The gaiety of the playheightens the reverence; it does not profane the ceremony. The words we have looked at aremore than expressions of contrast between worldly and unworldly realities. The energy andmusic here are as well suited to holy festivity as their spreads of meaning are to theanalytical mind. If the poem’s reconciliation of playfulness and seriousness, energyand intellect is a trick, it is a trick which hearkens back to the very beginnings ofliterature. From Bruce Michelson, Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time (Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 1991), 51. Marjorie Perloff… Wilbur’s laundry-as-angel metaphor strikes me as no more than an elaboratecontrivance, characterized by its curious inattention to the things of thisworld of the poet’s title. The incident, writes May Swenson,is so common that everyone has seen it, and … the analogy is … fitting ineach of its details: a shirt is white, it is empty of body, but floats or flies, thereforehas life (an angel).
But if, as Wilbur himself explains it, the scene is outside theupper-story window of an apartment building, in front of which the first laundry ofthe day is being yanked across the sky, the reality would be that the sheets andshirts would probably be covered with specks of dust, grit, maybe even with a trace or twoof bird droppings. At best, those sheets seen (if seen at all) from Manhattan high-risewindows in the fifties, billowing over the fire escapes under the newly-installedtelevision aerials, would surely be a bit on the grungy side.But of course the awakening poet might not notice this because the laundry is certainlynot his concern; the poet, after all, is represented as having been asleep when it washung out to dry.
… Woman is she who only dreams of better detergents – adream, by the way, the affluent fifties were in the process of satisfying – whereasman dreams idealistically (and hence hopelessly) of clear dances done in the sightof heaven, dances that might allow him to escape, at least momentarily, thepunctual rape of every blessed day.Punctual rape: it is the alarm clock going off, violating one’sdelightful daydreams, even as Donne’s busie old foole, unruly Sunneintrudes, through windows and curtains, on the sleeping lovers in The SunneRising. But in Wilbur’s poem the intruding daylight is not chided, evidentlybecause to be alive, however difficult, is to be blessed. The metaphor will not withstandmuch scrutiny, for here, as in the case of the laundry metaphor, the drive is to getbeyond the image that serves as vehicle as quickly as possible, so as to talk about therelation of soul to body, spirit to matter – those great poetic topoi introduced bythe Augustine-derived title, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World. Theactual things of this world, in 1956, are studiously avoided.
