Avian diptych: Richard Wilbur’s flights of imagination

During roughly the same years when Michael Polanyi was developing the critique of positivism which would eventually be published as Personal Knowledge (1958) and when Hans-Georg Gadamer was developing a similar critique in work that would lead to Truth and Method (1960), ¹ Richard Wilbur was writing poems that would be included in his 1956 collection, Things of This World. Like these two European philosophers, Wilbur appreciates the many ways in which the natural sciences have contributed to human thriving but resists the widely influential cultural reception of naturalism ² as the only (or the presumed best) pathway to human knowing. The theme appears in a number of different contexts throughout the collection; this article will consider two poems which bring together Wilbur’s intense appreciation of the natural world, birds in particular, with his strong sense that full appreciation and understanding of the world requires imagination as well as fact. Though each poem is richly developed enough to call for careful reading, neither has received substantial critical attention.

A brief description of some key ideas from Gadamer will provide a point of entry for close readings of Wilbur’s poems. In Truth and Method and elsewhere, Gadamer emphasizes that human understanding has the dynamic character of conversation. Developing concepts learned from his teacher Martin Heidegger, Gadamer phenomenologically describes the human experience and appropriation of truth as an event of insight which is achieved through the dynamic interplay of unconcealment (truth) and concealment (untruth). ³ By cultivating an unconventional vocabulary, Heidegger stresses his own demolition (or deconstruction) of Western mainstream philosophy, but Gadamer, more constructively, seeks to make Heideggerian concepts useful. Though the ideas are controversial, I am seeking a charitable appropriation of their description of truth as an occurrence in conversation, a “soft” reading which is ready to hear and receive whatever sounds legitimately useful, insightful, or otherwise beneficial. An example of the interplay of truth and untruth (on a soft reading) would be as follows: when I seek to put in words any particular truth, the concrete form I give that truth inevitably oversimplifies and misrepresents that truth to some extent. Conversation clarifies—an interlocutor may question, from her perspective, the particulars of my wording, and as I try to answer, refining my remarks, seeking agreement about the subject matter, the matter is likely to become more fully clear to me as well as to my interlocutor. As both Gadamer and Wilbur consider the issues, the language of science, though accurate in one way, falsifies with respect to other standards; the language of imagination and feeling, though false in one way, tells the truth with respect to points of view neglected by the natural sciences. In the essay “What Is Truth?” Gadamer contrasts the positivistic understanding of truth in the natural sciences with truth as an event in literary art. Gadamer accepts the relevance of correspondence for the natural sciences, but wants to allow for the way works of art (including works of literature) make a space for understanding that—at the very least—enhances the fullness of what we human beings experience as truth. ⁴ Truth is an event or, if this makes us nervous, the truth of something or other comes home to us as and in event. Wilbur grapples with the same issues and relationships in such poems as “Lying” ⁵ and “Icarium Mare.” In the two poems I’m considering, Wilbur lets the point of view of science and the point of view of the imagination confront each other in ways that bring out, particularly, the limitations of scientific (objective) description and the benefits of imaginative (metaphorical) description. ⁶ In addition to sharing their exploration of scientific and affective points of view, both poems do so through observing birds. The first poem, “All These Birds,” focuses on naturalistic descriptions of several kinds of birds, but hesitates over the limits of scientific language. The second poem, “An Event,” balances the first by beginning in the delight of imaginative description, but then acknowledging the limitations of figurative language (yet perforce without giving up on using it). This balancing suggests a relationship something like that in a diptych, whose two sides comment on each other by means of both similarity and contrast. Wilbur’s poems are not overtly or exclusively Christian. Nevertheless, his occasional appropriation of biblical references in “All These Birds” makes clear that his recommendation in these poems of what we might call a dialogical holism has a natural home in Christian interpretive practice.

