'On the Cello of Shared Grief'

With the deaths of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No thought for family or friends, or even other readers, merely one’s sense of personal betrayal. That’s how I felt seven years ago when Richard Wilbur died at age ninety-six, as though he hadn’t already given us more than we deserve. Then I had a chance to write publicly about Wilbur and his work, which might qualify as a form of that recent fashion for “grief counseling.” But that sounds melodramatic. 

Today I read Wilbur the way I read Edgar Bowers or Donald Justice -- on multiple levels, recalling earlier readings and misreadings, with that increasingly common sensation of another contemporary gone. We build a history with such writers. Poets at this level of achievement are absorbed into ourselves and become pieces of our sensibilities. There’s often a sense of déjà vu. Good poems are forever time-released and never give away everything. Included in the last collection Wilbur published during his lifetime, Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (2010), is “Psalm”:

 

“Give thanks for all things

On the plucked lute, and likewise

The harp of ten strings.

 

“Have the lifted horn

Greatly blare, and pronounce it

Good to have been born.

 

“Lend the breath of life

To the stops of the sweet flute

Or capering fife,

 

“And tell the deep drum

To make, at the right juncture,

Pandemonium.

 

“Then, in grave relief,

Praise too our sorrows on the

Cello of shared grief.”