Richard Wilbur's poem "The Writer" involves the poet's awareness of and reflection on the seriousness of writing. He comes to this discovery, or, more likely, rediscovery, by way of his young daughter, who herself has apparently only recently undertaken the act of writing.
The poem is unrhymed and composed of eleven three-line stanzas. The divisions in the poem, for our purposes, might be drawn after the third stanza, after the fifth stanza, and after the tenth stanza, leaving the final stanza to stand alone. The first three stanzas more or less lightly treat the fact of the daughter's writing activity. The pauses and silences of his daughter, the typewriter and the entire house in stanza four force the poet to recognize his condescension toward his daughter and her writing, a smugness of which he had not truly been aware before those pauses and silences. Stanzas six through ten record the poet's reflection on the metaphorical relationship between a bird previously trapped in his daughter's writing room and his daughter in there at the moment trying to write. The relationship is specified in the last stanza: "It is always a matter, my darling,/ Of life and death, as I had forgotten."
The poem is about the poet's remembering the importance of writing, both for his daughter and for himself, that it is as serious as life and death, on a spiritual if not physical level. The work begins far more lightly, however, as he playfully, perhaps proudly, imagines his daughter writing away in the front of the house as if in a room at the front of a ship plowing through the light of the world. He suggests the flowers at the windows are like seaspray perhaps. He imagines the sound of the typewriter to be "a commotion . . . Like a chain hauled over a gunwale." He further imagines that she is imagining "the stuff/ Of her life" as "a great cargo." And, satisfied with his metaphor-laden appreciation of his daughter's writing efforts, he says, "I w...