Today is Richard Wilbur's birthday, and I am remembering what I and others wrote about his poem "A Hole in the Floor" on earlier occasions.
From six years ago, for example:
I had an exchange of notes the other day with my son Joshua, thinking of the many homes he and I shared over the years of living together and then the visits with each other as he grew into adulthood and began to find and live in his own homes. My mind lingered, as it will, on the sheer number of comings and goings and the frequency of moving, the complex tangle of feelings and forces at work in leaving a home and breaking new ground. I was astonished, wondering as I counted from memory 43 homes in 70 years. I can still walk through all but the very earliest, the first two. Too many comings and goings, I wrote. And Joshua replied, from his own memory drawn from the well of experience we share,
"I remember you saying once when we were hiking in Wonalancet – that day we got lost, remember? - and looking over the mountains, and you saying, ‘another place in that interminable succession of places’ - and the best we can do is to be present for them – their grief, their promise, their tears of joy, forgiveness, loss, return. And when we cannot be present, to try to greet that, too, with compassion. So maybe life is this interminable succession of places, that is, of comings and goings. Thank God we can witness each other through this, and share many of those places."
As I was ruminating on my own comment and Joshua's wonderful rejoinder, I thought of a poem by Richard Wilbur that had not come to mind for many years, the powerful, deeply evocative image of a carpenter's hole in the parlor floor, the poet gazing down and down, an archeological find, kneeling, looking "where the joists go into hiding,"
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.
For God's sake, what am I after?
the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known
source of danger, host of life.
A Hole In The Floor
for Rene Magritte
The carpenter's made a hole
In the parlor floor, and I'm standing
Staring down into it now
At four o'clock in the evening,
As Schliemann stood when his shovel
Knocked on the crowns of Troy.
A clean-cut sawdust sparkles
On the grey, shaggy laths,
And here is a cluster of shavings
From the time when the floor was laid.
They are silvery-gold, the color
Of Hesperian apple-parings.
Kneeling, I look in under
Where the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.
The radiator-pipe
Rises in middle distance
Like a shuttered kiosk, standing
Where the only news is night.
Here's it's not painted green,
As it is in the visible world.
For God's sake, what am I after?
Some treasure, or tiny garden?
Or that untrodden place,
The house's very soul,
Where time has stored our footbeats
And the long skein of our voices?
Not these, but the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
And the whole dangerous room.
— Richard Wilbur
Heinrich Schliemann was a 19th century pioneer in the field of archaeology, who believed that the works of Homer described historical truth. He excavated Hissarlik in modern Turkey, presumed to be the site of Troy.
René Magritte, to whom Wilbur offers his poem, was a Belgian surrealist artist, often recognized for images that wittily and provocatively challenged observers' preconceived perceptions of reality. The Magritte Museum opened in Brussels in 2009.
Douglas Hofstadter used Magritte works for many of the illustrations in his book, Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Here is a well-known Magritte painting.