On Richard Wilbur’s “The Ride”

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty — and sheer variety — leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt is here to help. In The The Poem is You, Burt provides a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. Here is a brief excerpt looking at Richard Wilbur’s “The Ride.”

Does poetry change? Should it change much from generation to generation? Richard Wilbur’s long career seems to stand for the idea that it need not: from the 1940s through to the present day, the Second World War veteran and second poet laureate of the United States has offered carefully wrought examples of a metrical craftsmanship that could have been honored and recognized in any era from Shakespeare’s to our own. His poetry is “conservative” in that sense: it insists on historical continuities.

It is also “conservative” in the sense that it often hopes or tries to save (conserve) things in danger of disappearing, being crowded out, overwhelmed, or overrun (in this sense Greenpeace is conservative too). In this poem such things include a dream-horse, a path almost erased by snow, a familiar ethic of mutual assistance and respect for labor, and an idea of imagination itself. Wilbur’s stanzaic gallop through the veils and storms of nothingness becomes both an existential claim about what poetry and imagination can and cannot do and a nod to the real world of real people and service animals, in which Wilbur’s careful, kind, skeptical, and politically liberal imagination begins.

Before we can see what the poem does with political liberalism, we have to see how it figures imagination. Imaginative discoveries, like poems, like dreams, can seem hard to recapture once lost. W. S. Merwin, a contemporary of Wilbur’s, imagined the poems he had not been able to write: “How many times have I heard the locks close / And the lark take the keys / And hang them in heaven,” reads Merwin’s poem “ The Poem.” Percy Bysshe Shelley compared the imagination to a fading coal. Such earlier poets’ efforts to keep visionary discoveries alive give Wilbur the precursors for his own dream-trip: he is nothing if not aware of what came before him, even if the snowed-out vistas and the smooth surfaces of his stanzas make it harder to see.

But what does it mean to keep a vision alive? Wilbur’s balanced phrases (“the ice-blind pane of an inn”) and his exact rhymes suggest a poet who relies less on inspiration than on conscious skill. Yet his choice of stanza and meter — trimeter quatrains rhymed abab, so-called ballad stanzas, with free substitutions of triple feet for double (to the VEILS of his PAT-ient BREATH) — strongly recall the supernatural ballads of the Romantic poets, such as John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” where the poet or his hapless stand-in is overcome by a force from another realm. Wilbur does not present the poet as a prophet with a divine message, but neither does he present himself as a craftsman working to order. Instead the poet and the reader join each other on a ride across the territory that constitutes the poem — and they have help. They need it, too. Wilbur’s generous steed renders survivable, and exciting, what in other hands would be (literally still is) a nightmare.

That steed also adapts and renders tolerable the secret nightmare inside an all-too-famous poem by Robert Frost: who doesn’t know “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”? Wilbur, who has lived in western Massachusetts and taught at Amherst College (which he attended) for most of his life, often presents himself as the heir of Frost, especially in the New England seasonal poetry of Wilbur’s later volumes. These “spare lines,” the critic Bruce Michelson agrees, “recall the famous Frost scene and perhaps the Frost voice.” Wilbur presents himself, as Frost once presented himself, on a horse, in the dark, in the New England woods; the horse (as in “Stopping by Woods”) appears to know the right way better than he does.

Like many of Frost’s best poems, “Stopping by Woods” wraps in a popular cloak of homely wisdom something close to existential despair: there is really nobody out there, nothing to see, and no such thing as society to receive the poet after the long night. Wilbur’s horse is an answer to Frost’s, and the horse (like many of Wilbur’s animals) has a politics, something like the tragic liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr, which sees in mortality and in recent history reasons we can, and should, use the institutions of society for mutual assistance. As James Longenbach explained in a pathbreaking essay, Wilbur has been for decades “that rare thing: a seriously misunderstood poet,” both in terms of his politics and in terms of the metaphysics his forms imply, which are consistently liberal and gently secularist. Horses, even magic ones in Wilbur’s world, require “stable-hands,” and riders owe something — housing and food, for example — to the animals that carry them, and to the strangers who care for those animals, no matter what “magic” the journey seems to contain.

