Mis-Identifying Wildflowers

Lying
by Richard Wilbur

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Your reputation for saying things of interest
Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,
Nor will the delicate web of human trust
Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.
Later, however, talking with toxic zest
Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it
Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,
You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing
Above your head the shrug of unreal wings.
Not that the world is tiresome in itself:
We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.
So too with strangeness not to be ignored,
Total eclipse or snow upon the rose,
And so with that more rare conception, nothing.
What is it, after all, but something missed?
It is the water of a dried-up well
Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador.
There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung
From Hell to probe with intellectual sight
The cells and heavens of a given world
Which he could take but as another prison:
Small wonder that, pretending not to be,
He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden
In a black mist low creeping, dragging down
And darkening with moody self-absorption
What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen
From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.
Closer to making than the deftest fraud
Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made
To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,
Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,
How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping-board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened:
The eye mists over, basil hints of clove,
The river glazes toward the dam and spills
To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet,
And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile
Some great thing is tormented. Either it is
A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind
Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast
Which tries again, and once again, to rise.
What, though for pain there is no other word,
Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile?
It is something in us like the catbird’s song
From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning
That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,
Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant
Of the first springs, and it is tributary
To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut
That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron
Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof
Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre,
Or of the garden where we first mislaid
Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting
Out of what cognate splendor all things came
To take their scattering names; and nonetheless
That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees—
Which having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dovetailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about words. This poem, “Lying” is one that I often turn to when my mind drifts from objects, perception, and what it means to name.

A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light

In the stanza above, the ideas of “to make or do” and how we truly make nothing, but try to understand by “bearing witness.” Hopkins talks about objects as being spoken. Our own faculty of language is insufficient, we do not make the world but can only speak of it. We can only call a rock a rock, we cannot make that rock, but by naming it, we are able to understand what is already there. It is “Odd that a thing is most itself when likened” but true that our metaphors, similes, are what we make and do in unfolding this world. I’ve been very captured by the idea of something unfolding–it is disclosed, all is there to begin with (like with the Mind-Reader “…unfolding there/Like paper flowers in a water-glass”) and it is through words that we unfold things.The grackle is something made in language. Through the absence of the object, but the articulation of it, it becomes present and real. Through the imagination we disclose the reality of things and by the use of metaphor and simile we understand them. Wilbur said himself, “The poem assumes that the essential poetic act is the discovery of resemblance , the making of metaphor, and that, the world being one thing, all metaphor tends toward the truth.”

The idea of the Garden, the Fall, hearkens back to man’s desire to name–”…where we first mislaid/Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting/Out of what cognate splendor all things came/To take their scattering names…” but I am still unsure how this thought ties into my previous ideas in a fluid way, but I think I am on to something.

I want to close with the last stanza of “An Event” because I think that there is something to this idea of “cross-purposes” and what it means to dream the world.

It is by words and the defeat of words,
Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,
That for a flying moment one may see
By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

From Hark! A Vagrant!

Indulging in the Birth of Tragedy currently.