17 pages • 34 minutes read
Richard WilburThe Writer
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Starling
The introduction of the starling marks the poem’s major hinge or turning point. The speaker revisits this memory of the starling caught inside the room because his daughter’s struggles remind him of this seemingly unrelated, inconsequential moment. The starling here becomes a metaphor for the speaker’s daughter, as well as for the struggles each character is facing: the highs and lows of creative inspiration, and the constraints of parenthood.
When the speaker first reflects on his memory of the starling, the moment in time is bound to a particular place: “Which was trapped in that very room” (Line 17). The word “trapped” here is full of meaning; it refers to the way the daughter’s ideas are trapped inside her head, and the way she in turn is trapped by them until she finds a way to do them justice on the page. What’s notable about this scene is that the father and daughter never try to trap the bird in order to free it; they simply offer it a way out and then “[retreat], not to affright it” (Line 19). This suggests that creativity can’t be forced, and neither can freedom. The bird spends the next hour beating itself “humped and bloody” (Line 25), mirroring the frustrations of creative stagnation. The speaker and his daughter can only watch and wait for the starling to find its own way forward.
The starling and its confinement also parallel the father’s feelings of helplessness as he watches his daughter grow up. In seeing the two memories superimposed against one another, he understands that he can only watch and wait for his daughter to find her own way through life. The starling speaks to multiple levels of the poem and allows the speaker to transcend a new level of understanding.
The Typewriter
The typewriter is never seen within the poem, even in the speaker’s memories; it is only heard. However, its presence is felt distinctly, as the speaker uses it as a series of auditory cues to understand what his daughter is going through. He compares it to “a chain hauled over a gunwale” (Line 6), extending the overarching metaphor of the house as a ship, as well as establishing the typewriter as the link between the banal and the extraordinary. In this moment, the auditory cue tells the speaker that his daughter’s journey is beginning. After a moment, the typewriter is silent, “[a]s if to reject my thought and its easy figure” (Line 11). The pattern continues, a series of key clatters followed by a period of stillness in which the girl’s creative energy gathers itself to leap forward again.
In the larger metaphor of the house as a ship, the typewriter serves very specifically as the anchor. It not only offers the potential to loosen from its restraints, but it gives the sense of being rooted in a time and place. If one extrapolates that the father in the poem is also a writer, then the typewriter serves as an “anchor” between the daughter and her home, between one generation and the next. Here it becomes a symbol of heritage and the creative journey that has been passed from one hand to another.
In the poet’s time, there were no computers or word processing programs. It is easy to forget that when this poem was written, the use of typewriters as a compositional device was much more widespread than it is today. This roots the poem in a particular era; however, it also contributes to the idea of heritage and the same creative struggles and triumphs echoing through generations. By using the typewriter and engaging with it in an act of creation, the daughter is stepping into a place among a legacy of writers—an act that both brings her closer to the speaker and at the same time pushes her farther away.
The Writing Room
The writer’s room is established right from the opening of the poem, highlighting its importance as the base of the parallel internal journeys taking place. It’s described as being “at the prow of the house” (Line 1), which sets it up as a point of prominence. The prow is the forwardmost point of the ship, and the piece that points out above the water. It’s also where ships would often have elaborately carved figureheads, such as mermaids, for luck or to guide their way. This establishes the daughter as the focal point of the house, even though the father is ruler or “captain” of it.
The entire poem takes place in and around this room, even though there are two separate stories being presented. In the first instance, the speaker is listening to his daughter begin a composition in this safe place of her own; in the second, the daughter and the speaker watch a trapped bird try to make its way out. The room itself becomes a metaphor for the mind; like the starling, the daughter is trapped within it trying to find that elusive moment of inspiration.
Within the first storyline, the speaker never enters the room; he acknowledges it as a private, sacred space in which the daughter is facing and defeating an obstacle of her very own. Although the speaker is not physically barred from entering this space, it stands as a symbol of a figurative place he cannot enter—both internally and externally. It represents the daughter’s mind, a place in which new stories and ideas are being born; it also serves as a microcosm for the wider world and the life the girl has ahead of her, which the speaker will have to step back and let her navigate alone. It is a small, contained part of a much larger journey.
