From abstraction to concretization; from fuzzy blur to an increasing clarity; from a sense of solitary dread to a peaceful awareness achieved through contemplation—above anything else, it is the process of formation that we track in Richard Wilbur's "Mayflies". The poem moves from an observation of the natural world as represented by the ephemeral mayflies to an introspection of the self and one's purpose of existence; in doing so, it demonstrates the concept of an established, innate order and fairness that exists in all.
This sense of unfolding, whose significance we shall glimpse in time, is manifested in the entrance of the mayflies that appear "in their quadrillions", indicating the enormity of the sight in uncertain numerical estimation — much in line with the sense of vagueness evoked by the befogging "mist of flies" and sweeping phrase of "ragged patch". The delicate and wispy sibilance in "I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies" suggests just how barely discernible the mayflies are; together with the "sudden glittering", the diction cumulatively conjures a sensory blur. The shrouded opening is mystified further in the seeming illogic of "I saw from unseen pools", which instinctively raises the issue of "how does one see fromwithout?" Yet in one magical stride—"Through a brief gap"—the mayflies appear; it is a transitory moment of their coming into being in the eyes of the speaker.
However, the poem gravitates away from obscurity as it moves from the cumbersomely uncountable "quadrillions" to a specificity of information in "two steep yards in air". If we could read this gain in clear-sightedness as an attempt at clarifying the visual flux which foregrounds the mayflies, then on some level, it is the poet celebrating and perhaps giving definition to their otherwise ephemeral lives.
This tribute to the mayflies assumes several levels of elevation. The italicized "entrechats" immediately distinguishes itself from all the other words on the page. The fact that it is an esoteric word referring to a feat in dancing which is considerably hard to master makes the act the mayflies are performing thrice removed from the ordinary.
Mayflies are tiny creatures, whose flying is made possible mostly by their wings, but also, I think, partly by their light-weightedness—this attribution, however, is reversed in the poem. Their flying ("flies"/ "rise"/ "rose") is not borne out of lightness. Rather, it is endowed with a sense of weight created by the long vowels and the stress inherent in these monosyllables; the "great round-dance" then, by the same logic, is no trivial matter—it is a pivotal moment where the curtains are drawn; a flight pregnant with gravitas.
This increasing clarity is in pace with the increasing complexity in the second stanza, with the "manifold [ness]"demonstrated in the very construction of a single sentence from "Them [to] machine" spread over five lines, knitted by the conjunctions "Then/so/And/And/Or", layer after layer, each offering a varied nuance of the scene. That the speaker then faces difficulty deciding the appropriateness relativizing the mayflies to either "weavers of…cloth" or "pistons of…machine"—opposing images of softness against hardness—is a sign that perhaps it is really both soft and hard. Instead of emasculating the image, it is precisely the ambiguity that affords its mutability to achieve an unstable but dynamic fold. The need to metaphorize this visual experience and couch it further with the tentative "seemed" then becomes a double displacement for the reader; this may be arguably read as an obscurity as in the first stanza or, as I contend, a necessary consequence that stems from an ineffable experience which itself resists reification.
If that is true, then while "low/glow" and "manifold/gold" are perfect pairs of rhymes by themselves, the aural likeness in their rhymes resonates with one another such that we are drawn to consider them in relation and be reminded that what is "manifold" and "gold", and hence complex and precious, in fact began as "low" and could only summon up a mere "glow". To position the elevated relative to its humble and ordinary beginning then accentuates the sense of the extraordinary.
The first sign of debilitation, however, appears in the disyllabic discrepancy in "floated (down)", [1] which could be rationalized since it is used to mean descent. Yet the buoyancy implied in "floated" enacts a resistance against the gravitational "down" in the same way that the trochaic "floa-ted" stresses and then un-stresses—it is levity following gravity—and the sense that the mayflies will not accept a resigned, capitulating descent. And so the mayflies fight on in order to "climb once more"— it is sheer effortfulness opposed to the earlier "floated"; we use up our breath in the plosive "climb" such that we become increasingly breathless at "once more", imitating an out-of-breath exhaustion; one which the mayflies have little regard for.
A downward trajectory is in fact plotted in the verbs of the conspicuously short third and sixth lines of the first two stanzas which forces us to scrutinize them in relation to one another: the energy drops from an active "rise" to the relatively passive "appear" which then abates further into "rose", as if "ris[ing]" has become a thing of the past. "And figured scene" does not even contain a verb, hinting at how the mayflies gradually settle into inertia. This weakening is mirrored structurally in the way that the already short lines of the third further shortens in the sixth, as if some mayflies have died along the way. But the fact that the poem picks up again in the third line of the next stanza such that it reveals itself to be a solid 6-4-6- 4 syllabic configuration suggests an act of resistance towards life being snatched from them; it is a kind of agon and the mayflies are not giving in without a fight. As we see how the "ragged patch of glow"—the light weak and unpolished—break into "a sudden glittering" and eventually strengthen into a "cloth of gold", we also begin to understand that the intensification from four to six syllables represents the remaining mayflies shining all the more brightly for the sake of those which has passed on, in order to reinstate and maintain, however tenuously, a luminance previously achieved. So, to only comment that the transient lives of the mayflies are coming to an end is to miss the point; it is in their reluctance to settle for anything ordinary and a willingness to take up the challenge to define and make worth their fleeting lives, even if it means going head-on against the force of Nature, that the mayflies earn our respect.
