Cinematic Devices in Richard Wilbur's Poetry

CINEMATIC DEVICES IN RICHARD WILBUR'S POETRY Henry Taylor G? a brief essay, "A Poet and the Movies," Richard Wilbur points to some general ways in which motion pictures may have influenced his poetry; and he reminds us that connecting the two art forms too closely has its dangers, especially those arising from the conditioned eye of the modern reader: Whenever, for example, I read Paradise Lost, 1, 44-58 (the long shot of Satan's fall from Heaven to Hell, the panorama of the rebels rolling in the lake of fire, the sudden close-up of Satan's afflicted eyes), I feel that I am experiencing a passage which, though its effects may have been suggested by the spatial surprises of Baroque architecture, is facilitated for me, and not misleadingly , by my familiarity with screen techniques. If this reaction is not anachronistic foolishness, it follows that one must be wary in attributing this or that aspect of any contemporary work to the influence of film.1 In the remainder of the essay, Wilbur examines five of his poems2 for cinematic influences, concluding that he can be certain of their presence only in such poems as "Beasts" or "The Undead," which take some of their images directly from particular films (in these cases, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Dracula, respectively). In the other three cases, it is possible that movies have had an influence; but, as Wilbur suggests, it is equally possible that the passages he selects occurred to him because he was searching, with a conditioned eye, for specific qualities. All this indicates that cinematic devices are not abundant in Wilbur's poetry. They do not operate in the poems which allude to specific films, nor are they often at work in the larger group of poems whose emphasis on movement and visual imagery suggests that they might be filmed. But they do appear, functioning in important ways which Wilbur does not touch on in his essay. For example, some of the effects in "Casdes and Distances" and "Walking to Sleep" are achieved by cinematic means; furthermore, both poems contain some direct acknowledgement of the influence. From these poems it is possible to move to a few which display similar devices without making any direct reference to motion pictures. "Casdes and Distances" is in two numbered sections; the first is a meditation on certain mysteries connected with modern and antique modes of 'Richard Wilbur, "A Poet and the Movies," in Man and the Movies, ed. William R. Robinson, with assistance from George Garrett (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1967), p. 224. The poems are "Marginalia," "In the Elegy Season," "An Event," "Beasts," and "The Undead." 41 42RMMLA BulletinJune 1974 hunting; the second is concerned with the effects of landscape architecture on the inhabitants of casdes with formal gardens. The cinematic devices in die first section help to introduce die dieme which unifies die whole poem. The acknowledgement of die debt to cinema appears early, conditioning die reader's eye for later effects: From blackhearted water colder Than Cain's blood, and aching with ice, from a gunmetal bay No one would dream of drowning in, rises The walrus: head hunched from the oxen shoulder, The serious face made for surprises Looks with a thick dismay At the camera lens which takes Him in, and takes him back to cities, to volleys of laughter In film palaces, just as another, brought By Jonas Poole to England for the sakes Of James First and his court, was thought Most strange, and died soon after. So strangeness gently steels Us, and curiosity kills, keeping us cool to go Sail with the hunters unseen to the walrus rock And stand behind their slaughter: which of us feels The harpoon's hurt, and the huge shock When the blood jumps to flow?3 The strangeness which "gendy steels/ Us" is not merely die oddity of die image on die screen; it is also die way in which die image is perceived. The hunters and die audiences in the "film palaces" are bodi off camera, so diat die distance between diem is diminished to die point diat die audiences can "stand behind" die...