A Reflection on Richard Wilbur's Poem "The Writer"

Richard Wilbur is an accomplished poet who has won multiple awards such as the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry. In 1947, Richard Wilbur published his first work of poetry that appeared in the book, The Beautiful Changes. His debut was received very well with critics praising him as gifted and a poet of the generation. Coming from a family of editors, Wilbur showed interest in literature from a very young age. He wrote stories and poems for his college newspaper during his time at Amherst College. He went on to Harvard University to complete a masters degree. Afterwards, he began to work as an English professor at Harvard. No matter what the most present trend in poetry was, Wilbur continued to write in a traditional matter. His work encompassed “New Critical” style that was known for being comprehensible but also complex in a subtle manner. The poem that will be examined in this essay is “The Writer”.

In the poem “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur, the speaker’s love for his daughter is analogous to a captain’s love for his ship. In the first line of the speaker says, “In her room at the prow of the house.” This could be interpreted that the daughter’s room is at the front of the house, or that she is of utmost importance in her household, or perhaps that she is the center of her family’s life at all times. Perhaps a better interpretation is mere that she is the center of her father’s life. “The writer” is the daughter, who is writing a story. “A commotion of type-writer keys” can be heard. Wilbur’s simile compares this sound to a “chain hauled over a gunwale” as he adds more boat imagery. “The stuff of her life is a great cargo” insinuates that the daughter has had a rough life. Later the speaker says, “I wish her a lucky passage,” projecting a father’s love for his daughter as she goes on her voyage, her journey through life.

In a second extended metaphor in the poem, the speaker talks about a starling stuck in his daughter’s room. The father and daughter watched the bird for an hour as it struggled to escape. to the father, the daughter is like the bird as the bird is like the daughter. The speaker implies that his daughter is struggling not only with writing her story, but also struggling with her life. The speaker states that the bird “drops like a glove…to the desktop.” It is apparent that Wilbur uses the desk as the bird’s falling ground because of the daughter’s troubles with writing her story. The desk is the place she sits to write her story, as she struggles with writer’s block, just like the bird battles to get out of the room. The extended metaphor could also mean that the father feels he is holding the girl back, stuck in her room, just as the starling is stuck in the room.

The bird escapes, finally “beating a smooth course for the right window, and clearing the sill of the world.” The “right window” has a double meaning. One interpretation is that the bird is merely on the right side of the room, but it could also mean the bird has chosen the appropriate or suitable window, figuratively, the right opportunity for the girl or the starling to get out into the world. The starling finally “cleared the sill of the world,” or figuratively, the girl and the starling finally get over their difficulties and learn to soar into the world to make something of themselves