / His gaiety, his Greek.” The “quick sun” illuminates a chair previously in the dark. Wilbur, as ever, is mindful of light and its absence:

 

“It is the light of which

Achilles spoke,

Himself a shadow then, recalling

The splendor of mere being.”

 

Honoring the “exceptional” dead is a sacred trust. Their fate will soon be ours. Light is life. The waiting darkness is patient. Fitts was “brave and loved this world,” as did Wilbur. The poem turns to prayer and concludes:

 

“Yet in the mind as in

The shut closet

Where his coats hang in black procession,

There is a covert muster.

 

“One is moved to turn to him,

The exceptional man,

Telling him all these things, and waiting

For the deft, lucid answer.

 

“At the sound of that voice’s deep

Specific silence,

The sun winks and fails in the window.

Light perpetual keep him.”

 

Wilbur, another exceptional man, whose poems are suffused with brio, now dwells in “Light perpetual.”