The time is past when Richard Wilbur could be dismissed as a poet who writes “prayers on pinheads.”¹ But we still hear of his “ignoring of the dark,” and, in general, it may be said that he is not yet quite taken seriously even by readers who admire his work. The feeling has been that, in the long run, Wilbur’s poetry, for all its qualities, doesn’t matter, or doesn’t matter in a large way. It has not that range and power that makes some poetry, as Eliot would say, part of the consciousness of one’s age. The doubts about Wilbur (whose craftsmanship has been universally commended) have always centered on the depth of his vision and, most particularly, on his apparent insensitivity to the issues of our time.² The truth is, however, that while Wilbur is not a poet for the dark nights of the soul, neither is he a poet for the soul’s Sunday afternoons. If he seems to have made peace with the modern world, he has not bargained blindly: he knows with astonishing lucidity both the terms of his compact and its attendant perils.³ Wilbur has recently said that a good part of his work could “be understood as a public quarrel with aesthetics of Edgar Allan Poe.”⁴ He has conducted this quarrel, quite explicitly, in two brilliant essays, and his comments throw a good deal of light on the themes of his poetry. He says, for example, that for Poe “the poet is not concerned with the imaginative shaping of human life on the existing earth; his sole present recourse is to repudiate all human and mundane subject-matter, all ‘dull realities,’ and to pursue visions of those realms in which beauty was or is inviolate.”⁵ It is to this quest for visionary knowledge that Wilbur objects. His own poetry accepts the things of this world; it does not honor their imperfections, as the poetry of a jejune optimist might; rather, it celebrates the ineffaceable beauty which subsists in an imperfect universe, a beauty which is both created by imperfection and in adamant conflict with it.⁶ The relation Wilbur sees between beauty and imperfection is suggested by the title of his volume, The Beautiful Changes. In the poem which gave the volume its title, he says: “The beautiful changes as a forest is changed / By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it. …”⁷ The import of these lines Wilbur has explored in numerous poems’; he has made the chameleon everywhere visible.

What mattered to Poe about change was that it indicated a fallen world, from which escape was the only recourse. Wilbur points to the result of this thinking in Poe’s aesthetic philosophy:

Poe distinguishes in his criticism three divisions of mind—Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense—and bars the first and last from the poetic act on the ground that poetry has nothing to do with Truth or Duty. If the poet’s object is to get away from Earth and men, he is plainly bound to disregard the Moral Sense, which is involved with the conduct and passions of men; and he must also degrade the Intellect (which defers to facts and “dull realities”), restricting its function to rationalization.⁸

Wilbur does not suppose, as Poe does, that the intellect and the moral sense are inimical to the apprehension of beauty. Quite the contrary. In Wilbur’s poetry beauty is realized only upon the exercise of man’s intellectual and moral faculties. This condition has much to do with Wilbur’s style and tone. The poems have, characteristically, a moral design, and this design is, if anything, emphasized rather than merely insinuated. Similarly, the poems are deliberate meditations. They rely heavily on argument and debate and they use much intellectual irony, paradox, and ambiguity. These techniques are not employed in slavish imitation of what was, in Wilbur’s formative years, a fashion in poetry. They reflect, rather, the value he places on the life of the mind.

In general, Wilbur’s poems envision two kinds of change, disintegrative and metamorphic. Wilbur suggests that a genuine reverence for life can be attained if one has the capacity to see beyond disintegrative change, into the metamphoric and regenerative life of the universe. Metamorphic change is not without its own tragic consequences, but the tragedy is always redeemed by the fulness of being which metamorphosis effects. Insight into this redemptive process is possible only when both the intellect and the moral sense are intact. Wilbur’s poetry is therefore much concerned with a certain quality of vision, a certain way seeing into things. The presence of this vision is registered by perception of what he calls the beautiful changes. (Both syntactical senses of the phrase are important.) Here, once again, his poetry contrasts with Poe’s. Wilbur has commented on Poe’s capitulation to the “hypnogogic state”:

The hypnogogic state, about which there is strangely little said in the literature of psychology, is a condition of semi-consciousness in which the closed eye beholds a continuous procession of vivid and constantly changing forms. These forms sometimes have color, and are often abstract in character. Poe regarded the hypnogogic state as the visionary condition par excellence, and he considered its rapidly shifting abstract images to be—as he put it—“glimpses of the spirit’s outer world.” (my italics)⁹

Altogether the opposite condition obtains in Wilbur’s poetry. His poems present to the open eye a procession of constantly changing forms. These are never abstract, for they are the things of this world. And they are, or at least can be if the eye is educated, beautiful in their actuality.

Wilbur deals with the problem of change in a variety of contexts, but there is one context which, in the light of his alleged aloofness from the realities of the modern world, is particularly worth our attention. Since the nineteenth century, the most dramatic perceptions of the world’s mutability have been linked to what we have come to call the historical consciousness. Although once a source of benign optimism, the historical consciousness has more and more been an agent of despair. Stephen Dedalus cursed history as a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, and the remark has become a contemporary slogan. The issue was summed up by Philip Rahv when he said that “modern life is above all an historical life producing changes with vertiginous speed, changes difficult to understand and even more difficult to control. And to some people it appears as though the past, all of it together with its gods and sacred books, were being ground to pieces in the powerhouse of change, senselessly used up as so much raw material in the fabrication of an unthinkable future.”¹⁰ Wilbur's treatment of historical change is in every way remarkable. Sensitive as he is to the nature of change in general, he is able to write about historical change with far more penetration than the host of critics who demand from the modern poet endless tokens of torment.

“Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act” gives a clear view of the difference between disintegration and metamorphosis as modes of change, and it serves as convenient introduction to Wilbur’s poems on history. The theme is set in the fist stanza:

As Wulfstan said on another occasion,
The strong net bellies in the wind and the spider rides it out;
But history, that sure blunderer,
Ruins the unkempt web, however silver.

(p. 100)

History as “blunderer” turns out to have a special meaning, and Wilbur alerts us to it by first saying what he does not mean:

I am not speaking of rose windows
Shattered by bomb-shock; the leads touselled; the
                    glass-grains broadcast;
If the rose be living at all
A gay gravel shall be pollen of churches

Here is metamorphosis the way Wilbur see it. If the value is true, it will survive in other forms and the process of its survival is beautiful. History is a blunderer when “oathbreach, faithbreach, lovebreach / Bring the invaders into the estuaries.” In other words, history becomes a wanton agent of disorder only when men’s moral sense has broken down: “I speak / Of the spirit’s weaving, the neural / Web, the self-true mind, the trusty reflex.”

The theme is amplified in Wilbur’s “Advice to a Prophet”: the prophet will come, no doubt, “mad-eyed from stating the obvious,” but he asked not to recite “the long numbers that rocket the mind” nor to “take of the death of the race.” These horrors are so unreal that we, being “unable to fear what is too strange,” will ignore him. Therefore, the prophet is advised to “speak of the world’s own change.” By this Wilbur means that the prophet ought to instruct men in terms of those disintegrative processes which they have observed in Nature and which are fearfully familiar:

                              Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened
                    by frost,
How the view alters.

(p. 6)

Men will be able to see their destruction in Nature’s destruction because they have always used Nature as a mirror of experience:

Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

The image of the locust’s metamorphosis is crucial. Though we have known to our cost how the cloud crumbles and the vine blackens, we have also known change as metamorphosis. The prophet will do his best if he forces us to imagine a world that is not only the victim of disintegration, but which is also incapable of metamorphic revival. As Wilbur says at the end of the poem, there shall no longer be “lofty or long standing / When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.”