“All These Birds”

Three decades before he published “Lying,” Richard Wilbur dealt with similar themes in “All These Birds” (from the collection Things of This World). The later and better known poem talks about grackles and catbirds in order to address the accusation that poets lie. In “All These Birds” the speaker appears to be responding to similar attitudes about poetry but comes across as somewhat more annoyed than the speaker of “Lying.” The diction suggests concessions made in response to a persistently naturalistic argument:

Agreed that all these birds,

Hawk or heavenly lark or heard-of nightingale,

Perform upon the kitestrings of our sight

In a false distance, that the day and night

Are full of wingéd ⁷ words

gone rather stale,

That nothing is so worn

As Philomel’s bosom-thorn

That it is, in fact, the male

Nightingale which sings . . . (1–9). ⁸

The concession comes across in the opening word, “Agreed,” with its attendant “that” clauses (beginning in lines 1, 4, 6, 8, and 9). “Agreed” occurs again at the end of the second stanza (with additional “that” clauses beginning in lines 15 and 18). In the second half of the poem the structure moves to “let” clauses understood as reasonable conclusions based on the “that” concessions (“let” occurs in lines 22, 25, 29, and 38). This structuring suggests the patterns of formal argument, even as the poem resists the conclusions of rationalism.

Somewhat like the title character of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump” (who decides that “Everything is shed” and that all the traditional “images [of the moon] are on the dump,” 31–32), the speaker of “All These Birds” reluctantly admits in the opening stanzas that traditional representations of the lark and the nightingale ⁹ have been worn out by overuse and (perhaps) that they ought to be abandoned. ¹⁰ In these same lines, however, Wilbur begins to lay out a case against the naturalism that drives these concessions. ¹¹ “Perform” in the third line already hints at the relationship between observer and observed, whether in the performer’s awareness of audience or in the observer’s unconscious expectations (including anthropomorphizing) which may produce a tendency to subtly distort the behavior of the observed or to bias the observer’s interpretation of that behavior. ¹² The hint is deepened by the connectedness indicated in “kitestrings,” which not only associate the kite with the kite-flyer but specifically function as instruments of control. The reference to “false distance,” also, highlights the fallibility of human observation. Nevertheless, the poem overtly acknowledges that not only these birds named in the first stanza, but also those named later—the gull, the water-ouzel, the heron, the stork, the sparrow, and the dove—are “like nothing human” (18, and see 16, 11, 19, and 37) and therefore, from a naturalistic point of view, ought not to be anthropomorphized, personified, or otherwise made fabulous.

Wilbur’s appropriation of the phrase “wingéd words” confirms Dana Gioia’s recognition that “Wilbur uses wordplay for serious ends. . . . His creative obsession is to have important words serve double duty in a poem” (“Richard Wilbur”). According to Herbert Jordan, the Homeric expression winged words (ɛπɛα πτɛρόɛντα) occurs 124 times in The Iliad and The Odyssey, where it typically introduces a character’s speech (“Homer’s Winged Words”). ¹³ As Wilbur uses it, the phrase simultaneously fits the avian topic and suggests the tendency of words (including those words put together to form metaphors or to tell stories) to become obsolete (words which have “gone rather stale”). Wingéd words aren’t quite the same as dead metaphors (which Wilbur also loves to repristinate), but they’re from the same neighborhood.

Despite overtly allowing the naturalist’s reservations, the speaker continues to problematize understanding—when conceived merely as a matter of empirical fact—in the second stanza. The poem’s account of the water-ousel (also water ouzel or dipper) derives from what may be the earliest “naturalist’s” description of the bird, a description sent to Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, by a M. Hébert and included in Buffon’s massive Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (which eventually ran to 36 volumes and was published between 1749 and 1788). Wilbur may have come across the anecdote in the French original, but here is an English version included in William Wood’s Zoography, or the Beauties of Nature Displayed (I quote at length because several features of this account are suggestive for what Wilbur is doing):

M. Hebert communicated the following account of [an] extraordinary habit [of the water ouzel] to the count de Buffon: “I lay ambushed on the verge of the lake Nantua, in a hut formed of pine branches and snow, where I patiently waited till a boat . . . should drive some wild-ducks to the water’s edge. I observed without being perceived: before me was a small inlet, the bottom of which gently shelved, and might be about two or three feet deep in the middle. A water ouzel stopped here more than an hour, and I had full leisure to view its manoeuvres. It entered into the water, disappeared, and again emerged on the other side of the inlet, which it thus repeatedly forded. It traversed the whole of the bottom, and seemed not to have changed element, and discovered no hesitation or reluctance in the immersion. However, I perceived several times, that as often as it waded deeper than the knee, it displayed its wings, and allowed them to hang to the ground. I remarked, too, that when I could discern it at the bottom of the water, it appeared enveloped with air, which gave it a brilliant surface, like some sorts of beetles, which are always in water, inclosed [sic] with a bubble of air. Its view in dropping its wings on entering the water might be to confine this air; it was certainly never without some, and it seemed to quiver. These singular habits of the water ouzel were unknown to all the sportsmen whom I have talked with; and perhaps without the accident of the snow-hut, I should have ever been ignorant of them; but I can aver that the bird came to my very feet, and, that I might observe it, I did not kill it.” (480–81)

