Another poem from Wilbur's Italian journey, "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra," shows him again, as in "Altitudes," considering rival attitudes to life and weighing their merits. The poem consists of fifteen stanzas of the same construction as those in "Altitudes" (3a 5b 4b 5a); the long sentences run through the line-ends and stanza divisions in the same way; all but one of the sentence endings fall within the stanza. In his film interview Wilbur spoke of some of the special virtues of this form: "I think one reason why one finds in a lot of poetry nowadays very long sentences trickling down through the stanza is that in the long sentence you can have a more complex grammar and hence more freedom in placing the important words where you want them, at the beginnings and ends of lines. Of course, a lot of the length in this poem--a lot of the length of sentence--has to do with an effort to imitate the trickling down of the water."
The first six stanzas describe the Roman fountain referred to in the title. Nowhere else in his poems is Wilbur's descriptive talent more evident; the sounds of the language suggest at every point the flashing, splashing pattern of light, shade and sound that he wants to convey:
[. . . .]
Beginning with stanza seven Wilbur moves easily into the question at the heart of the poem: what human ideal this fountain expresses and now it compares with a different, more strenuous ideal implicit in another set of fountains described with equal brilliance in these lines:
[. . . .]
We see in the following stanzas what Wilbur has in mind: that the fountains of Maderna, unlike the wall fountain, express human aspiration upward, away from the actual toward the ideal, away from earth toward heaven: "If that is what men are/Or should be, if those water-saints display/The pattern of our areté [virtue] . . ." But he immediately supplies an apology for the fauns as an emblem of a different set of virtues equally Christian--not the yearning for what is not, but gratitude for what is:
[. . . .]
The Maderna fountain is shown "struggling aloft until it seems at rest/In the act of rising, until/The very wish of water is reversed . . . ," but the fauns "are at rest in fulness of desire/For what is given. . . ." The repeated phrase "at rest" serves to make the contrast sharper, and the ease with which this true and significant contrast is expressed is elegance.
Now, at the end of the poem, where another poet might say "As for me, I choose . . . ," Wilbur characteristically stays out of sight; but his voice continues, rapt, contemplative, and visionary as he refers us back to Saint Francis of Assisi for the tradition in which the wall fountain belongs:
[. . . .]
This final allegation is tentative ("Francis, perhaps, . . . might have seen in this"), but the vision of a blessed world in which we are perfectly assimilated and at home, "a shade of bliss" ("shade" meaning dream, ghost, shadow, copy, adumbration)--the vision inspired by the wall fountain is authentic and compelling. Despite the tentativeness, this is not a weak conclusion, but a strong one, in which the wall fountain in all its distracting glitter and homeliness is suddenly seen in perspective, its charm explained and justified. There are two opposite modes of sainthood--one lying in a perfect rejection of the world, the other in a perfect acceptance. The way of St. Francis may be no less difficult and blessed than the other. The last two stanzas show a heightened rhetoric, a subtle extravagance in the terms, that suggest both the dream and the consciousness that it is a dream, both its powerful charm and the ironic regret that it can never be realized; but the dream itself is real.
Do the descriptive passages in this poem show too much ingenuity? Do they distract us from the theme, which, as I have said, seems to me serious and important? I do not think so. I think the poem needs the fully detailed presentation of both fountains so that the contrast is well established. This is a highly elaborate poem; but if it were somehow cast in a more severe form, renouncing the pleasures of sound and sight, giving up rhyme perhaps, and refusing to play its high-spirited game with its formal hurdles, I cannot think it would be a better poem. The very central point of the poem is a rejection of a spare and severe ideal.