Welcome back to the Daily Column, a podcast from Goldenberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson and today is Friday, September 20th, 2024. Today's poem comes from Richard Wilber, and it's called, Advice to a Prophet. Wilber, who was born in 1921 and died only recently in 2017, lived through most of the 20th century and had, I think it's fair to say, decent grasp on how things are going.
So this poem is an apocalyptic poem offered into those circumstances, circumstances which are or are very like unto our own and the true meaning of the word apocalyptic is important here. Not only is it directing our attention to this idea of the end of the world or the end of A world, but the lexical meaning of the word, the oldest sense of the word apocalypse is an uncovering. Often it is at the ending of a world or a world order that things are revealed or uncovered, especially if there is, if we're dealing with a prophecy about the end of the world, an uncovering where I'm revealing about what is to come. This poem then is a kind of hypothetical apocalypse in offering advice to a prophet, the speaker of the poem, suggests to the prophet a rhetorical approach in which he helps his audience, he helps us imagine what could be our fate or how to imagine the worst possible fate and it's a surprising one.
He says, don't come trying to scare us with the talk of the death of the race. The vanishing, the end, the dying out of humanity isn't a very persuasive idea. He says because human imagination simply can't fathom it. How should we dream of this place without us?
He asks. But rather paint a picture of everything else, nature receding, so that man is left alone and this poem could be read, it has been read as a kind of environmental poem, warn us about greenhouse gases and deforestation and that sort of thing. I think that while that could be going on in Wilbur's mind, I think that misses the point of the poem, at least to a degree, because the warning isn't about the loss of these natural beauties that we love and that will go on with or without us. It's about the loss or a warning about the potential loss of what allows us to know ourselves and to speak about ourselves and, most importantly, to speak poetically about ourselves and about reality.
Here is advice to a prophet. When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, mad-eyed from stating the obvious, not proclaiming our fault at begging us in God's name to have self-pity, spare us all word of the weapons, their force, and range, the long numbers that rocket the mind, our slow, unreconing hearts will be left behind, unable to fear what is too strange, nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us? The sun, mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, a stone look on the stone's face.
Speak of the world's own change, though we cannot conceive of an undrent thing we know to our cost, how the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, how the view alters. We could believe, if you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, the lark avoid the reaches of our eye, the jack pine lose its knuckle grip, on the cold ledge, and every torrent burn as xanthus once, its gliding trout stand in a twinkling. What should we be without the dolphins' ark, the doves return, these things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, Prophet, how we shall call our natures forth, when that live tongue is all dispelled, that glass obscured or broken, in which we have said the rose of our love, and the clean horse of our courage, in which beheld the singing locust of the soul unshelmed, and all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose our hearts shall fail us. Come demanding whether there shall be lofty or long standing when the bronze annals of the oak tree, close. This has been the Daily Pullum. Thanks so much for listening.
We'll be back next week with more poetry for you. You can always find us at Daily PullumPod.substack.com, where you will find all of our past Daily Pullum episodes, as well as the means to subscribe to receive those episodes regularly to your inbox, or to support the show by sharing those episodes with your friends, family, neighbors, etc., or pledging a few of your hard-earns each month to make the continuing production of Daily Pullum possible. For all of us here at Goldberry Studios, including, and especially, our hard-working sound engineer, Logan Green, who makes this all sound better than it would, otherwise, it really makes it possible in a world where it wouldn't be otherwise. I'm Sean Johnson, wishing you happy reading.