First, although the account has the appearance of empirical description, and we may charitably assume that it was meant to be objective, we ought to notice that it is not actually the account of a trained (scientific) observer. M. Hébert unconsciously introduces an element of the fabulous, suggesting that the bird creates its own diving suit (Wilbur, impenitently poetizing, supplies the picturesque metaphor “Invisible armor,” and both Wood and Wilbur use the pleonasm “bubble of air”). ¹⁴ By including this particular anecdote, Wilbur manages to imply that, along with poetic devices such as anthropomorphism (and despite its “objective” goals), naturalistic description may itself be shaped by unconscious assumptions (and unconsciously figurative language) and may become outdated. Furthermore, the account allies the birdwatcher with hunters, probably the source for the same alliance expressed in Wilbur’s phrase “glass and gun” (29). ¹⁵ Finally, Hébert’s snow-hut becomes the “blinds” mentioned later in the poem. (I will return to glass, gun, and blinds below.)

The “Invisible armor” of the dipper becomes an image for the limitations of human knowing; even when the object of observation seems transparently available, its otherness renders it to some extent inaccessible. This is true not only for the dipper, but also for the gull in its “vast claire” (the open sky, perhaps over the ocean, implying a distant horizon). The gull’s surrounding space, though broad, confines (“claustral”) and conceals it as much as the shell of the oyster confines and conceals the oyster.

Naturalism requires recognizing that, despite the human desire to find something meaningful in their noises, the birds don’t actually speak human languages: ¹⁶ to call them “polyglot” is etymologically to acknowledge that they are “many-tongued”—but with its suggestion that none of them speaks the same tongue also emphasizes that none of these many tongues is human language; the birds are “wordless then” (23), capable of much sound, but no meaning. ¹⁷ Rather than personifying the birds as speakers of language or, what amounts to the same thing, romanticizing them by attributing to them human affect, naturalism calls for describing them scientifically or, for some practical reason, killing them. The sanctioned ways to deal with birds in a naturalistic and materialist culture, in other words, are “with glass or gun.” Their measure may be taken through the ornithologist’s binoculars (the “glass”) or they may be harvested (perhaps for anatomical study or the taxidermist’s work, if not for eating) by means of the hunter’s rifle. ¹⁸

Despite making (evidently reluctant) concessions to naturalism, the speaker of “All These Birds” feels dissatisfied with mere matters of fact. Like the speaker of Robert Frost’s “Birches,” who knows that ice storms permanently bent down the trees he is examining, but would prefer to imagine a boy bending them down in play, Wilbur’s speaker resists “tell[ing] the imagination it is wrong” (32). Wilbur catches the irony of watching (through binoculars or the sights of guns) “from our clever blinds”—like Hébert’s snow-hut, designed to hide the observer from the observed, but also limiting what the observer can actually see and cutting the observer off from direct involvement with the observed. Similarly, we effectively blind ourselves by denying imagination even as we take pride in our realism. The speaker goes on to recognize something reductive (the birds “Dwindle,” 28–29) in the objectification of “monsters” (30, used here in the archaic sense of the miraculous or marvelous) for the purposes of scientific study, only interesting for “habit, habitat, and song” (the last already reduced by the acknowledgement in the earlier stanzas that birdsong comprises mere animal noises; these three words regularly appear as organizing subsection titles in birdwatchers’ handbooks). ¹⁹

The passing reference to binoculars here anticipates Wilbur’s more expansive use of the same image in a later poem, “The Eye” (included in the 1976 collection, The Mind-Reader). Although “The Eye” doesn’t make quite the same point that is central to “All These Birds,” it nevertheless helpfully indicates one aspect of the importance of binoculars in “All These Birds,” the objectivizing tendency of detached observation. The first long section of “The Eye” recreates the experience of an hour’s use of binoculars on a visit to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In this first section of the poem, the binoculars allow for an accumulation of finely focused detail, at the epistemological cost of a comprehensive and holistic view: what the eye sees gives “An astounded/Sense of the import of the thing surrounded”—limited, bounded—by “the sudden premise of a frame” (21–22, 24); that is, binoculars focus directed vision, in part, by occluding peripheral vision. ²⁰ The surprising occurrence of “premise” to modify “frame” moves us readers toward the awareness that our seeing depends to some extent on our premises, our presuppositions, and our prejudices.

