[In the following essay, the writer discusses how Wilbur's A Bestiary modifies and builds on the original medieval text Wilbur translated.]

Everything in the world is strange and marvellous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder is the delight … which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary. His special attribute is the wonder of the eyes. Hence it was that the ancients gave Minerva her owl, the bird with everdazzled eyes.

(José Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses.)¹

For a comparatively young poet, Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) has received considerable recognition from official quarters: the Harriet Monroe Prize in poetry, 1948; the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, 1950; the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, 1957; the National Book Award, 1957; and the Pulitzer Prize, 1957. In recognition of his promise as well as his achievement he has been granted fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation (1952) and by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1945). Currently he is a professor of English at Wesleyan University.

One of his central interests has been animals, an interest that culminated in A Bestiary, compiled by Wilbur and illustrated by Alexander Calder (Pantheon Books, Inc., 1955). In this work there are thirty-three separate treatments: the frog, the dog, the fly, the spider, the hawk, the whale, etc. Fabulous animals like the centaur, the mermaid, and the unicorn are also included. For each creature there are four or five brief descriptions in prose or verse drawn from the voluminous literature on animals, from ancient books like Aesop's Fables and Pliny's Natural History to the works of contemporaries like Richard Eberhart and Marianne Moore. A few of the poems are Wilbur's own; some, like the one on the pelican, are his translations from other languages.

For more than a thousand years the Bestiary was one of the chief reference books on animals. In the earliest form of the work, The Physiologus of the second century, the legendary attributes ascribed to animals were given symbolical interpretations. By ingenious parallels the lion and the whale, for example, were shown to represent Christ. In many a medieval tapestry the unicorn dominates the scene. According to legend, it was an exceedingly dangerous beast; yet at sight of a virgin it would approach gently and place its head in her lap. So, Christ, mightiest of celestial beings, took on human form in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Animal allegories of this sort were favored by the Greek and Latin Church Fathers: Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Through their influence the Physiologus came to be translated as the Bestiary into most of the west European vernaculars. Wilbur draws particularly upon the Middle English Bestiary. For translation from the twelfth century Anglo-Norman Philippe de Thaun's Bestiaire he selects “The Pelican,” in which sophistication and naïveté are skillfully blended. The father pelican angered by the attacks his infant offspring make upon him, slays them. Moved by compassion he returns after three days, draws blood from his side and sprinkles it upon the lifeless forms. The little birds revive. In similar fashion, mankind condemned to death has been restored to life through the shedding of Christ's blood.

In definition and range, however, Wilbur's Bestiary goes far beyond its medieval original. It includes classical and modern accounts that have no trace of allegory. Thorstein Veblen's diatribe on “the filthiest of the domestic animals,” the dog, is an example. Of Wilbur's translations, one of the best is “A Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys,” by the late nineteenth century French poet, Francis Jammes. In its humble subject, its simple diction, and its unquestioning faith, it recaptures something of the charm of the middle ages. Wilbur's faithful translation deserves to be quoted in full:

When I must come to you, O my God, I pray
It be some dust-roaded holiday,
And even as in my travels here below,
I beg to choose by what road I shall go
To Paradise, where the clear stars shine by day.
I'll take my walking-stick and go my way,
And to my friends the donkeys I shall say,
‘I am Francis Jammes, and I'm going to Paradise,
For there is no hell in the land of the loving God.’
And I'll say to them: ‘Come, sweet friends of the blue skies,
Poor creatures who with a flap of the ears or a nod
Of the head shake off the buffets, the bees, the flies …’
Let me come with these donkeys, Lord, into your land,
These beasts who bow their heads so gently, and stand
With their small feet joined together in a fashion
Utterly gentle, asking your compassion.
I shall arrive, followed by their thousands of ears,
Followed by those with baskets at their flanks,
By those who lug the carts of mountebanks
Or loads of feather-dusters and kitchen-wares,
By those with humps of battered water-cans,
By bottle-shaped she-asses who halt and stumble,
By those tricked out in little pantaloons
To cover their wet, blue galls where flies assemble
In whirling swarms, making a drunken hum.
Dear God, let it be with these donkeys that I come,
And let it be that angels lead us in peace
To leafy streams where cherries tremble in air,
Sleek as the laughing flesh of girls; and there
In that haven of souls let it be that, leaning above
Your divine waters, I shall resemble these donkeys,
Whose humble and sweet poverty will appear
Clear in the clearness of your eternal love.(2)

