Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 103

THE MEANING OF MEASURE

ers the biochemical pleasure of endorphins. And they can write
it well-as we see in the poetry of, say, a Philip Larkin or a James
Thomson. For such unbelievers, the pleasures incident to meter
ultimately carry no more meaning than that delivered by the
wine of Omar Khayyám, doing nothing for lovers of poetry but
deadening the pain of living and dying in a pointless universe.
But Wilson is a believer, one who (in the Verse Letter addressed
to his brother John) affirms that "the Incarnate Word redeems our
fears." And his faith allows him to see more in meter than merely a
temporary anesthetic against the pains of an absurd universe. In
the acknowledgements in The Violent and the Fallen, Wilson raises
his "voice in gratitude for the guidance of the Saints, Thomas
and Augustine in particular, whose geniuses have helped to give
these poems their form and measure." An appreciation for the
ultimate origins of meter thus helps make him cognizant that, as
he notes in his study of Steele, "the world is pregnant with divine
meanings, permanent truths."
Meter, in fact, enables Wilson to discern the world's pregnancy with divine meanings, permanent truths, even when he
seems far, far away from "the very grandest heights of poetry."
In, for instance, "Living Together," Wilson fashions three perfectly crafted quatrains-metrical, rhyming-out of what looks
like mere detritus. Beginning where "flecks of fabric tangle with
your hairs, / Trimmed nails, the dry husks of dead beetles, bottle
/ Caps flipped into a corner off our beers," he moves, with perfect cadence, to a conclusion in which he realizes "The skein
of dust before my level eye / Is your self with my own absently
blent / In life's terse record: its sloughed but faithful sty." Even
in describing a scene bearing the unmistakable marks of the
Fall, metrical patterns that Wilson acknowledges as gifts from
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