Richard Wilbur

Poets are artists, writers, sometimes philosophers, and can be parents as well. Richard Wilbur in "The Writer" and Yvor Winters in "At the San Francisco Airport" are each writing poems to their respective daughters, and as they do so they offer advice on the one hand and indicate truths about themselves on the other. There are similarities and differences between the two stories, as a comparison will demonstrate.

The poems show parents who are watching their children grow and who are doing so at a key moment in each of the young lives in question. Both parents view their children from a vantage point of experience--they have been young once, and now they look back and know the pains and the problems and much of what their children will face in the future. Both express themselves in a way that the daughter would learn from if she were to read the poem, which may be intended, but neither speaks directly to their child. In a way, each is showing the understanding that their children must make their own mistakes and have their own triumphs.

Richard Wilbur's poem shows the father--a writer--watching the daughter begin to express herself as a writer. He thus has a dual experience--he is seeing her as a father, and he is seeing her as a writer. He knows the trials and tribulations of being a human being and of growing up, but he also knows the trials and tribulations of being a writer specifically. There is an old metaphor of life as a ship at sea, and the individual ma

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or Winters as well. The poem is written as the poet and his daughter are seated in the airport terminal in San Francisco in 1954. The daughter is going on a flight, and the real journey she is taking becomes a representation of the journey through life that the father also knows she is taking. There is a contrast in the poem between the physical reality of the actual journey the girl is about to take on a plane and the more amorphous but no less real journey she is about to take through life. In the opening stanza, the physicality of the terminal and of the hard steel technology used to carry people through the air is evoked: This is the terminal: the light Gives perfect vision, false and hard; The metal glitters, deep and bright (1-3). The light is false and hard, showing much more than we are likely to see in "normal" life. The vision is perfect in the terminal, and outside are the huge airplanes, waiting in the night for passengers. The planes are described as "already in the night" (5), indicating that the girl is about to embark into the night as well. The journey is always into the night, into the unknown, and there is thus some trepidation about the matter, whether the journey is in a plane or in the act of livin

Category: Literature - R