The closing of the oak-tree’s annals brings history to a halt, but there is, of course, no solace in the act, since metamorphosis is brought to a halt as well. This is precisely the predicament which is visited upon those who succumb to the seduction of the hypnogogic state. “Merlin Enthralled” confesses to the hypnogogic state’s temptations, but not without defining the punishment which submission always exacts. Wilbur connects Merlin’s surrender to Vivien with the collapse of Arthur’s kingdom, suggesting that Merlin’s will was weakened by the imminence of general disaster. A sense of history’s lugubrious operations is conveyed in the picture of the Round Table’s last survivors. The knights, obviously sensing imminent catastrophe, set out under Gawain to find Merlin. He is, in their minds, the only one who might be able to return to them the enchantment they knew in the past. But Merlin, bewitched by Vivien, is beyond helping himself, much less friends:

And Merlin slept, who had imagined her
Of water-sounds and the deep unsoundable swell
.....Slowly the shapes of searching men and horses
Escaped him as he dreamt on that high bed:
History died, he gathered in its forces;
The mists of time condensed in the still head. …

(p. 77)

With Merlin’s retreat from history into dream, the world loses its natural magic. The enervation this brings is reflected in the poem’s closing lines, which portray the knights fading away into mere fabulous characters: “Their mail grew quainter as they clopped along. / The sky became a still and woven blue.”

Merlin’s attempt to unify time is heroic, but to do so by destroying history is, at best, a pyrrhic victory. Transcendence of time’s disintegrative processes is, nevertheless, possible. This is what “Looking into History” affirms. If Wilbur writes prayers on pinheads, “Looking into History” approximates an oratorio.

The poem has three major motifs: it stresses the idea of optics, as the title suggest; it stresses the idea of posing and assuming postures; and it uses tree images extensively. These motifs are made to serve Wilbur’s basic interest, which is to show that although history is far more than a catalogue of events embedded in an inert past, although it has, indeed, enormous vitality in the human consciousness, men are not destined to perform a role which history has cast for them. Instead, Wilbur suggests, man asserts his dominion over history by a miraculous capacity to discover his human identity in all the bewildering modes of existence that history can prepare for him. The poem, then, rests on a paradox: the upheavals, changes, and entanglements of history confront men with a wilderness which threatens to smother the personal will, but in doing so they elicit from man’s creative imagination the very powers which allow him to order his world and sharpen his sense of his human identity.

The poem begins with a contemplation of the past as inert fact: the speaker is looking at one of Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs. Everything about the photograph confirms the static quality of the past. The five soldiers “stand in a land subdued beyond belief.” They are captured in “their amber atmosphere” and “show but the postures men affected then.” They are the remnants of “a finished year.” The speaker is at a loss to see his “spellbound fathers in these men” and pictures himself as “orphaned Hamlet.”

History as rendered by the photograph presents no threat, but neither does it afford an orphan any sense of his identity. The speaker must seek further. Noticing a file of trees in the background of the photograph, he awakes to what lies beyond the range of Brady’s camera. Looking into history in this way gives him connection with the past that a photograph is incapable of producing:

                              The long-abated breeze
Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound
Of guns and a great forest in distress.
Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound
Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness.

(p. 84)

Besides being the scene of a Civil War battle, Wilderness is a perfect metaphor for the unstructured world of changes, both disintegrative and metamorphic, through which all must find their way.

The purpose of the second movement of the poem is to explore the implications of looking into history with full consciousness of history as a force rather than as a series of facts. The movement is inaugurated by a dramatic development of the “Wilderness” metaphor and the tree imagery of the first stanzas:

But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think
How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees
Rode on the back of Simois to sink
In the wide waters.

These references to historical events as seen by great imaginative writers immediately alert us to the extraordinary significance of the historical process. The allusions redefine the meaning of “Wilderness” and recall that Homer and Shakespeare found it appropriate to understand man’s inner life within the context of climactic historical events. With this reminder, we are led to the poem’s central reflection:

                              Reflect how history’s
Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls
Its salvage of the world in shifty waves,
Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls
And yielding views of its confounded graves
To the new moon, the sun, or any eye
That in its shallow shoreward version
The pebbles charging with a deathless cry
And carageen memorials of trees.