In his own animal poems, only a few of which are included in the Bestiary, Wilbur strikes an original note. He takes for his themes such things as the locust's song in “windless summer evenings,” the southern flight of blackbirds in autumn, the death of a toad. Unlike Aesop, he provides no narrative, no moral; unlike Pliny, he is not concerned mainly with the animal's attributes, real or fabulous. In each instance, his animal is a medium through which he moves to larger, deeper issues. The poem about the locust, or cicada, rests upon a paradox. The cicada's song has always puzzled and delighted men; “chanters of miracles” have even taken it for a sign. Yet, as the scientist Fabre proved, the cicada cannot hear. In trying to catch in words the impression that the flight of blackbirds makes upon him, he discovers the shifting nature of reality, learns

By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

In imagination he follows the dying toad as it sinks back toward its origins in primal oceans, toward “cooling shores,” and “lost Amphibia's emperies.” But the particular and profounder quality of these animal poems is illustrated best, perhaps, in “A Grasshopper,” which appeared in The New Yorker, August 22, 1959. The familiar and invidious contrast with the ant has no place in this poem. There is no sermon on industry vs. idleness. Instead, the poem is an attempt, and a successful one, to catch the stillness of a summer day, the peace that for “a brief moment” descends on a field of grass, when a grasshopper pauses on a chicory leaf. The leaf rocks briefly under the weight and then is still. The quiet spreads to the surrounding flowers. The wind shrinks away. All cries fade out. Peace seems to extend “to the world's verge.” But suddenly, and with no apparent purpose, the grasshopper leaps away, “giving the leaf a kick.” By a kind of chain reaction, the grasses begin to sway again, the cricket's cry is heard, the entire field awakes. So, the macrocosm is shown in the microcosm. In little, the incident illustrates the larger ebb and flow of things, the universal alternation of opposites which is the dance of life, the cosmic harmony.

The Bestiary can be used to indicate another aspect of Wilbur's work, the equal attraction that comic and serious themes have for him. Under “The Fly” he has an entry drawn from Laurence Sterne and another drawn from William Blake. Uncle Toby in Sterne's Tristam Shandy is of so gentle a disposition that he has “scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.” Having caught a particularly large and persistent one that has buzzed around his nose through dinner, he ceremoniously conveys it to the window, and after a long, grandiloquent, semi-Biblical speech of forgiveness and benediction, sets it free. The passage is remarkable for its lightness of touch and its comic overtones. A striking contrast is provided by Blake's serious thoughts on the same subject:

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.
Am I not
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance,
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

That Wilbur includes selections from authors so different in type as Sterne and Blake indicates a range of interests that is to be found also in his own work—his translations and his original poems.

It is significant that among French authors the two with whom Wilbur is most concerned are Molière and Voltaire. For sophisticated repartee, the satiric give-and-take of drawing-room conversation, few plays in the world's repertory can match Molière's Misanthrope. And Wilbur's translation of the play (Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc., 1955) is as lively as any thus far in English. Furthermore, it is done in verse, preserving, as Wilbur says, “the frequently intricate arrangements of balancing half-lines, lines, couplets, quatrains, and sestets.” All this, too, without sacrifice of accuracy and faithfulness to the original. How difficult such a feat is the Italians recognize in their adage, “traduttore, traditore.” Too frequently the translator is a traitor. In Wilbur's English dress, however, Molière's epigrams retain their polish and their poison. The double-edged nature of the satire—the simultaneous ridicule of society on the one hand, and its chief critic, Alceste, on the other—is admirably maintained. For conversational ease and naturalness combined with deadly verbal thrusts, as in a duel, no scene surpasses the one in which two drawing-room belles, Arsinoé and Célimène, tear each other's reputations to shreds. It is the scene that Wilbur selects for inclusion in his collection, Poems 1943-1956 (Faber and Faber, 1957). The play as a whole shows his genuine talent as a translator.

After his success with Molière, he was a natural choice when Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman wanted someone to write the lyrics for Candide, their comic operetta³ on Voltaire's famous philosophical romance. Of all the spirited and amusing lyrics, the best is “Pangloss's Song,” Wilbur's contribution, on which the opera closes. Through the ravages of syphilis, Pangloss the philosopher of optimism, has lost an eye, and his nose is half eaten away. Yet he remains faithful to his philosophy, still sings a song of praise to the Goddess of Love in this best of all possible worlds:

