Today is the 91st birthday of the great American poet and translator Richard Wilbur - who, happily, is still with us.
He has been remarkably prolific (by modern standards) and at times his extraordinary fluency and mastery of form could seem almost facile, but when he is in full flow, his imagination fully engaged, he is surely among the greats. As in this moving and brilliantly achieved poem, on a theme which in lesser hands might be merely banal, but here is spun into something new and quite startlingly beautiful...
The Writer
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
It's good to read that goldfinches are thriving in the nation's gardens. These delightful birds are very numerous down my way, and always a joy to see - but they rarely appear at my garden bird feeders. Perhaps, like other smaller species, they're scared away by the gang of house sparrows that does its noisy, boisterous best to monopolise the garden food supply. Happily the sparrows are such messy eaters that the ground-feeding dunnocks, blackbirds, wood pigeons and collared doves (and the odd song thrush) all benefit from their litter. Starlings - which, like house sparrows, are in national decline - feed almost as enthusiastically, and can hold their own against most competitors. But all retreat from the scene when the ring-necked parakeets swoop down and latch themselves on to the feeders until they've had their (very substantial) fill. The exotic parakeets - greedy and insolent birds with nerves of steel and ugly shrieking voices - are not in the Garden Birdwatch Top 20, but, given the rate at which they're spreading, I fancy they will be before long. I'd sooner have goldfinches any day.
