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Reviewed by:
  • Opposites
  • James Scully (bio)
Opposites Richard Wilbur . Illustrated by the author. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. $3.75).

Everyone knows what opposites are, but how many know what opposites is? According to the publishers, "Richard Wilbur, his wife, and his four children used to play a rather unusual game around the dinner table. One member of the family would suggest a word, and then everyone would join in a lively quarrel about its proper opposite." Out of that game came this book. Although, given its origins, there is less word-play and more attribute-play than one might have expected: one of the opposites of squash is bean, because one's a yellow vegetable and the other is green, and the opposite of fox is ox, because one's clever and the other's dull. Yet this is neither here nor there because Opposites, whatever it is, is disappointing. Wilbur's letters are willing but his spirit, in this case, is wooden. Which again is hardly what anyone would have expected.

What would be the opposite of Opposites? Biting elegance, perhaps, instead of bourgeois fastidiousness:

I don't think I should care to knowThose hairless dogs of MexicoWho ramble naked out of doorsAnd must be patted on their pores.

(# 23)

What is the opposite of hat?It isn't hard to answer that.It's shoes, for shoes and hat togetherProtect our two extremes from weather.

(# 20)

The opposite of spit, I'd say,Would be a narrow cove or bay.(There is another sense of spit,But I refuse to think of it.It stands opposed to all refinedAnd decent instincts of mankind!)

(# 34)

I'd like to believe that this pose is a mock one, but throughout the book there's too much evidence that his culture-bound perspective is truly what it seems to be. Even if it weren't what it seems, there'd be something questionable about it. I've a notion that, in children's books especially, mockingly posed values are in effect values posed for real. And if one playfully confuses mental health with fineprint etiquette, one perpetrates a real confusion nonetheless.

What is the opposite of nuts?It's soup! Let's have no ifs or buts.In any suitable repastThe soup comes first, the nuts come last.Or that is what sane folk advise;You're nuts if you think otherwise.

(# 1) [End Page 240]

All in fun? Maybe. Though I wouldn't care to be caught bolting my food in this here dining stanza here. If the tenor of the book is any indication, next we'll be using hair styles as indices to morality. Again. As the short and long hairs used to do. And I once heard the wife of an Air Force sergeant accuse the French of being immoral because they didn't put toilet paper around the seats before they sat on them. Wilbur, of course, doesn't go nearly as far. Nor is he about to. Still, his class-bound perspective leaves the verses with remarkable blind spots.

The opposite of junk is stuffWhich someone thinks is good enough,Or any vessel on the seasThat isn't in the least Chinese.

(# 5)

The opposite of junk is booze, silly. The opposites is, stew in your juice or blow your fuse. Ask any twelve-year-old: junk, in every sense except Chinese, is what you learn about at school.

Or, the opposite of Opposites might be thoroughly pointless verses—at least, ones that wouldn't hobnob with reactionary innuendo.

What is the opposite of riot?It's lots of people keeping quiet.

(# 8)

A couplet caught in the act of turning its back to the world. And on the other side, in the opposite corner . . . What's the opposite of riot? No, not race. It's oppressed people keeping in their place.

This could and should have been a spirited, liberating little book. Wilbur has an extraordinary wit that can play with things and ideas as well as with words, and what's more he can make concerted play of them. Yet here, somehow, the...

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