Dear boy, you will not hear me speak
          With sorrow or with rancour
Of what has paled my rosy cheek
          And blasted it with canker;
'Twas Love, great Love, that did the deed
          Through Nature's gentle laws,
And how should ill effects proceed
From so divine a cause.
Sweet honey comes from bees that sting,
          As you are well aware;
To one adept in reasoning,
          Whatever pains disease may bring
Are but the tangy seasoning
          To Love's delicious fare.
Columbus and his men, they say,
          Conveyed the virus hither
Whereby my features rot away
          And vital powers wither;
Yet had they not traversed the seas
          And come infected back,
Why, think of all the luxuries
          That modern life would lack!
All bitter things conduce to sweet,
          As this example shows;
Without the little spirochete
          We'd have no chocolate to eat,
Nor would tobacco's fragrance greet
          The European nose.
Each nation guards its native land
          With cannon and with sentry,
Inspectors look for contraband
          At every port of entry,
Yet nothing can prevent the spread
          Of Love's divine disease;
It rounds the world from bed to bed
          As pretty as you please.
Men worship Venus everywhere
          As plainly may be seen;
The decorations which I bear
          Are nobler than the Croix de Guerre,
And gained in service of our fair
          And universal Queen.(4)

There is a sprinkling of poems of the light and humorous sort in each of Wilbur's books thus far published. Two clever couplets, for example, are devoted to Dr. Samuel Johnson's kicking a stone in refutation of Berkeley's idealistic philosophy (“Epistemology”). Don Quixote riding abroad in search of glory and adventure comes to a crossing and allows his horse to choose the way. The horse, wiser than the master, heads back for the barn (“Parable”). A graceful dancer pirouettes on a museum wall (“Museum Piece”). It is a painting by Edgar Degas who once bought an excellent El Greco

To hang his pants on while he slept.

Degas, to whom Wilbur devotes two poems (“Museum Piece” and “L'Étoile”), is not the only painter, however, to interest him. “My Father Paints the Summer” is another poem on the kindred art. Eugène Delacroix receives a tribute in “The Giaour and the Pacha.” A painting by Bazille is the subject of “Ceremony.” And Pieter de Hooch's art inspires “Objects” and “A Dutch Courtyard.” In the work of these painters it is evident that Wilbur finds principles operative that are of value, also, to him as a poet. There is, for example, the peculiar power the painter Pieter de Hooch has of making “objects speak.” This power Wilbur also possesses. From many possible illustrations, “Driftwood” can be selected as representative. Cast up by the sea, at rest finally on the sand, a few gnarled relics have a tremendous significance. They tell of years of growing in the forest; of service as mast, or oar, or plank; of eventual ship-wreck; of floating in deep waters by which they were “never dissolved”; of being “shaped” and “fitted” by ocean tides until now they have

                              the beauty of
Excellence earned.

To the present generation faced by so many difficult problems, these relics should have a special meaning, for through all their ordeals—the wrecks and the wash of the seas—they have preserved their “ingenerate grain.”

In his Weltanschauung Wilbur does not belong to the school currently in fashion. Today the reigning favorites are the authors who possess the tragic vision. There is a revival of interest in Hawthorne and Melville with their sombre musings. Dostoevsky's schizophrenics and psychopaths, characters who have lost their spiritual bearings, are taken to be the forerunners of twentieth century man. The dominant philosophy in Europe is existentialism, which has its origin partly in Nietzsche's dictum, “God is dead.” Existentialism's leading exponent is the French philosopher Sartre, whose first novel, Nausea (1938), expresses in its very title his attitude toward existence. And the titles of the French novelist, Camus, who in 1957 won the Nobel Prize for literature, are similarly revealing: The Outsider (1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall (1956). Among German writers of the twentieth century, few have received more attention than Kafka, whose story “The Metamorphosis” is representative. In it the chief character, Gregor Samsa, is filled with such contempt for himself, and so strongly desires to evade his responsibilities, that he longs to become, and in fact does turn into a cockroach.

For these dark readings of the human enigma there is, of course, considerable basis in twentieth century experience. Camus never allows us to forget “that over a period of twenty-five years, between 1922 and 1947, 70 million Europeans—men, women, and children—have been uprooted, deported, and killed.” It is no reflection on these powerful writers, however, to say that their philosophy is not the only one possible. At other times, or in other places, or by a different light existence may be viewed more favorably. For Wilbur, at any rate, black is not the only color, nor anguish the only theme. A writer's view of life depends largely on his temperament. And in temperament Wilbur differs from Sarte, Camus, and Kafka. Not that he is deaf or blind so far as social, political and economic questions are concerned. He, too, has witnessed the world conflict of the 'forties. In “Mined Country” he describes the aftermath. War, he says, “hits at childhood more than churches.” In “First Snow in Alsace,” the gutted buildings and the ammunition dumps are gradually covered and changed by the snowfall. And a mile or two outside the town, the snow also

                                                            fills the eyes
Of soldiers dead a little while.

