Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Richard Wilbur's "Juggler" presents an intriguing metaphor for the precarious balance between gravity and levity, the mundane and the extraordinary. The poem is steeped in kinetic energy and imagery, capturing the fleeting sensation of transcending the world's weight even if only for a moment. Its structure is marked by rhyme and meter, with a carefully controlled form that emulates the juggler's own balance and precision.

The poem opens with a meditation on the nature of a bouncing ball, personifying it as a thing that "resents its own resilience." Falling and settling is what it loves, Wilbur says, much like how human brilliance eventually fades into oblivion. The ball's natural inclination to fall and settle becomes a reflection of the human condition, an evocation of how easily we can become confined by life's realities. Then, enter the juggler, "a sky-blue juggler with five red balls," who upends our understanding of gravity and seriousness. He manipulates the balls with finesse, making them "learn the ways of lightness," and for a moment, they form "a small heaven" around him, breaking free from the pull of the Earth.

The middle part of the poem contrasts the creation of "heaven" with that of "earth." Wilbur argues that it's easier to create an illusion of paradise ("a heaven") from nothing at all than it is to reclaim the ordinariness of life ("the earth regained"). The juggler accomplishes both. With "a gesture sure and noble," he gracefully ends his performance, trading in his heavenly spheres for mundane objects-a broom, a plate, a table.

These objects, now part of his act, transform into celestial bodies in their own right. He balances the table on his toe and the plate on the broom's tip, mesmerizing the audience into a state of awe. When the performance is over, everything returns to its original state: "the broom stands / In the dust again," and "the table starts to drop." Yet, the ordinary is no longer just that. It has been imbued with a touch of the extraordinary, if only momentarily.

The poem culminates in a thunderous applause, signifying the temporary triumph over "the world's weight." Wilbur isn't just presenting a vivid tableau of a juggling act; he's diving deep into the psychology of performance and audience, of miracle and mundanity. The juggler becomes an artist of sorts, a master of perception who shows us how to find the extraordinary in the everyday.

The applause at the end, then, serves as a communal recognition not just of the juggler's skill but also of his ability to temporarily free us from our own limitations and gravities. It's an affirmation that moments of brilliance are to be celebrated, even if they are fleeting. In this way, Wilbur's "Juggler" acts as a beautiful allegory, reminding us to find moments of escape from life's heaviness, to appreciate the fleeting instances of grace that interrupt the monotonous pull of the everyday.

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