As opposed to “Mathew Brady’s eye,” which could only record an inert past, the eye of Homer or Shakespeare or any man with insight can see the great shaping forces of history. These forces are destructive in the changes they produce, but, to the acute eye, history’s changes finally issue in an affirmation of life. The “carageen memorials of trees,” while they constitute, as Keats might say, only a shadow of magnitude that was, are still inherently more appropriate as historical records than the photographic memorabilia of the first stanza. They achieve this distinction by virtue of the metamorphic process which they reflect. History’s changes are like the sea’s, and the sea’s changes are ones in which new forms of life are evolved out of old forms. Liberation from history comprehended as a blind concatenation of events depends on the ability to see these “carageen memorials.”

Wilbur, however, is aware of the elusiveness of this kind of perception. The poem clearly suggests that what our eye beholds in the sea’s “shallow shoreward version” must not blind us to the tumult that goes on in the great deeps. Similarly, the “carageen memorials” are themselves a very fragile form of life, and the “charging pebbles,” as we are surely meant to remember, sounded grating to Matthew Arnold.

Tenuous though it is, the perception is possible, and the poem, in its third section, undertakes to show how it is possible. This last section can, in fact, be read as an elaboration on what Wilbur means by that moral fiber which in “Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act” he offers as the only sure defense against the flux of time. One makes this defense by refusing to become imprisoned in the self, by opening oneself to all the forms of life that are external, and by drawing from those forms an increased measure of one’s human identity. In short, perception of the world’s beautiful changes becomes possible if we do not deny to our own being the instinct for metamorphosis.

Having established in the poem’s second section an analogy between history’s changes and the sea’s, Wilbur begins the final section with an address to Proteus, the presiding deity of his verse:

Now, old man of the sea,
I start to understand:
The will will find no stillness
Back in a stilled land.

The play on “still” recalls Brady’s photographs. History as the photograph conveys it is rejected, for the will insists on using the past as a living force in shaping its own identity. “The dead give no command … / Till they be mustered by / Some present fatal choice.” But the will, in exposing itself to history as a living force, does not invite its own annihilation, not, that is, if one can “rejoice / In all impostures, take / The shape of lion or leopard, / Boar, or watery snake. …” This protean disposition makes accessible the sources of renewed vitality which, as the poem implies, are immanent in history’s changes. Thus do we “by some fervent fraud / Father the waiting past. …” If the spellbound fathers” of Brady’s photograph showed “but the postures men affected then,” we are not, on the account, condemned to be orphans in the universe. We have within us the potential to establish our kinship with the past by undergoing transformation ourselves. Though this may seem a fraud, an affectation of postures, the ultimate effect is, paradoxically, a fuller comprehension of our identity. To contain oneself within the limits of the self-regarding life is a greater fraud, a greater affectation. It is in the “Wilderness” that we find our cause. And so the poem comes to its conclusion with an image that precisely expresses the paradox it has developed. Under the aegis of Proteus, we discover ourselves

Resembling at the last
The self-established tree
That draws all waters toward
Its live formality.

The protean disposition, nurturing itself on all the forces of vitality around it, becomes, in the end, firm and stable. From our perception of the “memorial of trees,” we build the tree itself, and from our ability to undergo metamorphosis, we impose coherence on history's “shifty waves.”

It is useful to place “Looking into History” alongside “The Aspen and the Stream,” a poem that takes the form of a dialogue between a tree and the stream which it borders. The aspen expresses dramatically the idea which the self-established tree of “Looking into History” represents symbolically. Beholding the stream, on whose surface all creation is reflected, the aspen aspires to what it believes is the streams “deep surrendered mind,” and says: “Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole / And, casting out my self, become a soul” (p. 32). But the stream, it turns out, takes no pleasure in its capacity for assimilating the life of things external to it:

I seek an empty mind
Reflection is my curse.
Oh, never have I been blind
To the damned universe. …

The stream is another version of Merlin and Poe's protagonists; it is weary of the world. But the point I wish to make in comparing the two poems is evident in the last stanza, in which the aspen concludes the poignant dialogue:

Out of your sullen flux I shall distil
A gayer spirit and a clambering will,
And reach toward all about me, and ensnare
With roots the earth, with branches all the air—
Even if the blind groping but achieves
A darker head, a few more aspen-leaves.

