… the poet and translator Richard Wilbur, who’s chugging along nicely at 89, with Anterooms, a new book of poems and translations. The Amherst Bulletin has a terrific article about him; it includes this poem, from the new collection, written in memory of Wilbur’s wife.
The House
Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.
There’s something about these poems of the long-married… Like this similar one by Stephen Spender... These poems can feature a peculiar intimacy with the unconscious of the much-loved, much-lived-with person. The lover intuits the loved-one’s dreams from what the beloved speaks in sleep; or from what she tells him about her dreams on waking.
And these dreams clearly represent a profoundly privileged territory, a deep-lying region of the truest personal truths, the purest contingencies of one particular person. It’s no surprise that Wilbur, seeking a sort of contact with his dead wife, will go here, to the realm he alone was able to perceive while she lived, that he would constantly “put to sea” in search of the most rooted place her mind inhabited, her islanded house inside life’s flow.
Think of Matthew Arnold’s To Marguerite: Continued, in which another separated pair of lovers laments their separation:
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain —
Oh might our marges meet again!
Meanwhile, there’s “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea,” the same sea Wilbur sails over night after night, his own dreams trying to become hers, trying to be her dreaming mind, in order to find her, transcended, finally at home.
******************************
Widow’s walk. Salt. There’s no idealizing here; it is the grave, the salt salt sea, the white hotel of D.M. Thomas’s novel, the strange infinity of our ceasing, whose reality we allow ourselves to feel in dream-image.
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
This is the conclusion of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. This is the way you make love when the person you love has died: you set out as wisely and foolishly as you can on that wide water, and keep looking.
December 17th, 2010 at 1:52PM
I’m a great admirer of Wilbur, and I’d add Donald Hall to the list of outstanding widower poets. In prose, Joyce Carol Oates is no Joan Didion, but her piece in the last NYRB was very affecting.
December 17th, 2010 at 4:30PM
Mr Punch: I’ve read Donald Hall’s Without – about the death of Jane Kenyon and its aftermath… I admire him, but he doesn’t affect me as much as Wilbur. Hall’s of course a much looser poet — no rhyme — and much more lengthily confessional, etc. I don’t feel, with Hall, that the emotion has been worked through and then evoked. It’s much more raw. I seem to prefer my poetry more cooked.
March 2nd, 2011 at 5:06PM
[…] still writing poetry. We’ve already considered a couple of his poems on this blog, but let’s go ahead and do yet another to mark the big […]