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.
Themes
Multigenerational Relationships
“The Writer,” at its heart, is about a father and a daughter. The speaker uses the space of the poem to explore two shared experiences between the two characters: the memory of watching a trapped starling in the child’s bedroom, and the frustrations of trying to get a piece of writing just right—an experience the daughter will take with her into her adult life. It is this thread between the two people, more than its beauty of language or setting or overarching metaphor, that makes the poem resonate with readers.
Early in the poem, the speaker listens to his daughter work with an air of indulgent irony. While he recognizes the intensity of youth, his response is only to wish the child luck on her storytelling journey. However, the daughter “pauses, / As if to reject my thought and its easy figure” (Lines 10-11)—a moment that makes the speaker recalibrate his perception of the situation and what it means.
Although the daughter is taking her own journey through a creative landscape of the mind, the narrative arc of the poem is of the father reaching a new understanding about the period of growth his daughter is entering, and where it will lead. Hearing the moments of silence that convey her careful consideration makes him realize that she is growing up, and he can only take her by the hand so far.
As the poem moves back in time, the speaker sees in his daughter a bird struggling against its imposed limitations. Eventually, the bird finds its way free—not abandoning the home, but coming into its own power and restoring natural order. In this moment, the father understands that his daughter will eventually find her own way free into a world where he can no longer protect her.
Another aspect of the relationship between these two characters is the continuation of the writing craft, handed from one generation to the next. While the mediums differ, both in the text and in real life—one works with poetry, while the other writes a story—the appreciation and immersion in literature has been extended from the father to the daughter. This thread will continue to connect them even after the daughter has moved on to the next stage of her life.
Life as Art
The speaker sees art as a metaphor for life, and vice versa. In the third stanza, the speaker reflects on his daughter’s life as she struggles to compose an early artistic work: “Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo” (Lines 7-8). Here, the word “cargo” is used to mean two things: the girl’s memories and life experiences, and the potential to turn those experiences into stories. In this moment, the act of living and the act of creation are one and the same.
As the poem moves into the speaker’s memory, he recounts his shared adventure watching a bird free itself from the girl’s bedroom. This is another moment in the poem that straddles two metaphors. In relation to the daughter, the starling represents the limitations of her young life and, finally, overcoming those limitations to live in a fuller and more fulfilled way. This scene also symbolizes the more internal battle for freedom as ideas fly around the writer’s mind—“Batter against the brilliance […] And wait then, humped and bloody, / For the wits to try it again” (Lines 23, 25-26)—as they circle through possibilities to find their way free. Once again, the need to create art is superimposed over the need to embrace life.
As an autobiographical poem, “The Writer” offers the reader a glimpse into a literary household where art and inspiration were not a rage against society but a way of life. In this poem, the young writer grows up from a young age understanding that life and art are not two separate goals that are ever in conflict but intrinsically bound as two sides of one complete existence.
Freedom and Restraint
The poem takes several opportunities to juxtapose freedom and restriction. The story begins with the young daughter being held in her room by the need to explore and express her ideas. While this ability to express is a form of freedom, it also becomes something that she is forced to acknowledge and do justice to. This duality is a natural part of the life of all artists. As a young person, she is also at the edge of these two chapters of life. Through the events of the poem, her father comes to recognize that he will soon need to give her freedom so that she can live a fulfilling life.
Both of these contrasts are echoed in the scene with the trapped starling, a device used to clearly illustrate the dichotomy between these two states of being. The starling is trapped inside the human residence and cut off from its natural world. During its struggle, the father and daughter open a window and retreat. This highlights the complexity of an individual’s search for freedom; while the starling had a clear avenue out of the room, it takes the bird some time to locate it and understand how to use it.
Additionally, the humans in the house never tried to trap the starling and force freedom upon it—they understood that while freedom can be extended, it is the responsibility of the trapped entity to take it for themselves. The poem implies that the father will soon be facing this same experience as the daughter comes into her own sense of being.
