The Writer (1976)

 

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

 

I pause at the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

 

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage.

 

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

 

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent.

 

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash

 

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

 

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

 

It lifted off from a chair-back,

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

 

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.

 

 

 

This poem uses a much less traditional form than “Ceremony,” having no precise meter and no rhyme scheme, rare in Wilbur’s poetry.  Within it, Wilbur uses the symbol of a bird trying to escape through an open window to symbolize the emotional and artistic challenges of himself and mainly his daughter.  

 

By his initial wish of a “lucky passage” for his daughter with its “easy figure,” Wilbur shows the need for a more complex metaphor to describe the struggles of a writer.  He finds it in his description of the starling, which may symbolize either artistic thoughts being slowly brought to expression (Wai 1995) or his daughter, whom he is unable to directly aid in the emotional challenges of her life.  The style of the poem gives it a revisionist tone, and the voice of the poem ultimately is one of humility and human characteristics: it asks only for the daughter’s forgiveness concerning Wilbur’s lack of understanding.