Ceremony (1950). Content and Description

This poem opens by mentioning a painting by the French artist Jean-Frederic Bazille (perhaps his View of the Village of Castelnau-le-Lez) in which a woman wearing a “striped blouse” sits in a pastoral landscape; the speaker of the poem responds to the potential charge that the woman seems too superior to the landscape to be really connected to it.

The speaker says that he prefers the wit of Bazille’s painting to a possible alternative painting featuring a fictional nymph whose relation to the landscape may seem closer but who is also entirely artificial. It is (the poem suggests) when civilized people and things are juxtaposed with natural surroundings that we become most aware of our own relationship with our natural environment and of the wildness inherent in nature.

The opening line of this poem encapsulates the work’s central subject: the human (symbolized by the geometrically precise “striped blouse”) and nature (symbolized by the open “clearing”) united by art (symbolized by the reference to Bazille). Appropriately enough (given its argument and subject) this poem is itself more highly structured than some others by Wilbur: There is no variation in the line lengths (each line, like the stripes of the blouse, is regular, consisting of exactly 10 syllables), the rhyme scheme is plainly apparent and also highly regular (abcabc), and punctuation at the end of many lines is more prominently emphasized than in other works by Wilbur.

The poem thus has a more predictable, controlled, and stately movement than is found (for instance) in “The Beautiful Changes,” another text that also emphasizes relations between humans and nature. In addition, “Ceremony”—in its diction, its imagery, and its allusions—seems a more mannered, more obviously “literary” poem than that earlier poem; the speaker is obviously a cultured person, familiar with French impressionist art, with the conventions of classical literature (such as nymphs), and with the figures of British mythology (such as Sabrina).

Through a variety of devices (such as the direct address of line 2, the reference to “we” in line 6, and the personal pronoun in line 13), the speaker invites us to share his own responses, but many readers are perhaps likely to find the whole performance a bit too precious and mannered, a little too artificial and contrived, however artful the work’s design. It is surely poems like “Ceremony” (skillful though it undeniably is) that have contributed to Wilbur’s reputation in some quarters as a poet who is sometimes too artificial—in every sense of that word—for his own good.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare and contrast this work with William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Dance,” which concerns a painting by Brueghel. How do the poems partly imitate (in structure and phrasing) the paintings they describe? What do the poems imply about the relations between art and life and between painting and poetry? Do you think Wilbur would admire the painting Williams describes? Justify your answer.

2. Compare and contrast this work with Allen Ginsberg’s poem “On Burroughs’ Work.” What do both poems imply about the relationship of art to reality? How are the diction and tone of each work appropriate to the subject and argument of each poem?

3. Ezra Pound’s poem “To Whistler, American” is also a work in which a specific painter and particular paintings are important, but how do the purpose, style, tone, and diction of that poem differ from those of Wilbur?