SOURCE: "Wilbur's Beasts," in The Explicator, Vol. 49, No. 4, Summer 1991, pp. 247-49.

In the following essay, Green analyzes and discusses the images and metaphors in Wilbur's poem "Beasts."

Richard Wilbur's "Beasts" depicts in striking imagery the anomalous place of man in Nature. This brilliant six-stanza lyric can be divided into three scenes: the harmonious world of Nature; the painful world of degenerating human nature; and the world of "superior" men who betray their calling and bring destruction on all the worlds. Man seems to be the only creature whose nature, form, and function are not fixed. Paradoxically, this freedom from definition leads him into obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior. The vision of the poem is Calvinist.

In the first two stanzas, we are in a peaceful world, whose condition is reinforced by a motif of musical harmony. The elements of this motif are major (the major keys are happy...