The Juggler Poem

Richard Wilbur, a legendary figure and the poet of "The Juggler", withholds great historical background unknown to many individuals. Despite of young age, Wilbur composed numerous short-stories, poems and editorials for college newspaper. In consideration with a majority of the masterpieces, a prominent theme exhibited throughout each is based upon the observations of surroundings and the natural world. Historically, Wilbur's involvement within World War II contributed significant influence in various poems. Similarly, "The Juggler" primarily emphasizes the notion of fluctuations involved within juggling, comparing such to harsh realities of daily routines.

Wilbur describes the juggler as happy in the moment through imagery revealing that the speaker may be going through a rough patch in his life. When the juggler is performing it is described as “Landing it ball by ball… Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom’s balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls on the tip of the broom!” as the children applaud and cheer the juggler on until “he bows and says good-bye.”. When the juggler is done putting on such a fantastic show he “is tired now… and though the plate lies flat on the table top, for him we batter our hands who has won for once over the world’s weight.”. The use of imagery about the plate lying flat on the table instead of the plate whirling shows us the juggler is tired but we still clap for him because in that moment of him putting on a show he made people happy and made no mistakes. The juggler “swinging a small heaven above his ears” is happy in the moment. The use of imagery

In the poem, the speaker uses figurative language to reveal and portray that the objects that the juggler juggles have a sense or life of their own and how their actions make the show even more impressive on the juggler’s end. Whether it’s the ball's’ “own resilience” as it bounces less and less or “wheel on his wheeling hands”, the figurative language describes an inanimate object that is subject to the laws of nature and forces such as gravity which is shown by the line “falling is what it loves.” However, under the hands of the juggler, it’s as if the juggler has changed the ball’s natural tendencies to his own, becoming the ball’s own force that it has to follow. The juggler appears to be as an omnipotent

In the first stanza Wilbur uses personification, diction and tone to portray the juggler as someone who gives the ball a meaning. In addition, the speaker’s interest in the juggler is revealed. For example, in the passage, it states, “A ball will bounce, but less and less. It’s not / A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.” (Lines 1-2) In this quote the speaker uses personification to reveal that the ball is not bouncing in a cheerful and joyous way. Instead the ball “resents its own resilience”. The speaker emphasizes the word “resents”, evoking in the readers a sense of solemnity and seriousness. Furthermore, by describing that the ball bounces, but eventually comes back down the speaker makes a comparison to life and how there will always be highs and lows.

In the third stanza, the diction of “heaven” and “noble” allows the speaker to craft an image of an almost godlike juggler. This view of the juggler creates the tone of amazement and ardent which breaks through the previous gloomy description of the earth in the first stanza which “falls/ So in our hearts from brilliance” (lines 3-4). This reveals that the world the juggler has made, unlike the earth which the speaker doesn’t appear to have fond feelings of, is a joyful and light-hearted place that the speaker is easily captivated by. As the juggler “reels that heaven in” (line 16), creates an atmosphere of an almost unearthly experience. This description of the juggler as a master of spiritual elements allows readers to view how the speaker's attitude is uplifted and enlightened.

The poem maintains a specific structure that organizes six lines into each stanza and places major verbs in the beginning of each line, which allows the speaker to describe a different part of the juggler’s performance for each stanza and place emphasis on the actions of the juggler to underscore the amazement the speaker feels. The first stanza describes how gravity usually works, but introduces the juggler’s power to defy this gravity, while the second stanza describes how the juggler moves the balls around in order to show this superhuman power. The poem reaches its climax in the fourth stanza, ending the performance of the juggler, and the last stanza describes how even though the act is over, the juggler has left a sense of awe and inspiration into the speaker. This specific organization helps the speaker transition his feeling of the performance from the beginning to the end, successfully showing the juggler has left him in wonder. Furthermore, in the second stanza, Richard Wilbur places the verbs, “Learning,” “Grazing,” “Cling,” and “Swinging” in the beginning of each line, putting the emphasis on those words and pausing for a moment before going into the important verbs (9,10,11,12). This syntax helps the poet describe what makes the speaker so amazed by the juggler, the specific and graceful movement of the juggler as he throws the balls up and down the air.

As the poem progresses, we can see how the juggler manipulates the five red balls he is using to move around his body. Richard Wilbur uses figurative language like personification to show how the balls move by the tricks the juggler does. Wilbur says, “ The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hand, learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres, grazing his finger ends, cling to their course there.” ( lines 8-11). The author explains how the

Take a minute to imagine “Men looking like they had been/attacked repeatedly by a succession /of wild animals,” “never/ ending blasted field of corpses,” and “throats half gone, /eyes bleeding, raw meat heaped/ in piles.” These are the vividly, grotesque images Edward Mayes describes to readers in his poem, “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976.” Before even reading the poem, the title gave me a preconceived idea of what the poem might be about. “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976” describes what an extreme version of what I expected the poem to be about. The images I

|Spend about 1 hour on this section. Think carefully about the poems before you write your answer. |

Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than

The first stanza enables readers at first to think about a simple interaction between Tommy and his mother. The writer uses gentle words like “dances” (2) at first may bring bright smiles and happiness following the relationship between the mother and her son to the reader. These words cast a sense of happiness and the playing time. However, the very next line “throws him across the room” (5) depicts the horror story that the child must bear from his mother. Sexton has used the connotations such as “Red Roses” (4) to mean bruises and cuts that Tommy must have to while her mother abuses him by throwing him across the wall and shout at him. Here dancing means punishment Tommy must face for being a bad boy. All the music and sound his mother is playing inside the room reduce the noise produced when throwing Tommy on the wall.

I started the circle poem with the word memories because the entire chapter is about memories of Jenny’s grandma’s past life. Next, I put lane because of the saying, “a stroll down the memory lane.” Which leads to the word after, drive. I put drive instead of stroll even though that isn’t how the saying goes, since Jenny drove her grandma around San Diego. The next words, bus, Greyhound, redemption, and whirligig correspond with each other because Brent took the Greyhound bus around to get to the destinations where he would build the whirligigs for redemption on killing Lea. Whirligig connects to whale because one of the whirligigs that Brent built was a whale, and that whale happened to be built in San Diego, where Jenny lives. A couple of

Mona Van Duyn once said “The world’s perverse, but it could be worse”. This quote relates to the dramatic monologue by Mona Van Duyn “The Miser” because the writer reveals the obsessive theme of a person who lives in wretched circumstances even though they can afford a good life only to hoard money. Why do people choose to live in such harsh, low life when they can afford comfortable life? In the poem, the speaker, the miser, reveals many of the everyday things he does just to be able to save money. Van Duyn’s poems usually remain essentially optimistic, focusing on the perpetuation rather than the loss

“Dothead”. This word is a racial slur that mocks the entire Indian culture. It is very clever of the author Amit Majmudar to title this poem of his “Dothead”. Throughout the poem the speaker’s classmates are mocking his culture, specifically the red dot that his mother and all of the other women in his culture wear on their foreheads, this is where the title “Dothead” comes from. This red dot the speaker is referring to is called a “bindi” usually in the Indian culture a bindi is used to signify that a woman is married and it also is referred to in a more religious meaning as a “third eye” to ward off bad luck. Overall, the title of this poem creates the idea that the author also at some point has experienced mocking based on his cultures stereotypes.

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”