Poetry Warning: Picking Apart Wilbur's "Objects"

For all two of you who might enjoy this exercise, I feel compelled -- I cannot rest until I do it -- to analyze Richard Wilbur's poem, "Objects." This new analysis is dramatically altered from my first one.

Objects

Meridians are a net

Which catches nothing; that sea-scampering bird

The gull, though shores lapse every side from sight, can yet

Sense him to land, but Hanno had not heard

Hesperidean song,

Had he not gone by watchful periploi:

Chalk rocks, and isles like beasts, and mountain stains along

The water-hem, calmed him at last near-by

The clear high hidden chant

Blown from the spellbound coast, where under drifts

Of sunlight, under plated leaves, they guard the plant

By praising it. Among the wedding gifts

Of Herë, were a set

Of golden McIntoshes, from the Greek

Imagination. Guard and gild what's common, and forget

Uses and prices and names; have objects speak.

There's classic and there's quaint,

And then there is that devout intransitive eye

Of Pieter de Hooch: see feinting from his plot of paint

The trench of light on boards, the much-mended dry

Courtyard wall of brick,

And sun submerged in beer, and streaming in glasses,

The weave of a sleeve, the careful and undulant tile. A quick

Change of the eye and all this calmly passes

Into a day, into magic.

For is there any end to true textures, to true

Integuments; do they ever desist from tacit, tragic

Fading away? Oh maculate, cracked, askew,

Gay-pocked and potsherd world

I voyage, where in every tangible tree

I see afloat among the leaves, all calm and curled,

The Cheshire smile which sets me fearfully free.

I'm reassessing my previous analysis of this poem, which felt trite to me, and too academic. A friend put me on a track that showed me a blundering error in my reading of the poem, which then opened the poem to me in new ways.

It seems to me the poem is full of contrasts. The free seagull, who knows nothing of our latitude and longitude, discerns the coastline with his "sense." In contrast Hanno (a Roman leader from Carthage) must hug the coastline on his exploration of western Africa, either using a periploi (guide text) or making one as he goes. Explorers label and claim the land they find. At the poem's end, Wilbur aligns himself with the seagull -- "fearfully free."

The poem progresses from idea to idea like links of a chain. The sea-scampering seagull leads to the coastline-jumping Hanno. Hanno, who searched for the island of the Hesperides (Greek nymphs of the dying sunset) and their golden apples and beautiful songs, was disappointed. He found instead an island of brutal, violent, ugly savages - the island of the Gorgons (another contrast). The locals called them gorillas. Here's a passage regarding his encounter with them:

In the recess of this bay [i.e., the Southern Horn] there was an island, like the former one, having a lake, in which there was another island, full of savage men. There were women, too, in even greater number. They had hairy bodies, and the interpreters called them Gorillae. When we pursued them we were unable to take any of the men; for they had all escaped, by climbing the steep places and defending themselves with stones; but we took three of the women, who bit and scratched their leaders, and would not follow us. So we killed them and flayed them, and brought their skins to Carthage. For we did not voyage further, provisions failing us.
The women's skins were taken back to a Roman temple and were preserved there for about 350 years, according to Pliny.

In his poem, Wilbur doesn't address this grisly aspect of Hanno's historical trip. Wilbur gives Hanno a mythical setting, --  Hanno hears the nymphs' "high hidden chant" on a "spellbound coast" where the nymphs guard and worship the tree of the golden apples. Wilbur's scene is imagination, not reality. In his poem, the object to be guarded and treasured is not the flayed and preserved skins of women, it is a tree of golden apples ... or perhaps a clay tablet that guided the way to an enchanted island.

These apples lead Wilbur to his next link in his poetic chain: Hera and Zeus's wedding. The apple tree was a wedding gift to Hera from Gaea. She asked the Hesperides to guard the tree and its apples in her garden. They became highly-desired objects, greatly valued and fought over among the gods and goddesses. Was this what Hanno was really searching for? 

Wilbur then stops, mid-poem. He seems to contrast what he's written thus far with his next link in the chain: a 17th century Dutch painter names Pieter de Hooch and his work. I enjoyed reading Wilbur's descriptions of de Hooch's work and viewing the paintings on Wikipedia. I could see exactly what Wilbur saw in them -- the courtyard bricks, the shafts of light, the sparkling beer, the cloth, and lots of tile. Everyday people populate the paintings, doing mundane things.

If this poem is about objects, what does Wilbur have to say about them? Humans designate some objects as "classic" and some as "quaint." We label them. Some we guard like the royal jewels. Some we gild, like the apples, altering them from something common to something divine. Wilbur says to "forget uses and prices and names" -- forget these designations. Some old books we handle only with white cotton gloves in locked museum vaults. Some old books we allow to mold away in library basements. Wilbur wants the objects to speak for themselves, I think. Whether in classic stories or in human history, we've elevated some objects to a status of worship, and relegated others to neglect.

