Mayflies

by Richard Wilbur

The Heart's Crayon

In 1988 Richard Wilbur, then poet laureate of the United States, published New and Collected Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize. It was the second time that Wilbur had received the honor, having won a Pulitzer in 1956 for his book Things of this World, the title poem of which many consider to be one of the finest American poems of the century. Since then, Wilbur, who will turn 79 this year, has been a quiet force, slowly working on the 20 poems and eight translations that make up his newest book, Mayflies. These new poems exhibit Wilbur's thoughtful pace, steadily and carefully pursuing their objects without a misplaced word or struggled cadence. With Mayflies, Wilbur has returned to center stage, and it has been well worth the wait.

The time between books will come as no surprise to longtime Wilbur fans, who are a patient lot by necessity. Prior to New and Collected Poems, his most recent book was The Mind Reader, published in 1976. Since his first two books, separated by a mere three years, Wilbur has worked at an average rate of one book of poems per 8.3 years, a reliable if not fleet stride. Wilbur's poems are so finely wrought that they must be written slowly, over time. Wilbur may be the finest poet of formal verse writing in English in the latter half of the 20th century. He has a tremendous ear, and his musicality has the delicate balance of song and speech that is the very basis of poetry. Throughout the mutations that the poetic form has undergone in America since Whitman, and even more so since the 1960s, Wilbur has remained one of the few major poets who even attempt to write metrical rhyming verses. As he puts it, "I have no case whatsoever against controlled free verse. Yet I think it is absurd to feel that free verse -- which has only been with us in America for a little over a hundred years -- has definitively 'replaced' measure and rhyme and other traditional instruments."

The themes in Mayflies are common to Wilbur. He is always concerned with the effect of thought and feeling on the physical world. Wilbur is a humanist -- behind his poetry there lurks a world that, unenhanced by human passion and aim, lies before us pale and lame, an incomplete and mysterious place that means nothing. In "A Digression," he chronicles a moment in which a writer, having just dropped a manuscript in the mail, wanders down an unfamiliar street and slips from the tether of purpose that holds him to the world. His soul, "proposing nothing," sees nothing, only

            ...an obstructive storm

      Of specks and flashes that will take no form,

      A roiled mosaic or a teeming scrim

      That seems to have no pertinence to him.

      It is his purpose now as, turning 'round,

      He takes his bearings and is homeward bound,

      To ponder what the world's confusion meant

      When he regarded it without intent.

One would think that Wilbur, as a poet, might be accustomed to feelings of purposelessness. But what makes the poem more than just a complaint is his impersonal, world-aware, and formal tone. This poem is not about what it feels like to have nothing to do but wander aimlessly; it is about what the world is beneath the meaning we ascribe to it.

Another poem, "At Moorditch" (the title comes from a line in Shakespeare that Wilbur says "seemed a good name for the sort of hospital where people are treated for depression"), faces the same unmade world, but this time not out of purposelessness but desolation. There are two voices in the poem, Wilbur's, or Wilbur's surrogate, and a commanding "voice of lock and window-bar." Being told to confront things as they "really are," Wilbur responds,

       "Things have," I said, "a pallid, empty look,

       Like pictures in an unused coloring book."

The voice, which comes now from the "sad hallways," insists, asserting that the "scales have fallen from your eyes," and former impressions of delight were all folly. Still Wilbur holds his ground in humanism, stating,

      "This cannot be the world," I said. "Nor will it,

       Till the heart's crayon spangle and fulfill it."

Again, it is the activity of human thought and feeling that makes the world, whatever that is, into the world we know.

This common theme is there in the book's first poem, "A Barred Owl," which takes up the transformational powers of words. After comforting his daughter, who has wakened in the night to th...

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2000

About the author

Early years :

Wilbur was born in New York City and grew up in North Caldwell, New Jersey.He graduated from Montclair High School in 1938, having worked on the school newspaper as a student there. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade. At Wesleyan, he was instrumental in founding the award-winning poetry series of the University Press.He received two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and, as of 2011, teaches at Amherst College.He is also on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.He married Charlotte Hayes Ward in 1942 after his graduation from Amherst; she was a student at nearby Smith College.

Career :

When only 8 years old, Wilbur published his first poem in John Martin's Magazine. His first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, appeared in 1947. Since then he has published several volumes of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (Faber, 1989). Wilbur is also a translator, specializing in the 17th century French comedies of Molière and the dramas of Jean Racine. His translation of Tartuffe has become the standard English version of the play, and has been presented on television twice (a 1978 production is available on DVD.)

Continuing the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur's poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences. Less well-known is Wilbur's foray into lyric writing. He provided lyrics to several songs in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical, Candide, including the famous "Glitter and Be Gay" and "Make Our Garden Grow." He has also produced several unpublished works such as "The Wing" and "To Beatrice".