But the poem is not just a tribute to the mayflies; rather, it is part of a motivating impulse that deflects the speaker into a depressed gush of self-awareness: The collectiveness of the mayflies militates against his solitariness in the same way that his feeling "mortal", which I take to refer to an acute sense of commonness, is sharpened by the deep contrast against the extraordinariness of the mayflies. The rift is deepened in the third line of the final stanza "In a life too much my own", which manifestly effects a similar shortening of the line; though with seven syllables, it actually departs from the 6-syllable pattern thus established. This flagrant addition could be read as a conscious attempt by the speaker to delineate himself from the mayflies, perhaps in a moment of indulgence; to fill his vacuity and make himself appear less "mortal".
Yet the poem positions us to read this act as excessive by suggesting that there is an innate order and reasoning in all things. There is "no muddled swarm" in the natural world; the oxymoronic expression of an organized mess hints at some kind of order even within the disorder. This is also seen in the stanzaic structure that at first glance seems to be a clutter of randomly long and short lines. It then reveals itself as conforming to a strict 6-4-6-4 syllabic pattern in the third and sixth lines; this alternation is the very thing that fashions a flowing and ebbing effect, which aptly bears visual resonance to the rising and floating down of the swarm. The rhyme scheme too asserts a similar sense of order in its patterning ABBA CDCD that is firmly maintained throughout.
The poem extends its dialectical discourse by suggesting that in a seemingly unfair world, an innate fairness actually exists. "fair" is then interesting because it has a couple of inflections. It could point to the aesthetic, in which case the speaker's task is to appreciate the beauty of God's creation. But it is also "fair" in the sense of justice: the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long and so the mayflies that gleam majestically also go off in a burst of light. By enacting a sense of fairness, the poem positions the readers to see the needlessness of the speaker's despair over his commonness.
In fact, it is anything but mediocrity that the poem is suggesting of Man. If we were to trace the verbs employed by the speaker: "I saw/I witnessed/watching/I… see", it is the act of "seeing" that predominates. While we may have been caught up earlier with the physical presentation of the mayflies, I am suggesting that there is also something worth musing over the mayflies' appearance which the speaker then "saw/witnessed/watch[es]/see" because appearing is as much an act of coming into being as it is a coming into sight; a moment with the mayflies picked up by the senses as opposed to a prior moment where they are not.
Seeing is hence poised as an action imbued with significance. If the sight that the mayflies conjures is magnificent, then it is Man's act of seeing that concretizes this magnificence and is thereafter registered as so; without Man bearing testimony, the magnificence does not actually exist and God's "fair" creation would not be appreciated. So if the mayflies' extraordinariness is based on Man's seeing it, then Man becomes a vital figure in the wider scheme of things. Instead of being apart from such brilliance, as the speaker envisions himself earlier in the self/mayflies dichotomy, he is in fact very much a crucial part of the phenomenon.
The speaker's increasing comprehension eases him; no longer does he stretch the syllables— "Not fly or star"returns to four syllables—and order is once again reinstated. At the same time, however, we observe how the three-word pattern in the sixth lines of the preceding stanzas, as some innate fairness would have it, quietly expand into four in the last stanza; it is as much an affirmation that the speaker is indeed "Not fly or star" as it is a subdued recognition of Man's worth and his greatness.
The unfolding of the mayflies, then, does not simply lead to the unfolding of the speaker's mind; this process of formation takes place as well at the intellectual level of the reader. For all the times that I read aloud "I saw"/ "I…see", in fact, I do not. Just as the speaker thinks back to the "fly" and the "star" to achieve an illumination of his position in life, the reader only achieves clarity on hindsight. This need for retrospection suggests that many things, such as an innate order, are not always made immediately apparent to us, but it does not follow that they are therefore untrue or do not exist.
And so, while the poem seems to invite us to reconsider whether the longer lives that we have are truly lived with the drive and attitude comparable to that of the mayflies, its persistent emphasis on how an innate fairness exists dismisses such comparisons as unnecessary. Be that as it may, the admirable spirit of the mayflies still lies at the heart of the poem, gently prodding us to "joyfully" lead our lives in spiritual contentment; this time truly "seeing" for ourselves and having faith in a divine order that governs our world.
Zhan Yi has just completed his first year as an English Literature major in NUS. Besides reading and watching films, he likes to solve for words that are substituted by letters, play cross-word puzzles and anagrams, and construct acrostics as birthday gifts for his friends. More than literature, it is the encoding, decoding, locating and rationalizing of patterns of all kind—visual, aural and textual—of which he regards as his most valuable asset, that tease his brain and make him feel suitably alive.
[1] This is in reference to an earlier discussion of monosyllabic verbs in this poem that denote flight(flies/rise/rose)
Works Cited
Wilbur, Richard. "Mayflies". Mayflies: new poems and translations. Ed. Andre Bernard. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. 17. Print.