by John Poch

 

A Measuring Worm

 

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.

It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.

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One of the problems in reading poetry is that we have so little time in today’s world. False. There is as much time as there ever was. Twenty four hours in a day. However, so many people, institutions, networks, electronics, products, apps, and entertainments want our attention more than ever, and unless we take measures to defend ourselves, we are under constant assault. I’m as guilty as anybody—my smart phone buzzing, flashing, and ringing.

But poems are often very short, sometimes as short as the Richard Wilbur poem above, so you can read one quickly. False, again. Poems actually take a lot of time and concentration, and in a world where we are usually trying to multi-task, this conflicts with what a poem requires: our full attention. A poem like “A Measuring Worm” might look like it would take two minutes at most to read, but maybe multiply those two minutes times ten if you really want to see what is going on. Or more.

Many distractions in life compete for our eyes and ears and souls, but there may be only one reason, and that is money. Because time is money. If someone has your time, they in some way have access to your pocketbook. The designers of phones and apps know this, and you have to know they are doing everything they can to keep you away from a life of solitude, paper books, and prayer.

I don’t allow the use of electronic devices in my classroom because a video screen with its colors and its noise will nearly always win someone’s attention over words on a page. So, I tell students to put away the phones and only get them out if we need to look something up in relation to the poem at hand. Have some manners, I say. Manners require an attention to detail, and the details of this poem will only be found with our full attention. Only ten years ago, back when mobile phones were a bit of a novelty, I told my students to not even bother bringing them to class. One day we were looking closely at a poem, and a student across the room yelped. At first, I actually thought someone was in some odd way excited about something in the poem (It’s college; you never know). But, no—one of my students was having an epileptic seizure. I jumped up out of the circle from my chair, and I grabbed the kid before he hit the floor. He was jerking wildly and drool was dropping from the side of his mouth. Immediately, half the students in the class grabbed their phones and dialed 911. I was glad they had ignored my request to not bring their phones to class, because within five minutes campus police had arrived with the paramedics right after to get the student the help he needed. Needless to say, we didn’t finish class that day. We were distracted.

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Richard Wilbur, until he passed away this weekend, may have been the greatest living poet writing in English. The publication of his Collected Poems in 2004 showed Wilbur to be the major poet we always thought he might be. While other poets throughout the twentieth century fled to the wilderness of fragmentation, wandered through the cities of common or uncommon prose, preached from the pulpits of free verse, and even abandoned the prisons of punctuation, he humbly continued the more “English” verse tradition passed down from Frost, Auden, and Larkin—a tradition that considered the iamb and rhyme still imaginative, vital, inexhaustible, and beautiful. Wilbur, in his best poems, conjures a cinematic and philosophical voice that is at once authoritative and decidedly curious. This kind of poetry demands no single style, and Wilbur displays a range of formal expertise while retaining his particular voice.

Much of the literary criticism written about Wilbur’s work concerns his attraction to manners, ceremony, and artifice. You can tell by his formal artistry that Wilbur is always conscious of his play. He is fastidious, though our egalitarian age often perceives this characteristic as a fault. A reader’s perception of Wilbur varies, depending in what light that reader perceives the term, “mannered.” Many think of someone who is mannered as someone supercilious or prideful, but this need not be the case. After all, manners are the measures we take to make others more comfortable. We say “thank you” and “please” and “Yes sir” to coordinate a more complete understanding of our social interactions. And by saying these things we express humility rather than pride. A fancy table setting is not necessarily ostentatious; all those extra glasses, silverware, and plates are intended for the pleasure of the guest rather than the pride of the host. Admittedly, it may not always seem this way. Wilbur is not a fussy or careful poet, rather he is (I want to use phrases from his poems) a “suitor of excellence” and a “connoisseur of thirst.” If manners are the more thorough actions we take to please others, then Wilbur is one of our most generous poets.

And he is, perhaps, our greatest contemporary poet of paradox. Wilbur’s subject matter varies widely and he writes equally well on the great themes: art, history, love, war, death, dream, nature, and theology. He is never merely witty, and he is as imaginative as Wallace Stevens, though quite different in his approach.

Wilbur’s most widely known poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” is his best version of “in what manner the body is united with the soul.” Wilbur is no ascetic: he gets to have his cake and eat it, too. And note, not “the World,” but “This World.” Richard Wilbur’s very specific world is one that constantly comes to closure and grounding that occurs through cycles.

That poem was published early in his career in 1957. The book in which it appeared, Things of This World, won both the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award. Wilbur, unlike most poets, continued to write strong poems throughout his career.

Even in a short, recent poem like “Crow’s Nest,” Wilbur transforms the natural world into the ship where the crow’s nest becomes metaphorical. But that perch cannot remain metaphorical and beyond reach, where a competent poet might leave it. Wilbur circles back around to the real to move beyond mere competence. Where other poets settle into their metaphors, Wilbur resists closure until at least a cycle is complete. And the cycle is achieved through a variety of means beyond metaphor such as movement through seasons, the course of a day, resurrection, and redemption. The closure is never absolute, as the paradox pulls us back into the poem. One can see how Wilbur’s formal tendencies lend him a helping hand (and foot): the rhyme and iamb are quite suited for the cyclical poem because these devices are cyclical and rhythmical in and of themselves.