His honors include the 1983 Drama Desk Special Award for his translation of The Misanthrope, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award, both in 1957, the Edna St Vincent Millay award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Chevalier, Ordre National des Palmes Académiques. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959.In 1987 Wilbur became the second poet, after Robert Penn Warren, to be named U.S. Poet Laureate after the position's title was changed from Poetry Consultant. In 1989 he won a second Pulitzer, this one for his New and Collected Poems. On October 14, 1994, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton. In 2006, Wilbur won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2010 he won the National Translation Award for the translation of The Theatre of Illusion by Pierre Corneille.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

By far my favorite was This Pleasing Anxious Being, which you can hear Wilbur talk about and read at the provided link.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thin volume by Wilbur that came out in 200o. It is not one of his better books. It appears that it was filled out for publication with translations. But for Wilbur, average is still great on the poetry scale when measured against others. All of the poems are excellent.

[Jake McAtee · Rating 5 out of 5]

2021: Even better. This Pleasing Anxious Being was a perfect end - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5meU... https://figuratives.tumblr.com/post/1...

2018: Brilliant.

[Brainard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some notable translations in here, besides his beautiful poems, translations of Baudelaire, Dante, and more

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite collection of poems from Wilbur’s book!

[Roger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 9 of my sealey challenge

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested to read a book of poetry from a Pulitzer Prize winner, and I did appreciate most of the poetry in this book. It was also nice to read a poet who doesn't think himself above rhyming (which I always like when done well). I could not appreciate Wilbur's translations of other pieces since I had not read those originals (or other translations) before, so I lacked context to the pieces he chose. My favorite poems in the collection were "A Barred Owl," "The Gambler," and "Crow's Nests" while my favorite translation was that of Charles Baudelaire's "The Albatross." It is probably not a collection I would re-visit, but I picked up the book from the library book sale last year and figured I'd give it a shot.

[Albion College · Rating 5 out of 5]

At age 91, Richard Wilbur is still writing and publishing wonderful poems, so this is by no means his latest work, but it is representative of the poetic gifts that have won him numerous awards. The title poem moves from evocative description of nature—here, a swarm of mayflies—to personal reflection to a final joyful, unifying recognition of the beauty of the Creator’s “fiats.” “A Barred Owl” captures human attempts to domesticate our fears of a darker, wilder side of nature.

“For C.” is the most beautiful modern love poem I know. The “C.” of the title is Wilbur’s wife, Charlotte, and the final stanza affirms married love and fidelity as an expression of our fullest, deepest humanity. [After reading “For C.,” seek out Wilbur’s most recent volume, Anterooms, which opens with a heartbreaking poem (“The House”) expressing
his grief after Charlotte’s death.]

Wilbur is also an acclaimed translator. He includes translations from poets such as Baudelaire and Dante, and you can get a taste of Wilbur’s lively translations of Molière’s plays with “The Prologue to Molière’s Amphitryon.”

-Marion Meilaender, Library

[Kirsten Kinnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm completely blown away and feel like I should go back over my ratings and demote everything by one star (of course I won't). Formal, metrical, full of ideas and humor. Perfect.

One of my favorites:

Elsewhere

The delectable names of harsh places:
Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.
In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,
We hear no ill of brittle parch and glare.

So late October's pasture-fringe,
With aster-blur and ferns of toasted gold,
Invites to barrens where the crop to come
Is stone prized upward by the deepening freeze.

Speechless and cold the stars arise
On the small garden where we have dominion.
Yet in three tongues we speak of Taurus' name
And of Aldebaran and the Hyades,

Recalling what at best we know,
That there is beauty bleak and far from ours,
Great reaches where the Lord's delighting mind,
Though not inhuman, ponders other things.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would do us all good to occasionally take some time out to read poetry. Words, with their subtle and differing meanings in combination are the backbone of civilization and in the hands of a master can generate so many different emotions. This collection, not all of which are by Richard Wilbur, are shining examples of the craft and art of poetry. Each moved me in different ways every time I read them, demonstrating the he is indeed worthy of his Pulitzer Prize. I highly recommend it for your poetic

This review also appears on Amazon

[Edward Ferrari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most focused in translations and aphorisms, the other stuff awkward, rhymey, and unfocused. Prefer to read Wilbur's earlier books. Favorite poems were: the Dante translation, Fabrications, and 'This Pleasing Anxious Being.'

[Sandybjork · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeremy proposed to Kara by giving her this book of poems with a note inside that Richard Wilbur wrote at Jeremy's request asking her to marry him.

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting collection, this volume contains Wilbur's own poetry interspersed with some translations he has done. It contains a wonderful poem by Wilbur entitled "Bone Key."