Think of the list of objects thus far in the poem: the equator, the gull, Hanno's periploi, the women's skins (which I think are certainly in Wilbur's mind), the apples. Perhaps I've missed some. Wilbur is asking what they are, if we forget the cultural attributes we've placed on them, if we allow them to just be. We might take Wilbur at his word, forget what labels, values, or limitations we've applied to these objects, and simply allow them so speak for themselves. What would they say? I'll leave you to thrash that out for yourselves.

Guard and gild what's common, and forget uses and prices and names; have objects speak. This, I think, is the first tenet of Wilbur regarding objects. 

De Hooch's art is a new thing altogether, contrasted with the "classic and quaint." De Hooch is a real man (unlike Hera or the Hesperides). His art, which he views with a "devout ... eye" (as the nymphs "praise" the apple tree), is a real object, depicting real objects. Wilbur describes the artist's eye as "intransitive," a strange word for and eye. The term intransitive is used to describe verbs "expressing action which does not pass over to an object; not taking a direct object." (OED) It seems Wilbur chose this word carefully. De Hooch is an unusual artist because he does not allow himself to impose any values on the objects in his paintings; he "forgets uses and prices and names." He allows the objects he paints to speak for themselves. At this point, the concept begins to make sense to me.

Apparently we humans are not very good at this. We like to bind objects and imprison them in their uses, define them by their monetary worth, name and label them. I believe this is what Wilbur is driving at in the poem. He enjoys De Hooch's paintings because they are free of this imprisonment by their creator. Wilbur says, of De Hooch's art, that it passes "into magic."

Wilbur then asks this question about objects:
For is there any end to true textures, to true integuments; do they ever desist from tacit, tragic, fading away?
(An integument is a tough outer protective layer on an animal or a plant.)

Do objects die? It seems sad, but Wilbur is admitting that the objects around us that we manipulate for our own ends, lack souls, lack spiritual substance. Unlike humans, when they cease to exist, there's no afterlife for your average clay tablet, painting, or even golden apple. (I have often wondered where is the Ark of the Covenant, on this planet. Surely it's somewhere? Just a few chips of its wood, or a little gilding from an angel's wing? When did it cease being valued enough that someone threw it into the dump? Isn't this what Wilbur is also asking?)

He ends with this wonderful statement: Oh maculate, cracked, askew, gay-pocked and potsherd world I voyage -- the entire world is an object, a precious, damaged, pock-marked and cracked object, growing older by the moment. Who values it? If the Earth could speak, what would it say? Have we humans carved it up, divided it into your-land and my-land, labeled it, used it, applied monetary value to it? Yes -- all of the above.

He ends by saying that he sees in every tangible tree ... afloat among the leaves, all calm and curled, the Cheshire smile which sets me fearfully free.

The Cheshire cat was free to disappear!I'm sorry to say that at this point I must drag Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into  the discussion. I pulled out my copy to refresh my mind about the Cheshire cat, and in reading I discovered so much that's pertinent to our discussion. Alice's experiences have much to do with objects being misused. The Duchess is trying to hold a baby (which she passes on to Alice), a baby that won't be held because it's not a baby, no matter how you dress it in lace and bounce it on your lap. It's a pig, and it must be allowed to run off into the woods. As Alice notes, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes a rather handsome pig, I think." Alice proceeds to play croquet with the Queen and her friends. They don't have the right objects for the game, so they appropriate hedgehogs as balls, flamingos as mallets, and force soldiers to bend over double to be their arches (wickets). And most of the people present aren't people at all. They are playing cards! The Queen (of Hearts) keeps ordering heads to be lopped off, but everyone is confused about how to behead the Cheshire cat. How can you behead a cat's head if it has no body? And as the Cheshire cat disappears right down to his grin, of course, he can't be executed at all. He evades the Queen's manipulation.

Carroll's story is all hilarious, but Wilbur sees the Cheshire cat as a freeing image, an object than can escape human manipulation and the shackles we usually attach to everything we own. Indeed, the only other thing in "Objects" with that kind of freedom is the seagull, careening over the waves, free of maps, using instinct. Wilbur himself delights in being "fearfully free," and takes the gull and the cat as his inspiration. Like De Hooch, will the poet Wilbur be able to treat his words -- his art -- with the same "intransitive eye"?

This complicated poem has occupied a chunk of my mind for many days. I have not figured it all out, but I hope you've enjoyed wrangling it with me. If you have any enlightenment to add, please do!

[My earlier analysis had some pretty hilarious errors in it, on my part, which I've now changed. Many thanks to Linda Lee for setting me on the right course.]