Worse, the limited view through the binoculars falsifies the speaker’s sense of self, tempting him ²¹ to feel like “the unseen genius of the middle distance,/Giddy with godhead” (27–28) as he objectifies and thereby domesticates whatever his eye falls on. His gaze becomes proprietary. It is this temptation that leads the speaker to invoke St. Lucy in the second section of “The Eye”: “Preserve us, Lucy,/From the eye’s nonsense” (29–30). Though he doesn’t use the term, he implicitly asks for the grace to see the world whole, with an eye that accepts not only the physical glory of a “double pike with layout,” but also “the strong,/Shouldering gait of the legless man” and “The calm walk of the blind young woman” (44–47), so that his eye will “not be folly’s loophole ²² /But giver of due regard” (55–56). “The Eye” has in common with “All These Birds” its resistance to the objectivizing gaze. Ironically, the objectivizing selectivity of the binoculars (or the telescope, or the microscope) betrays reality precisely by leaving out or leaving behind non-scientific ways of knowing (whatever doesn’t fit the accepted “frame”). ²³

To summarize the point so far, “All These Birds” subtly resists the culturally dominant assumption that scientific objectivity (as we call it) is possible and insists rather that all our seeing is through something and from somewhere and in some element. In addition to the viewing from the hunter’s blind through binoculars or gun sight, “Hébert beheld/His water-ousel through . . . a clear bellying veil or bubble of air” (10–12), and the gull, for all its apparent freedom of movement, inhabits the sky as the oyster inhabits its shell (15–17). Human inability fully “to know the heron” (despite an ability to map and measure its migratory routes) accentuates the limits of the scientific method.

The penultimate “let” clause of the poem agrees that, from a naturalistic point of view, we should “tell the imagination it is wrong,” yet the imagination will not be denied. Under the pressure of correction it will “spin a lie . . . to possess the air”—to take back the place where birds fly. Ironically, it will persist because, like the birds (and despite the bias of naturalism), the imagination is itself “a natural thing” (39). The first couple of lines of the final stanza ask a question which seems to imply that, since truth is no stranger than fiction (and even akin to fiction because it generates fiction, like the story that storks deliver babies through chimneys, a fable ²⁴ which derives from actual “chimney-nesting storks,” 37), the imagination is nothing to be ashamed of—need not be “shy” (36).

Beyond being merely tolerable, imaginative responses to creatures may serve purposes other than those recognized by the scientist, a point Wilbur makes with reference to a biblical model, Solomon, ²⁵ who first appears in the fourth stanza’s allusion to 1 Kings 4:32–34. ²⁶ According to 4:33, Solomon in his proverbs and songs “spoke of trees [Wilbur’s ‘boughs’], from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.” What interests Wilbur is the way in which Solomon spoke of birds. For example, Proverbs 26:2 asserts that “Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, a curse that is causeless does not alight” (ESV). The proverb may draw on an actual observation of ornithological behavior, but its point is not scientific objectivity, the truth of empiricism. It offers rather a bit of wisdom, a truth aimed at human belief and behavior. ²⁷

The example of Solomon shapes the final lines of Wilbur’s poem as well. He represents imagination as “Like some great trumpet-vine”—“like” registering the kind of imaginative “lying” we refer to as simile. ²⁸ The trumpet-vine grows until “all birds that fly come natural” to it (so that it resembles the mustard plant in Jesus’ parable, which similarly grows until all “the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches,” Matthew 13:32). This is to say that the imagination is inherently inviting; it is hospitable. And perhaps it is the overt invitation that reminds Wilbur of the repeated invitation of the bride and the bridegroom in the Song of Solomon, “come,” so that the closing reference of the poem echoes the metaphorical references to doves in the Song (see 1:15, 2:4, 5:2, and 6:19) while simultaneously inviting the reader to “Put on the reins of love” (42). “Reins,” in the archaic usage of the Authorized Version of the Bible, translates a Hebrew word for the “inner being” of a person. In the context of a reference to the Song of Solomon, the invitation recalls the traditional Christian allegorization of the text as an account of the love of Christ for the Church. For Wilbur’s immediate purposes, the dove offers another example of bird imagery which enables a truth beyond and other than the objective. Moreover, this conclusion echoes the title of the poem that anchors this volume of Wilbur’s work, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” Within the context of Things of This World, in other words, the call to “put on the reins of love” insists that one of the ways human beings are called on to love the world is in the creative “letting-be” which resists the reduction of creatures to scientific description.