While it is important to notice this cyclical movement, we see more apparently the way Wilbur can lead the reader by the eye and ear through very specific spatial movement in a poem. Notice how the senses and rhythms imitate the thing observed:

 

                More intricately expressed
In the plain fountains that Maderna set
        Before St. Peter’s—the main jet
Struggling aloft until it seems at rest

                In the act of rising, until
The very wish of water is reversed,
        That heaviness borne up to burst
In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill

                With blaze, and then in gauze
Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine
        Illumined version of itself, decline,
And patter on the stones its own applause?

from “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”

 

Is there a more lovely, patient, vivid, exact, and formal description of water in American poetry? The further wonder of this description is that it refers to a completely different fountain than the title! Notice here how Wilbur slips beyond mere cycle or repetition and toward transcendence.

Wilbur often reminds us of another Christian poet, W.H. Auden. But while Auden’s authority rises out of slightly more abstract and distant realms of meditation, Wilbur returns again and again to a more pastoral and domestic imagery (one might think of Frost, but the flora is more luscious, the waters more shapely, and the rooms more particularly well-lit). Auden is a man of the world, yet so is Wilbur. But where I imagine Wilbur amid the nature he describes, Auden views the same nature from the walls of the city or a train and through a cloud of cigarette smoke. In short, Wilbur is a much more private than public poet.

And Wilbur is one of the few American contemporary poets who profess to be a practicing Christian. Many of our poets who claim some kind of Christian worldview write much more about their doubts and reservations than beliefs. While Wilbur is no “inspirational” poet, his doubts or stumblings do not prevent his faith, humility, and passion from pushing through paradox, admitting to a higher beauty and order.

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His poem, “A Measuring Worm” was first published in The New Yorker magazine in February 2008. At first it seems a trifling little poem of meager description. Immediately one notices that the title of the poem is not “An Inch Worm”, though that is what we know we are observing. Wilbur is emphasizing the word “Measuring” to make us pay attention to that term. In fact, the word allows us to see the worm (and word) in motion, as a participle rather than the more firmly measured “Inch”. The worm is observed initially in the act of “climbing”. As well, immediately, we see that the poem rhymes. Lines one and three create a kind of measured finality for each stanza with that sonic repetition. One can imagine the rhyming pattern as a kind of “measuring worm” crawling down the right side of the poem, the middle line bunching out much like the body of the worm, while the feet of the rhyming words are planted along the same line. There is a nice irony here in that movement of our eye down the page (in the pattern of the rhyme) while Wilbur has told us the caterpillar is climbing up.

The action of the inchworm “Humping up his back” is described as “Constantly” due to the lack of legs in the middle part of his body. If you look at an image of the inchworm, you can see it has five pair of legs with a smaller arch of the belly between each two. Thus, the measure of the five stanzas is even more beautifully rendered. Could it be Wilbur’s intention to mirror those arching legs with the arching of the five rhymes? Regardless, there it is. There is also the larger arch of the entire body between the front three pair and the back two pair of legs. If you look at where that arch, or turn, comes in the poem, we see it is at the crux of the matter when this omega will “warn of Last Things”.

Just before this, at the very center of the poem we arrive at a crucial epiphany. The etymology of the word “semaphore” means “to carry a sign”. This worm seems to be trying to tell the author something, and the poet realizes the shape of the worm is not just a hump. With his feet, his arched form makes the shape an omega. Omega, we know, is the last letter in the Greek alphabet. From the last book of the Bible, we know that God is our Alpha and Omega, our Beginning and End, so here we have a signal, perhaps, from God (The Finisher of our faith) himself. This is confirmed in the very next line of the poem, with an eschatological warning of “Last Things.” Capitalized, in case we might not realize the gravity of the situation.

The worm here goes from being a kind of harbinger to ignorant of its own situation: “he doesn’t know it, / He will soon have wings”. This prefaces the speaker’s own realization in the last stanza, but before that happens, notice how the worm is referred to as “he” in the second line of this stanza, then “He” in the third. Of course, this is only an accident of the formal choice of capitalizing line beginnings, but it is nonetheless meaningful as we see the metamorphosis take place in both insect and pronoun.

Here at the end of this magnificent poem, a worm, which is nearly nothing, gains wings and becomes a butterfly. Then, metaphorically, and metamorphically, the worm and butterfly transform into a human being imagining his worm-like state and the transformation possible. The paradox is extraordinary. Though the poem moves downward, it moves upward. Though all seems to point toward death, we understand via the visible world around us a type of second life. Though the speaker might move only inch by inch, he has made great leaps of understanding. Though, the poem ends with this final stanza and a period, the last word of the poem is “go” which seems to signify something akin to the fact that we go away, as in “going, going, gone”. It is a word of departure. Shortly before his death, Jesus explains to his disciples that he must leave them: “I go to prepare a place for you.” However, “Go” is also the evangelical word with which Jesus sent his disciples into the world to transform it.

