What Is It Like To Be a Bat? ("Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" by Richard Wilbur)
(originally on TinyLetter)
This June I woke up on my last night as part of a family vacation in the Berkshires to see -- blurrily, shakily -- something winging itself around under the skylight in my room. I wasn’t wearing my glasses, but could see that something strangely pale was circling in and out of the moonlight. Then I realized I was terrified.
To sleep, I often recite to myself the poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World” by Richard Wilbur. It begins:
Part of what is so good about this poem is that this first stanza, so full of the spirit, immerses us in “awe” sounds: the soul “bodiless,” the "dawn" "false" and “all awash with angels." The invisible yawn of awakening stretches through the lines. When I say it to myself, the waking tricks me into slumber: the world the poem rises to is the world I need to think exists so -- and as -- I dream.
The second stanza billows from this openness:
The syntax lends some rhythm to the potential energy, here, flowing to a measured beat. The soft anaphora of "some" and the slant rhyme of “feeling" and “breathing” lends the stanza a sonic swirl as it circles itself, like water down a drain. Or like a bat in moonlight. It happened once more, that summer: in August, on my first night in my new apartment in Ithaca, I woke up to see once again something whizzing around the room. This time, I knew what it was.
That night, I tried reciting the poem again to fall asleep, but the third stanza suddenly terrified me:
I used to love the quiet that came after “quiet;” I felt myself there in the end-stopped fifth line where “nobody” is. Like that soul, the poem in my brain -- at first so motile and alight, winging from gerund to gerund -- turned in on itself to rest. But with the bat in my mind’s eye, these lines woke me back up again petrified, sure I had conjured a bat with my recitation. I realized what could be so "terrible" about "omnipresence." I experienced again the first stanza’s “awe,” remembering it as a word that originally meant terror, dread.
Thus, as Wilbur tells us, "the soul shrinks:"
I, like you probably just did, always snag on the “rape” in this stanza, which is rape as metaphor, which I don't excuse, mostly because I suspect it is there to echo the “rapt” quiet of the previous stanza. I don’t think that poetics is its own argument, here. But I find there is enough room in this poem for me and my moment of repulsion. It doesn't justify itself and I don’t either. I just move on, into the laundry, more aware of the price of that cleanliness, wondering what powers the poet calls on when he points me back to heaven and light, and how I look from that angle as the poem ends:
What anyone who knows anything about bats tells me when I talk about these visitations is that bats are forces for good. They eat mosquitoes, they keep ecosystems thriving. Like nuns in their dark habits, they maintain a difficult balance, if you allow me the cuteness of the parallel. I don't know if you should. Reading a poem right means seeing how the first stanza's awe becomes the last stanza's awe, but I'm not sure what happens when you read your own life that way. The part of my brain that symbolizes, that figures and represents, wants badly to connect bat to bat and fear to fear because it is superstitious and it is narcissistic. It is fixated on the fact that scientists first identified the coronavirus as similar to one that appears in bats, and that bats appeared twice to me. It wants to make this mean something the way I can make a poem mean something.
I am grasping at significance because I feel small against the size of the pandemic. But also because I am unused to confrontations with the animal. I am unfamiliar with the way nature can transgress -- that is, profane -- the lines we use to draw our lives. I feel like even if I survive and everyone I love survives we’re all already the unspoken dead in the sentence that one day will read “In early 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic erupted worldwide” like all the other unspoken dead in all the other sentences that make up all the told and untold histories. Never in my life had I encountered a bat as anything more than a presence looping far over my head outdoors on a summer night; never has the curve of illness drawn such an ominous line between the world as it was and as it is. I have never felt more that we are here to fill out patterns already made, and that all we can do is call to each other, likeness to likeness, vowel to vowel, through the stanzas.
source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43048/love-calls-us-to-the-things-of-this-world
(Thus ends the first installment of whatever this is or will become! I have no plans yet for the next one. Maybe it'll be in a week or a month. Feel free to write me back, forward to a friend, print out and frame, commit to memory, whatever. Thanks for reading this far.)