“An Event”

Heidegger has commented on the challenges of such a “letting-be” within a culture shaped by naturalism, that is, given what Gadamer calls the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice:

What seems easier than to let a being be just the being that it is? Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks, particularly if such an intention—to let a being be as it is—represents the opposite of the indifference that simply turns its back upon the being itself in favor of an unexamined concept of being? We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself in its very own being. (“Origin” 31)

Two poems after “All These Birds” in Things of This World, Wilbur included another poem about birds, “An Event,” which admits the poet’s responsibility to “give them leave to be.” In this poem, however, the challenge to creaturely integrity comes from the imagination which, like the objectivizing gaze of naturalism, tends toward its own manner of domestication of the object. The two poems complement each other, since both address (and enact) the tension between the way things are in themselves and the way they are perceived by human imagining. As a means of getting at the shape of this tension in “An Event,” it will be helpful to appropriate a few additional ideas from Heidegger. ²⁹ In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” arguably his most important aesthetic statement, ³⁰ Heidegger tries to answer the question, How does “the happening of truth” occur in a work of art? (“Origin” 57). Heidegger’s student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method and elsewhere, developed Heidegger’s question in his own treatment of truth as an event; Gadamer’s term moves us toward understanding Heidegger’s relevance for Wilbur’s poem. Although both Heidegger and Wilbur acknowledge the validity of propositional truth in its proper sphere, both also recognize the perception of truth as something negotiated, something which comes to understanding dynamically, something which happens. When Heidegger asks “how does truth happen?” (55), I hear Wilbur answering, in the closing lines of “An Event,”

It is by words and the defeat of words,

Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,

That for a flying moment one may see

By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt. (21–24)

This is to say that words do something. They give shape to the world. And yet, that shape is never final; the best verbal description of the world will become obsolete (“the defeat of words”), and another voice will need to try again. Nevertheless, well-chosen words will, for a moment, let the world be perceived. ³¹

Wilbur’s words “defeat” and “cross-purposes” locate the emergence of meaning in a tension or struggle, and “An Event” highlights this struggle as characteristic of our human understanding of things. The speaker of the poem repeatedly attempts to control, by means of his imaginative, metaphorical renderings, the marvelous occasion which the poem records, but repeatedly recognizes that the dynamic marvel of birds in flight (and, more broadly, as they are in themselves) is too great to be finally contained by words (because words express how things are perceived and only by indirection how they are in themselves). To be understood at all, the event demands description. At the same time, it resists the closure inherent in description. The poem opens self-consciously with the phrase which defines metaphor, “as if”: “As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand,/A landscapeful of small black birds . . . convene at some command/At once in the middle of the air” (1–4). ³² The backward-moving “cast of grain” into the control of the hand turns out to be inadequate to the dynamism of the flock of birds, so the speaker resorts to another simile: “They roll/Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!” (7–8). This comparison also fails to satisfy the speaker, who goes on to confess that comparisons amount to confinements; it is their nature to impose a kind of control by imagination: “so I give their image,” though not the birds themselves, “to my soul/Until, as if refusing to be caught/In any singular vision of my eye/Or in the nets and cages of my thought,/They tower up, shatter, and madden space/With their divergences” (9–14). Strikingly, the speaker cannot escape comparison; even the acknowledgement that his similes are attempts to trap the birds is couched in simile, “as if refusing” (a personification), and the effort to let the birds be what they are stumbles into further comparisons (the birds “tower up,” they “shatter” like a piece of glass). The effort to comprehend (to hold in “my thought”) cannot avoid becoming an effort to apprehend.

The poem clearly recognizes that the tension between things as they are in themselves and things as they seem to an observer is inextricably related to the ontological distance between the self and the other. The speaker is emphatically self-conscious: “I give their image to my soul,” “[the] singular vision of my eye,” “the nets and cages of my thought” (lines 9, 11, and 12). What the speaker sees is “singular,” unavoidably idiosyncratic. But the self’s other, the birds, resist metaphorical captivity. They “shatter” (13), they diverge (14), and finally they disappear (they are “swallowed ³³ from sight,” 15), thus persistently avoiding the observer’s appropriative vision.

