27/1001 - Richard Wilbur

 Short Story: last night I read a chapter of Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliott. I'm co-teaching a co-op class and we are reading this book together. I read it over 20 years ago as a new Christian. I had just learned that people still died as martyrs and that there were still people who had never heard of Jesus. I was shocked and fascinated. This book was a strong encouragement that Christ is worth everything we give. It's been good to revisit it.

Essay: today, I read this interview with Richard Wilbur. I love what Wilbur says about metaphor:

Interviewer: Your poetry, too, is grounded in the real, physical world.

RW: Well I hope it is. I was just writing a letter to a friend this morning and remembering how Aristotle says that the essential poetic gift is for metaphor. And if that’s the essential poetic gift, then a kind of impatient abstraction that rises above this world and its things is not the essential poetic move. Poetry is concerned with things, and with making them vivid, and what metaphor does is to render some part of the world more vivid by comparing it– sometimes violently– to something else. That’s certainly what happens in the riddle, which Aristotle describes as “dark metaphor.” You go into it a little puzzled, but when you come out it’s like you’ve come to. You say “Ah-ha! This is that.” Of course you don’t in a literal way believe this is that, but it makes the thing under consideration far more solid and it gives you a more intense and surprised perception of the interlaced objective world, of things as they are.

***

And this:

L: Your poems maintain such good will. Are you an optimist by nature?

RW: If an optimist is somebody who thinks everything will come out all right, I’m not. But, if it’s optimistic to think that the world is fundamentally a great wonder and a great order, yes, I subscribe to those things.

"...the world is fundamentally a great wonder and a great order..." Yes and Amen.

Poem:

Everness

by Jorge Luis Borges

translated by Richard Wilbur

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.

God saves the metal and he saves the dross,

And his prophetic memory guards from loss

The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.

Everything is: the shadows in the glass

Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you

Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew

Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.

And everything is part of that diverse

Crystalline memory, the universe;

Whoever through its endless mazes wanders

Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,

And only from the sunset’s farther side 

Shall view at last the Archetypes and the Splendors.