He refers in passing to such things as the Negro problem, and “the single-tax state” (“Water Walker”). Five of his quatrains berate the Philistines in the suburbs (“To an American Poet Just Dead”). But he is not at his best on these subjects. They lie on the periphery of his thought.

Essentially, Wilbur's note is one of affirmation. He is attracted, for example, by an Italian fountain (“A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”), by the carved fauns at their innocent games. They never grow weary of the sun. They are happy in the loose waterfall and spray,

Reproving our disgust and our ennui
          With humble insatiety.

It is possible, Wilbur implies (“A Problem from Milton”), that men reflect too much on the nature of things, do not enough enjoy the natural phenomena of which they are a part, the life force evidencing itself in the coiled vine, the lush tree, the comber dashing itself on the rocks. Adam in Eden was the first offender. Not content simply with being, he lost Paradise in his attempt to understand it. For splendid vitality there is no better example than the sea

Whose horses never know their lunar reins.

As Ortega y Gasset says in the passage quoted at the beginning of this article, “Everything in the world is strange and marvellous to well-open eyes.” Unquestionably, Wilbur would meet with the Spanish philosopher's approval. For he discovers the strange and the marvellous in the commonest objects. Like the painter, Pieter de Hooch, whom he admires (“Objects” and “A Dutch Courtyard”), he is entranced by the way in which a courtyard seems to burn in the sun, finds pleasure in “true textures,” “true integuments,” magic in “the weave of a sleeve.” Even the lowly potato inspires a lyric (“Potato”) ten stanzas long.

Yet he is aware, as Wordsworth earlier was aware, that when he invests the commonplace with magic, he half perceives and half creates the objects of his vision. In “My Father Paints the Summer,” the setting is a beach hotel on a chilly, rainy July day. While the other guests shiver by the “lobby fire,” the father in his room puts on canvas his conception of the perfect season. It is “a summer never seen,” having its origin in the heart, for

Caught summer is always an imagined time.

On occasion, as in “La Rose des Vents,” the poet may be too prone to journey to the lands of his imagining, to cultivate the “roses of the mind.” His lady calls him back to reality so that he may

                    tend the true
The mortal flower.

Deep within the heart of reality, however, dwells the miraculous, requiring for its perception no perversion or distortion of things, only “well-open eyes.” This is the theme of “Praise in Summer”:

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour's in this wrenching thing awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?(5)

Many of Wilbur's works are songs of praise. His love poems, delicate and restrained, trace the forms the beautiful takes in its many changes (“A Simile for Her Smile” and “The Beautiful Changes”). Reading in the Notebooks of G. M. Hopkins he comes upon a quotation from another poet: “The young lambs bound / As to the tabor's sound.” And at once he thinks of Nijinsky's “marvellous mid-air pause” in his dancing; the amazing sure-footedness of the dining-car waiter “in the shaken train”; Hamlet's thought and Flaubert's speech—all instances of grace that he remembers with pleasure (“Grace”). And along with “Grace” his tributes to “Clearness,” “Lightness,” and “Ceremony” should be mentioned. In effect, they are what he calls one of his poems, a “Conjuration.”

From all these examples cited, it is evident that Wilbur is a versatile poet. Nothing has been said of his verse forms and metres, but they are as varied as his themes, and as skilfully handled. He is deeply and widely read in at least two literatures, English and French. In his techniques as in his subjects he sometimes draws upon earlier authors: Nash, Traherne, Milton, La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Valéry. But always he supplies his own distinctive touch, beats his own music out. In the difficult and insufficiently appreciated art of translation he is a master. Most of all, in his own, original work he imparts to the familiar an air of newness and strangeness. He is what Ortega y Gasset desires—an intellectual man who has not lost the sense of wonder. He is one of those poets of whom in a recent anthology Robert Frost says that they “need live to write no better, need only wait to be better known for what they have written.”

Notes

1. Quoted under “The Owl” in A Bestiary, compiled by Richard Wilbur, illustrated by Alexander Calder (Pantheon Books, 1955).

2. From Things of This World, copyright, 1956, by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

3. Candide: A Comic Operetta Based on Voltaire's Satire. Book by Lillian Hellman. Lyrics by Richard Wilbur [and others]. Random House, 1957.

4. Reprinted by permission of the author and of Random House, Inc.

5. From The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, copyright, 1947, by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.