The speaker says of the worm, “he doesn’t know” and then of himself: “I, too, don’t know”. Ignorance is an inescapable condition, but it is also a prerequisite of humility and faith. We should notice that Wilbur pushes this tightly controlled poem to have one last repetition via the sonic echo of alliteration or assonance in every third line: steep/screen, humping/his, omegas/meant, will/wings, and inch/inch. That final exact repetition of “inch” brings us to an extraordinarily tidy ending, perfectly measured. The paradox is rich. Despite the fact that we go “Inch” by “inch”, we can surely make a great leap of faith. It will take a new body. With wings.

Speaking of a new body…we know that Wilbur’s poems throughout his long career have almost strictly been created with the iambic line, but we don’t see that in this poem. The lack of iambs in a Wilbur poem as the controlling foot is almost a shock. (One might even argue that the regular foot of the iamb is not in use here because the poem is about an inch worm, therefore a smaller unit of measurement, a syllable, is more appropriate.) When we look more closely, we can see that another form is in place here beyond the rhyme. If we count the syllables, we realize that Wilbur has written a series of five haikus to make his poem. Lines one and three of each stanza have five syllables and each middle line is seven syllables. Japanese haikus don’t rhyme, but Wilbur’s does, adding a challenge to the formal work.

There are several reasons beyond the mathematical why this is important. Traditionally, haikus are Japanese poems of the natural world that often emphasize a season of the year. The seasons, we know change, and the nature of transformation is a key to understanding many haikus. Obviously, in Wilbur’s poem, the haiku is all about change and the awareness of the natural world and its possibilities of showing us who we are or what we might become. We can see in this poem what was pointed out earlier about much of Wilbur’s work. This emphasis on closure, and yet the paradox revealing that something closed has a way of opening again, through poetry.

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Robert Hass, who edited The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, says in his introduction to that book that the haiku form “was, from the beginning, very attentive to time and place.” Wilbur’s time and place of this poem is quite intimate and contained. The inchworm measures both space and time in this poem. As well, Hass claims that the haiku “required that the language be kept plain”. In Wilbur’s poem, only the word “semaphore” seems even slightly difficult, and the grammar is very straightforward. Hass points out another aspect of haiku that is interesting in relation to Wilbur’s use of the haiku form:

 

One of the striking differences between Christian and Buddhist thought is that in the Christian sense of things, nature is fallen, and in the Buddhist sense it isn’t. Another is that, because there is no creator-being in Buddhist cosmology, there is no higher plane of meaning to which nature refers. At the core of Buddhist metaphysics are three ideas about natural things: that they are transient; that they are contingent; and that they suffer.

 

Wilbur, being a Christian poet, it seems to me, gets it both ways, in his use of a form connected with Buddhism. Readers of this poem aren’t as concerned with the worm (as representative of nature) being fallen, so that issue falls to the way side; we are concerned about the fallen nature of the speaker who confesses: “And I, too, don’t know / Toward what undreamt condition / Inch by inch I go.” To be fallen is to be cursed with a death sentence. Yet, for the Christian, death will be finally “swallowed up in victory.” The final word, “go”, is one of movement. And a movement upward, beyond the poem, with wings.

Most anyone recognizes that a worm is synonymous with death. When we die, if we are put into the ground, the worms eat us, and our bodies return to mere soil. To say, then, “a measuring worm” is even more significant. We can measure ourselves by the worm’s actions, its shape, and its purpose. Although inchworms do not eat human flesh, we know that other worms do, and the poet is conscious of this. In the end, the real worm that measures who we are is not some cute little inch worm on a window screen, but the maggot who reminds us that our lives are but for a moment and that we are in many ways, hanging by a thread. Despite this, the inchworm is harmless, and perhaps in the scope of eternity the Christian poet might see death this way.

The Apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 15:19 that, “If in this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most pitiable.” Many versions translate that last word as “miserable.” In Wilbur’s poem, the idea that, finally, the wings of another life await us is not just a metaphorical dream to the Christian. It is a spiritual reality that gives us hope beyond what we can measure in the here and now.

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It is October 15, 2017. I have just learned that Richard Wilbur has passed away at the age of 96 years old. I feel an enormous sense of loss now, knowing that he will not write any more poems. I was blessed to have met him a few times: once in a graduate poetry workshop where he visited us in Gainesville, Florida, and once at the West Chester Poetry Conference where he and I chatted briefly about haikus, strangely enough.

One of his great poems, “Year’s End”, is a gorgeous meditation on death much longer than “A Measuring Worm”, though I think both are equally rich in how they address death directly, without fear. Its last stanza begins, “ These sudden ends of time must give us pause.” Wilbur’s lines, often end-stopped or taut with meaning (each functioning as coherent units of meaning), are full of these pauses, more so than just about any contemporary poet. Each line ending, often enforced by rhyme, helps us slow our pace. Why rush to our deaths? Why not pause? Even if to meditate on death? And life. The last two words of “A Measuring Worm” are “I go”, signifying both death and life. Richard Wilbur may be gone, but his poems go forward with us, keeping him right here where we need him.