Richard Wilbur died last month. He was, Dana Gioia said, the
finest poet of his generation and the greatest American Christian poet since
Eliot.
Here's an example of why I liked him so much. It is part of a
toast he gave at his eldest son's wedding. (I recited it at the marriage of our
youngest.)
"St. John tells how at Cana's wedding feast/ The water pots
poured wine in such amount/ That by his sober count/ There were a hundred
gallons at the least./ It made no earthly sense unless to show/ How whatsoever
love elects to bless/ Brims to a sweet excess/ That can without depletion
overflow."
I'm sure there are better examples, but this little snippet shows
two things I honor him for. The first is his sense of rhyme and meter. His
poems seem effortless, as though it's the most natural thing in the world to
speak in iambic pentameter. And they are musical, but the music fits precisely
into each sentence.
I wish our modern church hymns had this congruence. How often I
find myself inwardly complaining that the lines leave me off balance or that I
can't sing a flock of consonants perched on a string of eighth notes.
Wilbur wrote poems you could set to music. He was Leonard
Bernstein's collaborator on "Candide."
The same gift made him a wonderful translator. A few years ago
our drama department did a performance of "Tartuffe" in Wilbur's
translation. It's a funny play.
But Wilbur's version was more than just a successful play on
stage. It was, like Moliere's original, a work of poetry in rhymed couplets (10
syllables — not alexandrines, but maybe that pace is better for English
speakers).
I said Wilbur's wedding toast showed two things I liked. Beauty
is one. The other is a conviction that, if we look closely enough, we will see
that the world is fundamentally good, even blessed.
The miracle at Cana made no earthly sense, but there it was. The
wine overflowed, as the five barley loaves multiplied later in John's
Gospel.
The physics of it is puzzling. But try this instead. We know it
works like that with love. The more we give away, the more we have.
"Whatsoever love elects to bless/ Brims to a sweet excess/
That can without depletion overflow." Perhaps Wilbur was thinking of his
own marriage of 64 years.
Or maybe he was speaking from faith rather than love. In a 1977
interview with The Paris Review, he offered this:
"I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that
the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of
things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of
all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on
temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude."
These two things I admire in Wilbur's poetry are actually related
to one another. In postmodern poetry, music, painting, we see a kind of chaotic
eclecticism that mirrors a universe in disorder.
For Wilbur, the energy of the universe "take(s) pattern and
shape." We see the same regularity in his verse forms and meters. They are
comely, like the world they describe.
And good. A universe governed by entropy will eventually die of
its own disorder, the physicists say. It has no point. It is neither good nor
bad.
The universe that God created is, as the Book of Wisdom says,
arranged "by measure and number and weight." And it has a point. It
was made for the glory of God.
Garvey is president of The Catholic University of America
in Washington.