This poem by Richard Wilbur is an old favorite of mine. It startles me to realize how much this cherished simile: “the commotion of typewriter-keys/like a chain hauled over a gunwale”  dates me. Whoa. Ancient history. I think of Jean McCrosky, who told me when I was 13, “You girls, you young girls, there are so many things you’ll never experience…the world is changing so much — you’ll never know what it’s like to try to put on a girdle in the upper berth of a train.”

The urgent sound of a big ol’ manual typewriter operated at top speed is something that today’s teens will probably never experience, either, except maybe a short burst in an old movie. But Wilbur’s poem is for the ages, speaking eloquently of the elation of the launch, when a girl’s life somehow takes flight. And poignantly, he addresses the helplessness parents and teachers feel when she suffers the ineluctable pains of growing and learning.

THE WRITER

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

—Richard Wilbur