One needs no further gloss on the meaning of the last image in “Looking into History.” The aspen's beautiful changes are accomplished by its openness to sullen flux. And if the process entails exposure to tragic experience (the “darker head”), once again it is fulness of being, not annihilation, that results.

The bearing of “The Aspen and the Stream” on “Looking into History” illustrates the point that Wilbur's poems on history are actually part of a wider preoccupation with change itself. And both of these poems, as well as “Advice to a Prophet,” illustrate Wilbur's tendency to comprehend change by means of the heuristic power he finds in Nature. His exploration of change, in the context of natural forms, is effectively conducted in “Driftwood.” The poem contrasts disintegration and metamorphosis as processes that are equally real. And it advises us that our capacity to perceive the difference between these alternatives depends on our willingness to reject the overweening self and to embrace the universe.

The poem attempts to reconstruct the lineage of some miscellaneous driftwood:

In greenwoods once these relics must have known
A rapt, gradual growing,
That are cast here like slag of the old
Engine of grief …

(p. 153)

The speaker has here been struck by the mortal—and natural—process of erosion. But as he muses with regret on the changes suffered by these relics, an entirely different view of the changes begins to form itself. He sees that in their pristine condition the driftwood could merely have “affirmed an annual increase / Their close selves, knowing / Their own nature only …” The rapt, gradual growing, it now appears, has the falsity of Poe's hypnogogic state. It was better, the poem indicates, that “their solitude was taken” and that they were “milled into / Oar and plank. …” Though metamorphosis into ships exposed them to a hostile world in which they “smashed or sank,” still, they did not disintegrate. Instead, release from their self-regarding lives made available to them a revelation of their essential identity which they could never have won in the greenwoods:

Then on the great generality of waters
Floated their singleness,
And in all that deep subsumption they were
Never dissolved. …

Thus, far from reducing them to slag, the changes imposed on these relics have wrought in them a hallowed purity and beauty:

Curious crowns and scepters they look to me
Here on the gold sand,
Warped, wry, but having the beauty of
Excellence earned.

That the excellence is at once aesthetic and moral and that these qualities are inseparable, as Keats affirmed and Poe denied, is the point on which the poem concludes. Though the pieces of driftwood “have ridden to homeless wreck” and have been “long revolved / In the lathe of all the seas,” still they “have saved in spite of it all their dense / Ingenerate grain.”

Another subject about which Wilbur has written with profound skill is children, whom he neither patronizes nor romanticizes. Children experience change in quite radical ways, and Wilbur understands how the imaginative life of the children reflects their delight in change on the one hand, and their sense of its painful mysteries on the other. Children in Wilbur's poems, however, are never victimized by the conflict. They are paragons of the open self, the self that is amenable to transformation. As a result, their lives are a pattern of the way in which the conflict between beauty and tragedy in change can be reconciled through an instinctive capacity for metamorphosis.

In “Statues” Wilbur discovers an almost ritualistic significance in the well-known children's game. The children refuse to be caught in the sculptured rigor mortis that characterizes both the adults who observe them and the scientifically designed playground that has been constructed for them:

                              in a planned
And planted grove they fling from the swinger's hand
Across the giddy grass and then hold still
                    In gargoyle attitudes,—
All definition were outrageous. Then
They melt in giggles and begin again.

(p. 83)

The earth itself is dazzled by their performance and the “planted grove” is released from its bondage to the Park Department's empty vision. Rediscovering their immemorial capacity for beautiful changes, the maples “with a stiff / Compliance” begin to “entertain the air” and lose the “look of trees / In rushed and cloudy metamorphosis. …” As the children and trees dance to their splendidly “fickle” rhythm, something is touched and aroused in the bric-a-brac adults who watch them:

                    The soldier breaks his iron pace;
Linked lovers pause to gaze; and every rôle
Relents,—until the feet begin to stroll
Or stride again.

