SOURCE: "Wilbur's 'Ceremony'," in The Explicator, Vol. 55, No. 2, Winter 1997, pp. 98-99.

In the following essay, Wai provides a brief explication of Wilbur's poem "Ceremony."

In his poem "Ceremony," Richard Wilbur treats the paradox that man and nature may seem to be in combat with each other yet are in some respects basically akin. The poem demonstrates his respect for ritualistic forms in both nature and society. "I think that a lot of one's feeling of union with natural things is unilateral," says Wilbur, "and yet I persist in feeling that nothing, right down to the stone, is irrelevant to us, is not part of a family."

"Ceremony" begins with Wilbur's response to a painting by Bazille, a nineteenth-century French-Impressionist painter:

      A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille
      Is, you may say, patroness of boughs
      Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.

The reader immediately senses the...