Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (review)

To write serious and engaging poetry over the length of some seven decades is a feat as remarkable as it is rare. The publication of Richard Wilbur's Anterooms marks just such an accomplishment, though with the modesty and grace that have informed the central mien of his work from the start. A small collection containing sixteen new poems, an excerpt from a musical play, five translated poems, and thirty-seven riddles from the Latin of Symphosius, Anterooms nonetheless touches upon every major theme of Wilbur's career, be it nature, religion, dreams, love, myths, word play, humor, or time's inroads on the day's passing. However, it would be a mistake to regard Wilbur's new book as merely a gathering of knock-offs from his poetic brand, for as so often is the case in the poems themselves, small matters disguise large, surfaces reveal depths, and the casual is conduit to the complex, but only to the degree that we invest ourselves in a poem's reading.

Take for instance "A Measuring Worm," the book's opening poem, though it is preceded by a kind of envoy called "The House," which I'll discuss later. After describing what we also call an inchworm climbing up a window screen in the first two stanzas, Wilbur muses:

It's as if he sentBy a sort of semaphoreDark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.Although he doesn't know it,He will soon have wings,

And I too don't knowTowards what undreamt conditionInch by inch I go.

Deft and sure is the turn here to weightier matters, though there will be readers who will see the play upon "inch by inch" as too obvious or calculated. And yet such a rush to judgment risks missing the more structural, yet unspoken opposition between the mention of "Last Things" and the countering affirmation of "He will soon have wings," a qualifying "Although" having worked like a fulcrum in the poem's turn to the afterlife as an "undreamt condition." Such are the testaments of faith that frequent Wilbur's verse, but quietly so, one might even say "inch by inch." And though that view of the worm as "semaphore" sets up nicely the Greek analogy to "omegas," how right that it is a word native to Wilbur's formative military service or even his days riding the rails cross country in summer as a student.

To appreciate such subtle transformations is really to appreciate the modesty with which they are performed. This also requires that we don a similar state of mind in reading, for anyone too eager to settle for a poem's overt meaning will likely miss its richer sub-currents. A good example of this occurs with the book's title poem, which also starts modestly with a view of a sundial rising out of "ticking drops" of melting snow in spring, the poet meditating on how "it strains belief/ How an instant can dilate/ Or long years be brief." If the poem were to end there, it would remain no more than a commonplace. But instead, it pushes through to something deeper and more subterraneous in reflecting that

Dreams, which interweaveAll our times and tenses, arewhat we can believe:

Dark they are, yet plain,Coming to us now as ifThrough a cobwebbed pane

Where, before our eyes,All the living and the deadMeet without surprise.

Though perhaps not as nuanced in its formal argument as "A Measuring Worm," nonetheless these last three stanzas take us to a more inward terrain than the window gazing of the first two. It is as if the latter part of the poem transpires within the mind that observes the first part, opening up to us a kind of dreamscape of meditation and melancholy, that space where, indeed, "the living and the dead/ Meet without surprise." Though the insight is common and recognizable, the smooth and offhand arrival to it is very much like...