by Richard Wilbur
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.
Though a husband and wife have already said to each other, "until death do us part," they have not thereby fully described the "confinement" of their knowing. One flesh still falls asleep and awakens separately. But there are two kinds of confinement: one that says, "beyond this point you cannot go"; the other, "think only of this." The first is a temptation; the second a gift.
The first word of the poem says two things to the husband: (1) you can only observe (you cannot predict) and (2) death is not the only limit. Whatever sort of solace was given in "until" is confronted by this "sometimes." How strange a sometimes must be when it overtakes your wife who, it was said, would not part from you until death; how jealous you might get: "what was that sometimes? It was like death was taking you and you did not altogether resist. You closed your eyes again. What if I held them open?" Or he remained silent and did not grudge, only remembered. Did she answer or are the gatepost, terrace, fanlight, widow's walk, etc., the materials in which the husband stored the separate moments of sometimes the way memory experts (so I've read) place names on shelves and tables. Perhaps he took those moments as the likenesses of death and thought to put them together so he might find her again after she had gone. Or she told him herself, hoping to be found, the white house a metaphor of confinement (never again would a white house look the same). And there is the sea:
The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to ocean--
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition. (Frost, Devotion)
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9 comments:
SOMETIMES you close your eyes and see the place where you used to live...
Sorry about that, but given your predilection for the Killers and their hyp-notic 'magic', I couldn't resist...
But because you, along with those divine words of Frost, draw upon such confines with native familiarity as are elsewhere being discussed inelegantly and strangely, I feel compelled to quote a word dear to my heart from a famous letter: "The talk about the house of Being is not the transfer of the image "house" onto Being. But one day we will, by thinking the essence of being in a way appropriate to its Sache, more readily be able to think what "house" and "dwelling" really are." Wilbur, it seems to me, in everything that he writes never strays far from this homestead.
I'm glad you didn't resist. That is exactly the sort of thing that is close to my own heart, along with hearing what someone else is compelled to say after reading a poem so that I can believe in the possibility of being compelled--in "magic," if you will.
Ocean? Devotion?
maybe a magic ontological
Lotion
Will-BURR! (He's ok, and while I respect tradition (over the usual bricabrac beatnik jive), Wilbur seems slightly...juvenile. Not a Frost or ...Osiris forbid, PB Shelley o Coleridge...)
It sounds like you read a little too quickly and impatiently and with the understanding that Wilbur isn't the sort of name, like Shelley or Coleridge, that promises a complete thing, a thing that would still be recognized in time. But I can't blame you. I have no talent for appreciating the differences between poets and it's an accident of education that I have even read anything by Wilbur.
Perhaps.
Arbiter I'm not, but ...well...it's like jazz (or great classical muzak) it either grabs you or it doesn't.... then TS Eliot bores the cr*p out of me as well---I get Dostoyevsky, usually, or Flan. O'connor, or a Conrad, Crane....modern poesy's not on my list of priorities
Shelleyan verse, while maybe juvenile at times, ...takes off at times (and the boy had read a bit of metaphysics, and science as well as belle-lettres) ...few poets do that, even the greats...IMHO , tho' I imagine a proficient classicist (such as Pseudo.) probably notes that in Aeschylus or somethin'..
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
pleasant
A friend of mine, commenting on the similarity (re: houses) between this post and the one before it, sent this passage from Tess of the d'Urbervilles:
Every window of the house being open Clare could hear across the yard each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house, so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables breathed forth "Stay!" The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility. Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's. It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held partly responsible for this it was not solely so. Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.
To which I'll irresponsibly add a quotation from the Odyssey:
Friends, someone inside going up and down a great piece of weaving is singing sweetly, and the whole place murmurs to the echo of it, whether she is woman or goddess. (Polites in Book X)
From JPII's Theology of the Body, Audience 11/7/79:
Considering the specificity of the language, one must first recognize that this Genesis torpor, in which, by the work of Yahweh-God, the man is immersed in preparation for the new creative act, stimulates much thought. Against the background of contemporary mentality, which is accustomed--by analysis of the subconscious--to link sexual contents with the world of dreams, that torpor may evoke a particular association. The biblical account, however, seems to go beyond the dimension of the human subconscious. If one then supposes that a certain diversity of vocabulary is significant, one can conclude that man (adam) falls into that "torpor" in order to wake up as male (is) and female (issa). In fact, it is here in Genesis 2:23 that we come across the distinction between is and issah for the first time. Perhaps, therefore, the analogy of sleep indicates here not so much a passage from consciousness to the subconscious, but a specific return to non-being (sleep has within itself a component of the annihilation of man's conscious existence), or to the moment before creation, in order that the solitary "man" may by God's creative initiative reemerge from that moment in his double unity as male and female.
In any case, in the light of the context of Genesis 2:18-20, there is no doubt that man falls into this "torpor" with the desire of finding a being similar to himself. If by analogy with sleep we can speak here also of dream, we must say that this biblical archetype allows us to suppose as the content of this dream a "second I," which is also personal and equally related to the situation of original solitude, that is, to that whole process of establishing human identity in relation to all living beings (animalia), inasmuch as it is a process of man's "differentiation" from such surroundings. In this way, the circle of the human person's solitude is broken, because the first "man" reawakens from his sleep as "male and female."
Here is a description of the memorization technique from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (ignore the evolutionary psychology stuff):
Both men use a technique they say is popular with memory fanatics, a method known as loci, which means places, thought to be used by the ancient Romans and Greeks. The theory is that the brain is best equipped to remember images and locations, because this information is evolutionarily useful, say, in helping humans remember which trails through the woods lead back home.
By turning names, facts and figures into pictures and then anchoring these images in the mind using familiar locations, such as one's house, one needs only to "walk" through his house mentally to remember where the image was placed.
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