"I wish what I wished you before, but harder."

rhyming starling / my darling

Souvenir postcard depicting Jean-Jacques Henner’s La Liseuse (The Reader), 1910, France

---

The Writer
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
 

From New and Collected Poems, published by Harcourt Brace, 1988.

---

Creative Invitation

Ask your memory to deliver an image of the first time you felt great happiness and freedom making or doing something, independently.

Maybe you were under ten years old. Was it art, writing, baking, woodworking, caring for animals, building, exploring? When did you feel a sense of oneness with a craft, or a sense of knowing what you were made to do?

Look back at yourself tenderly. Draw or describe the setting in which this happiness or freedom arose. What bonds did it break you free from? What movements did your body make to bring the happy freedom in? How did the craft change your feeling about life?

Reflections on the Poem

Whenever I’ve read this poem aloud, usually to high school students, my voice has cracked or otherwise betrayed excessive feeling when I got to “my darling” in the last stanza. Something about it made me almost cry.

A parent breaks through the confines of their own mind’s limits about their child’s selfhood and creativity: is their child’s life experience/emotional world something they can understand or control? The parent learns more about the child’s autonomy as the poem moves from line to line.

The narrator tries out a metaphor—house as ship, himself as captain, congratulatory of child sailor’s efforts. How satisfying. Too small, too easy: she rejects it. Listening to his daughter’s keystrokes and silences on the typewriter he realizes she’s her own force, having her own odyssey.

The next metaphor he tries out is also too easy—a trapped bird trying to escape a room—but that metaphor works because the father and daughter are equals in the scene, observing the bird in the room. They’re both apprehending that in creative acts we try, hit a wall, try again, hit, try again again, and then miraculously fly, leave the limits we were testing in the dust, “clear the sill of the world.”

Recognizing that his daughter is fully engaged in the same struggle he is, on her own terms, brings the father to address her with a term of endearment. We sense the love in the helplessness. It’s this helpless love I find so touching—it feels real.

‘It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.’

---