‘‘Paulsaul.’’ He serves as an example of a ‘‘water
walker,’’ a person who was converted from serv-
ice in the material world to service in the spiritual
but who remained capable of living in both. The
speaker in this poem desires a similar balance
between two worlds, material and spiritual; but
he is kept from transcendence, like the larva of
the caddis held in the cocoon, by the fear that he
might be unable to return to the material world.
In his first book imagination is a creative
force necessary to the poet, but Wilbur also
touches on an important theme developed more
thoroughly in his later poetry, the danger that
the imagination may lead to actions based
entirely on illusions. His interpretation of
Eugene Delacroix’s painting, the subject of the`
poem ‘‘The Giaour and the Pacha,’’ seems to be
that in his moment of victory the giaour realizes
that by killing his enemy he will lose his main
purpose in life, which has been based on a single
desire that proves valueless and illusory.
Another poem, ‘‘Objects,’’ stresses what is to
become a dominant theme for Wilbur, the need
for contact with the physical world. Unlike the
gulls in the poem, the poet cannot be guided by
instincts or imagination alone. His imagination
requires something more tangible, physical
objects from the real world. The poet must be
like the Dutch realist painter Pieter de Hooch,
who needed real objects for his ‘‘devout intran-
sitive eye’’ to imagine the unreal. It is only
through being involved in the real world that
the ‘‘Cheshire smile’’ of his imagination sets
him ‘‘fearfully free.’’ The poet, like the painter,
must appreciate the ‘‘true textures’’ of this world
before he can imagine their fading away.
One of the best lyrics in the collection is ‘‘My
Father Paints the Summer.’’ It has an autobio-
graphical basis because Wilbur’s father was a
painter, but it is not a personal poem. The lyric
develops the second meaning implied by the title
The Beautiful Changes—the existence of change,
mutability. It praises the power of the artist to
retain a heightened vision in a world of mutabil-
ity. The last stanza begins with the kind of sim-
ple, graceful line that is to become characteristic
of Wilbur at his best:[....] Again the concern is
balance in the relationship of the imagination
and the particulars, the physical things of this
world. The imagination needs the particulars of
a summer season, but the artist needs his imag-
ination for transcendence of time[....]
The title poem of the volume is also the con-
cluding poem and serves at this stage of Wilbur’s
poetic career as an example of his growing dis-
trust of Poe-like romantic escapes into illusion
and of his preference for a firm grasp of reality
enhanced by the imagination. In ‘‘The Beautiful
Changes’’ Wilbur gives four examples of how the
beautiful can change: the effect of Queen Anne’s
lace on a fall meadow, the change brought about
by the poet’s love, a chameleon’s change in order
to blend in with the green of the forest, and the
special beauty that a mantis, resting on a green
leaf, has for him. The beautiful changes itself to
harmonize with its environment, but it also alters
the objects that surround it. The ultimate change
described is the total effect of the changes of
nature on the beholder, worded in Wilbur’s
most polished lyric manner: [....]
Wilbur’s first volume was generally well
received by the reviewers, and it was evident
that a new poet of considerable talent had
appeared on the postwar scene. Many of his
first poems had a common motive, the desire to
stress the importance of finding order in a world
where war had served as a reminder of disorder
and destruction. There were also the first ver-
sions of what was to become a recurring theme:
the importance of a balance between reality and
dream, of things of this world enhanced by
imagination.
Wilbur spent three years between the publi-
cation of his first volume of poetry in 1947 and the
appearance of his second in 1950 as a member of
the Society of Fellows at Harvard, working on
studies of the dandy and Poe that he never com-
pleted. What he did complete, though, wasCere-
mony and Other Poems(1950), continuing his
concern with the need for a delicate balance
between the material and the spiritual, the real
and the ideal. In finding order in a world of dis-
order, poetry as celebration of nature is a ‘‘Cere-
mony,’’ something aesthetically and humanly
necessary. The concept of mutability, secondary
in his first volume, is now primary, leading to a
consideration of death, both as the ultimate threat
of disorder and chaos and as motivation for creat-
ing order in the human realm. One of the poems
concerned with facing death has come to be
among Wilbur’s most frequently anthologized
poems, ‘‘The Death of a Toad.’’ Wilbur finds in
the toad a symbol for primal life energies acciden-
tally and absurdly castrated by a tool of modern
man, a power mower. The toad patiently andLove Calls Us to the Things of This World