Until I was 20, I believed that “everything will be OK in the end”. That year, grief over the death of a child, following hard on the deaths of two friends, nearly overwhelmed me. Nonetheless, I kept my balance until I encountered a different kind of tragedy: to my horror I learned that not one, but two, friends had allegedly sexually abused children.
“I thought life was fundamentally OK,” I wailed to my father when he found me weeping, completely undone by the news.
“I knew bad things happened, but I thought the important things turned out OK, one way or another, and I guess they don’t.”
I paused, waiting for Dad to explain what I was missing.
“Oh, Bria,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want you to find that out until you were at least 25.”
It’s this kind of exact and unsparing comfort – for comfort it was – that I’ve come to count on in the poetry of Richard Wilbur, who died on October 14, aged 96. A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and skilled translator, as well as poet, he was known for his formal and emotional precision. Yet I loved his work not for its literary merit, but because he made me less afraid. Like my father’s words, his poems assured me of two things: first, that he wouldn’t lie to me, and second, that if he could live peacefully knowing the depth of the world’s pain, perhaps I could, too.
Take, for instance, his poem “A Barred Owl”. In it, Wilbur’s narrator soothes a young daughter disturbed by the uncanny shriek of an owl, teaching her, as my own parents taught me, that it’s merely calling, “Who cooks for you?” But even as Wilbur comforts her with a partial truth, he does not shield the presumably grown-up reader:
Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.
“Not helping!” was one friend’s response to this ending. Still, I’ve found the dark turn as much a relief as my father’s admission that life was, not scratched, but riven through with suffering. I was not crazy to believe things were this bad. I had not fallen off the edge of the world. I could stop trying to make myself believe everything was fine. I trusted my father and Wilbur to tell the truth, and so I also trusted them when they seemed to believe that their daughters should not be panicked by the truth, but should feel free to find real comfort, knowing full well that the world is cruel.
By the time I discovered “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”, I was no longer panicked about the brokenness of the world, but I didn’t know how to embrace it and had retreated – to the laundry room, of all places.
Not only could I not stop my friends’ wrongdoing, but I couldn’t stop one brother’s seizures, and I couldn’t stop another from disappearing into himself as autism added another challenge to those already created by his extra chromosome. I couldn’t ease my parents’ burden, and I couldn’t nag my siblings into keeping the house clean. What I could do was fold a towel neatly into vertical thirds, then in half, and in half again. I could starch shirt collars and fold fitted sheets, imposing order on the chaos of eight people’s dirty clothing.
So it was with surprise and delight that I read Wilbur’s ode to the clothesline, reveling in his description of the rising and falling of clean shirts and sheets hung to dry, and agreeing wholeheartedly with the plaintive cry:
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Of course, Wilbur was setting me up. To remain suspended, to avoid “the punctual rape of every blessed day”, might seem a sensible defensive response to ugly reality, but those who attempt to do so are more deluded than those who believe “everything is OK”. Everything is not OK. There are no private bubbles of safety to be had, and attempts to create them end badly. Used wrongly, the clothesline becomes a gallows.
Laundry has to come down, even if it’s to “clothe the backs of thieves”. “The soul descends once more in bitter love,” daily entering into the mess – of laundry, disability, or sin – because, as the Episcopalian Wilbur knew, death is the only way into life.
“One does not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means to organise oneself and the world, until one’s world somehow gets out of hand,” Wilbur wrote once. When I heard that he had died, I was drafting a letter to him. I wanted to tell him that his poems had served their purpose for me. As it is, I can only pay him the tribute – perhaps too late – of having needed them.
Bria Sandford is a senior editor at Penguin Random House in New York
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