In the Field by Richard Wilbur

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 1969 (collected in Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations, 1969)

Type of work: Poem

The Work

The title “In the Field” is an ambiguous reference to the two halves of the poem. The poem chronicles two walks in the same field, the first at night (the speaker looks at the stars), and the second one on a sunny day (the speaker looks at the flowers of the field). The poem has both a speaker and someone spoken to, who is probably a wife or lover, and the poem is a looking back at the events delineated there.

The simple stanza form—four lines each of trimeter, pentameter, tetrameter, and trimeter, rhyming abab—gives the poem a classical feel with a personal twist. It may be said to have as its subject the fear of Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French philosopher and mathematician, of the immensity of the universe. It relates this topic not as an abstract concept but as one resulting from a personal discovery of the poet and his beloved.

The poem opens as the two are walking through the field on a moonless night looking at the stars. The imagery of stanzas 1 and 2, however, suggests that they are wading in the sea, their “throw-back heads aswim.” The meditation begins with discussions of anciently named constellations, pointing out that Andromeda no longer fears the sea even though she moves “through a diamond froth of stars.” Nor does she need Perseus, her godlike savior in the myth, or even Euripides, the famous ancient Greek tragedian, to preserve her memory. The dolphin of Anon, the legendary Greek bard, is still there, as flawless as he was in ancient times.

Stanza 5 turns the poem in a new direction. The speaker, as if discovering what he had forgotten, says that none of the legends written in the stars “are true.” He explains by noting that the stars have moved slightly since ancient times: The pictures visible to the ancients are “askew” and, therefore, meaningless. The heavens have burst “the cincture of the Zodiac” and “shot flares” (meteors), and they no longer have anything to say.

So the two of them talk in modern astronomical terms—star magnitude, nebulae, and star clusters—which is fine until the imagination gets into the act with a “nip of fear.” It fakes “a scan of space/ Blown black and hollow”; perhaps the imagination thinks of a time ahead when the stars go out, an intimation of apocalypse. The air becomes chill, and the two go home to bed.

The second half of the poem describes the field in sunlight. The stars are gone; the “holes in heaven have been sealed.” The only galaxies they see are “galaxies/ Of dream flowers,” images that populate stanzas 16 and 17. Yet what do they mean? Do they refute the fear felt in the night walk? No, that would be a mistake. In a complicated answer, the poet discovers the “heart’s wish for life.” He opines that this wish “pounds beyond the sun” and “is the one/ Unbounded thing we know.”

When one has finished analyzing the poem, one finds that the ambiguous title “In the Field” now has a third meaning. Besides indicating the dark field of the stars and the bright sunny field of flowers, it indicates that speaker has taken a “field trip”: an experience that backs up an abstract idea, Pascal’s fear, which his mind had already grasped. The stars are frightening and the flowers comforting, but the infinite wishes of the human heart are the only “unbounded thing” humankind has from experience.

Bibliography

Bixler, Frances. Richard Wilbur: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Hougen, John B. Ecstasy Within Discipline: The Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994.

Michelson, Bruce. Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Reibetang, John. “What Love Sees: Poetry and Vision in Richard Wilbur.” Modern Poetry Studies 11 (1982): 60-85.

Salinger, Wendy, ed. Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

Stitt, Peter. The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.