For those who know the rest of Wilbur’s work, it is tempting (though it might be over-reading) to see, in the reliable, powerful horse that keeps his rider safe and warm, the horse that risks vanishing from memory now, a kind of preemptive elegy for the welfare state, which America rode through the Great Depression and whose growth over decades — and whose subsequent sabotage by political conservatives — Wilbur lived through. In 1987–1988 he was the second writer to bear the title of poet laureate (earlier poets held similar duties as consultants in poetry to the Library of Congress); the only poem Wilbur published during his year in the job, “A Fable,” was an Aesopian caution against President Ronald Reagan’s program of nuclear missile defense.

It might go too far to see, in “The Ride,” a full defense of the New Deal, or the Great Society, in the Reagan era. At the least, though, we can see in “The Ride” a rebuke to poets who consider themselves self-made men, who credit themselves and only themselves for their acts of imagination, who hold them- selves up (as Frost sometimes did) as autonomous, inimitable examples (“the exception / at I like to think I am in everything,” Frost called himself ). The Frost of “Stopping by Woods” made his own decisions, wryly overruling his inquisitive horse. But the Wilbur of “The Ride” has to trust his equine companion, not only to get him through snow to his destination but also to know where he is going and to keep him from hypothermia (“chilled to death”). Wilbur’s own wry and careful vision begins in helplessness, requires credit to someone or something outside the poet, and concludes with measured and timely acts of obligations inside a larger, precarious social life. at vision includes not just death but taxes, imaginary hay as support for the arts, not a “burden” without justification but a matter of mutual gratitude.

Whether or not “The Ride” becomes directly political, it is a poem of pathos about the fleeting and yet articulable nature of inspiration, and about how one writer’s moments of transport depend on the labor performed, sometimes invisibly, by other people (and animals) at other times. e dreamed ride comes from a dreamed horse; the real poem comes about because the real poet has the time and resources to write, and who supplied those? Stable hands, and horses; not demons, nor gods. Wilbur’s consciously balanced, artificial form, working against the onward rush of his sentence, also “resists any mystical sense” (to quote Longenbach) “of the poet’s ability to transcend the boundaries of language or thought.” “The Ride” admits, at the same time, that we wish poetry could do such a thing, that we go to poetry to see that wish shared. Wilbur’s imagined stable, so full of nostalgia, also recalls the stable in Thomas Hardy’s Christmas poem “The Oxen,” another great poem in rhyming quatrains, by a disillusioned political liberal, about reluctant post-Christian disbelief.

Many of us would like to have a religious or quasi-religious belief in something that could steer us through all the difficulties of waking life. But “magic ease,” like thrilling horror, like anything supernatural, belongs to the night. Come day, we must make choices, credit our sources, feed the hungry, compensate service workers, get down and walk. thee old-fashioned confidence that Wilbur’s rhythms suggest does not control his tone, which begins in some fear and ends in the familiar sadness of an unmet obligation: animals and people (real and imaginary) continue in their needs, and the poet does not know how to help them out.

“The Ride” came first in Wilbur’s 1987 New and Collected Poems, making it both a way to greet the times and an introduction to the inspiration — and the craft, the care — that guides Wilbur’s entire oeuvre. e kind of care that a good rider and stable hands can show a faithful horse becomes Wilbur’s figure for the poet’s work, even as the life-threatening ride through harrowing winter weather becomes (to quote Frost again) the figure a poem makes. the blanket at the end is the blanket under which we sleep, or would like to sleep, or would like to continue our sleep in the morning, even though we must wake to perform our practical tasks, our real-world obligations to real-world col- leagues, students, parents, partners, or children. But we may also — so Wilbur suggests, in his measured way — have obligations to our dreams: we should take time to feed, thank, preserve, and shelter them, before they fade away.