The word “singular,” moreover, conflates the self/other tension with a network of words and phrases in the poem which register the tension between generalization and particularization. The birds are generic ³⁴ “small black birds” (2); they “convene” in “unanimous consent” (3 and 5); and the question which opens the second stanza seems to discount individuality: “What is an individual thing?” Nevertheless, the birds resist being limited by generalization, both in their shattering and in their divergence, as “each” disappears “alone” (14). The image of the “drunken fingerprint” brings together general and particular, since no two fingerprints are alike (so that “fingerprint” functions as an image for the distinctively individual), but the speaker attempts by means of the image to collectivize the birds, to put his finger on what they are, as it were. Inevitably, the image stumbles as if drunk and finally falls apart as the birds separate.

Despite the speaker’s efforts to fix the birds in place (at least in his consciousness) by “shaping . . . images to make them stay” (16), it is the speaker who is literally left “in this place” (15). But the creative activity of the poem, which for Heidegger involves not only the creative work of the artist, but also the self-disclosure of that which is (here, the birds’ self-disclosure) amounts to a negotiation between observer and observed. This structure of creativity means that the images are not only the invention ³⁵ of the poet. The speaker in “An Event” recognizes that, though his images have attempted to control the birds, he has himself been controlled by the birds. Even after they have gone, “in some formation of their own,/They fly me still, and steal my thoughts away.” Just as he sought to give them form in his imagination, they are forming him (while resisting the form he has imposed on them by choosing their own formation—still metaphorical, suggesting, for example, a military formation). Although they have left him behind and on the ground, they have also taken him “away” with them. His effort to appropriate them “in the nets and cages of [his] thought” has been countered by their “steal[ing his] thoughts away” (12 and 18). Line twenty richly expresses the ambiguous dynamism of the negotiation: “I set them down and give them leave to be.” ³⁶ On one reading, the line relinquishes control of the birds. The speaker has taken them up in his thought in order to comprehend them, but now lets them go. The same words, however, might refer to the creative event of the poem; the poet sets the words down on paper ³⁷ and, in doing so, lets the things be more fully than would otherwise have been the case. ³⁸ That is, the line simultaneously relinquishes and reclaims the birds, allows their absence and brings them to presence.

As I suggested above, the interplay of words suggesting success and failure in the closing lines of the poem makes Wilbur’s optimistic/pessimistic point with respect to meaning. On the one hand, “It is by words . . . That for a flying moment ³⁹ one may see . . . the world” (including seeing it in the sense of understanding it) in flashes of insight (“sudden vistas”). The words allow glimpses of reality, but eventually words succumb to “the defeat of words,” not only because things change (the birds no longer look like a fingerprint after they have scattered and vanished), but also because their reference is incomplete (even when the birds looked like a fingerprint, they didn’t look exactly like a fingerprint, so the description immediately calls for corrections, qualifications, and reservations; in Heidegger’s terms it simultaneously discloses and conceals). The “attempt” to know is “vain” (22). Nevertheless, by means of words “one may [actually] see” the world in the dynamic, conversational negotiation which the last line refers to as “cross-purposes.” The birds are “intent/On the far south” (2–3); that is, their purpose (regarded as either their destination or as their reason for being) differs from the purpose of the speaker. Birds and speaker perceive the world differently, and each attempts to impose meaning on the other (the birds by being what they are, the speaker by trying to describe them). Neither birds nor speaker completely controls the outcome, and yet something of the truth of things comes to expression in the event of the poem.

Like others in his generation and since, Wilbur has been concerned to challenge the hegemony of naturalism without denying its legitimacy and usefulness within proper bounds. In the two poems which I have described as his diptych, he playfully appropriates naturalistic description in such a way as to expose its limits, including its inability completely to avoid imaginative verbal constructions. At the same time, while clearly demanding a place for the imagination in human discourse, Wilbur acknowledges the propensity of the imaginative to distort. By bringing the two modes of discourse into interaction with each other, allowing them to enhance as well as correct each other, Wilbur pictures in these two poems a dynamic model of meaning hospitable both to verity and to creativity. While neither poem develops an explicitly Christian application, both poems are deeply informed by Wilbur’s love of the world as God’s good creation so that Christian readers will rightly discern in the hermeneutic model they construct a particular relevance for Christian understanding of and interaction with the natural world.