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Boy at the Window Richard Wilbur

Boy at the Window Richard Wilbur

Guest poem submitted by Steve Chernicoff:

 Seeing the snowman standing all alone
 In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
 The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
 A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
 His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
 The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
 Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
 As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.

 The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
 Having no wish to go inside and die.
 Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
 Though frozen water is his element,
 He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
 A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
 For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
 Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

Apropos of Martin's submission of "A Barred Owl" (Minstrels Poem #1849),
here's another by Richard Wilbur that I like. It deals with the same
themes Martin mentioned in his comments on the other poem, the
"domestication" of a child's fear and the "stark sense of the violence
that lurks in the mundane." Wilbur's image of the mutual pity between
boy and snowman is quite moving.

One thing I particularly like about Wilbur is his formal discipline. In
an age when most poets can't be bothered with such niceties as rhyme and
meter, Wilbur's poems are as rigorously and precisely structured as
anything from a Milton, Keats, or Tennyson. An exemplary illustration of
Robert Frost's definition of freedom as "moving easy in harness."

--Steve

Available link for download

Posted by Unknown at 7:45 AM

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