'Give Thanks for All Things'

“It is the province of poems to make some order in the world, but poets can’t afford to forget that there is a reality of things which survives all orders great and small. Things are. The cow is there. No poetry can have any strength unless it continually bashes itself against the reality of things.” 

So much contemporary writing is a refutation of this helpful reminder. It recalls my first encounter, as a college freshman, with the thought of Bishop George Berkeley and his subjective form of idealism. I was seventeen and thought it was ridiculous, but only later did I encounter its definitive refutation. Boswell recounts speaking with Dr. Johnson about Berkeley and his “ingenious sophistry.” Johnson kicks a large stone with “mighty force” and says, “I refute it thus.” In the first stanza of “Epistemology” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950), Richard Wilbur endorses Johnson’s reasoning:

 

“Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.”

 

We can think of Wilbur as the Poet Laureate of Reality. In his verse he is no fantasist or dreamer. His subject is creation, what exists, and his manner is celebration and gratitude. At a poetry conference at Bard College in 1948, Louise Bogan and William Carlos Williams discussed poetic form and Wilbur replied to them in an essay, “The Bottles Become New, Too” (Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976) – the source of that passage at the top. Here is “Psalm” from his final collection, Anterooms (2010):

 

“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.”

 

Again, gratitude follows on accepting the real. In his Paris Review interview, Wilbur says:

 

“To put it simply, I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude. My feeling is that when you discover order and goodness in the world, it is not something you are imposing—it is something that is likely really to be there, whatever crumminess and evil and disorder there may also be. I don’t take disorder or meaninglessness to be the basic character of things. I don’t know where I get my information, but that is how I feel.”

 

Wilbur was born on this day, March 1, in 1921, and died on October 14, 2017, at age ninety-six.