Their withdrawal before metamorphosis, their instinctive retreat back into their familiar attitudes, are gestures which pay ironic homage to the children's superior wisdom. It is left to “one aging bum,” to grasp something of the children's real significance as he “stares at the image of his kingdom come.”

In “Boy at the Window” a child is in terrible anguish as he looks out from the sanctuary of his home at a snowman whom he knows is about to be assaulted by “a night of gnashings and enormous moan.” What he sees in the snowman is, of course, a reflection of his own situation as a human being. Wilbur universalizes their common tragedy:

His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

(p. 99)

The meaning of being cast out of paradise is that one inherits a world of whose imperfections are inevitable and omnipresent. The boy's feeling of security in his warm home is an innocent illusion, and the illusion is partly exposed by the snowman's “having no wish to go inside and die.” The fundamental nature of this illusion does not, however, become clear until the snowman responds with sadness to the boy's love and is

                              moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear …

The snowman begins to dissolve as he begins to love. This condition, rather than the bitter night, reflects the true nature of the world. The boy at the window, who is “surrounded by / Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear,” has not yet realized that these qualities, which have shielded him from the world's brutality, are but imperfect gifts. Unutterable love will be for him, as it has always been, the cause of crushing pain. He is even now being introduced to this pain: “Seeing the snowman standing all alone / In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.”

Nevertheless, if the snowman's act of love reveals the real nature of the boy's illusions, it also illuminates both for him and for the reader how the willingness to bestow love, in spite of the pain, is redemptive. The snowman in dissolving does not, after all die. He is metamorphosed into “the purest rain.” His love exacts an enormous cost, but the effect on him is, finally, beautiful, both in itself and because it rescues him from the “night of gnashings and enormous moan.”

Kenneth Burke has claimed that “a rationale of history is the first step whereby the dispossessed repossess the world.”¹¹ It may be said that Wilbur makes this claim with reference to change in general. The rationale which informs his effort to repossess the world, the rationale of the beautiful changes, has obvious limitations. It assumes, for example, a world that is imperfect, not a world that is meaningless. But Wilbur make the possibility of repossessing an imperfect world decidedly real and palpable, and that is the achievement of his poetry.

Notes

1. Excerpts from the poetry of Richard Wilbur are from his volume, The Poems of Richard Wilbur and reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., © 1950, 1956, 1959, 1961, by Richard Wilbur; copyright, 1952, 1953, by The New Yorker Magazine. Page references are to this edition.

2. This view of Wilbur is reflected in such a standard work as M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1960), pp. 253-255.

3. Wilbur himself has indirectly replied to his critics by saying that no poet should “adjust his concerns to what others consider the great thought-currents of the times: the Zeitgeist, after all, is only a spook invented by the critics.” “Round About a Poem of Housman's,” in Don Cameron Allen, ed., The Moment of Poetry (Baltimore, 1962), p. 97.

4. “On My Own Work,” Shenandoah, XVII (1956), 66.

5. “Introduction” to Poe (Laurel Poetry Series, New York, 1959), p. 9.

6. On this aspect of Wilbur's poetry, see A. K. Weatherhead's fine essay, “Richard Wilbur: Poetry of Things,” ELH, XXXV (1968), 606-617.

7. Poems, p. 226. Sister M. Bernetta Quinn quotes “The Beautiful Changes” in her study of The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (New Brunswick, N. J., 1955), pp. 7-8. She does not, however, deal with Wilbur in the book, though I suspect she would have if Wilbur's key work, Things of This World (1956), had been available to her.

8. “Introduction” to Poe, p.10.

9. “The House of Poe,” Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture, May 4, 1959, reprinted in Eric W. Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966), p. 265.

10. Philip Rahv, The Myth and the Powerhouse (New York, 1965), pp. 13-14.

11. Attitudes Toward History (Boston, 1961), p. 315.