The Mind-Reader by Richard Wilbur

First published: 1972; collected in The Mind-Reader: New Poems, 1976

Type of poem: Dramatic monologue

The Poem

Richard Wilbur’s “The Mind-Reader,” a dramatic monologue of 151 lines, unveils the inner world of a fortune-teller. Although Wilbur leaves gender unspecified, out of convention the reader may regard the aged figure as a woman. The reader cannot rely on convention, however, when it comes to judging her psychic talents. While not able to see the future, she can see past appearances. She can read minds and has a special talent for finding lost items by probing people’s memories. Nothing put into a mind is ever truly lost: “What can be wiped from memory?” she asks, adding that “Nothing can be forgotten, as I am not/ Permitted to forget.”

Unnamed in the poem, the mind-reader begins her monologue by ruminating on loss. Things that no one sees disappear are “truly lost,” she says. She imagines a hat that slips over a cliff. “The sun-hat falls,/ With what free flirts and stoops you can imagine,/ Down through that reeling vista or another,/ Unseen by any, even by you or me.” She likewise imagines a “pipe-wrench, catapulted/ From the jounced back of a pick-up truck,” and a book sliding from beneath the chair of a reader on the deck of a ship, into the “printless sea.”

The mind-reader then tells of her childhood, when her talent was used for finding missing objects. She likens exploring a mind to exploring a landscape: “you would come/ At once upon dilapidated cairns,/ Abraded moss, and half-healed blazes leading/ To where, around the turning of a fear,/ The lost thing shone.” Her youthful experience led to her lowly profession: “It was not far/ From that to this—this corner café table” where she sits and drinks “at the receipt of custom.” She describes the people who come to her, ranging from those who put faith in her talent to those who outwardly scoff but seek her nonetheless. Skeptics arrive, too, “bent on proving me a fraud.”

She describes how she performs for customers. She hands them writing materials, turns away, and smokes. Then she touches their hands and engages in the “trumpery” that her audience expects. She recognizes her own showmanship and explains that she obtains the information she needs through her natural ability: It gives her the thoughts of her customers. Within herself, she sees those thoughts unfold “Like paper flowers in a water-glass.” She rues that when her talent fails her she is thought a “charlatan.” Of actual fortune-telling, she says, “I have no answers.” Yet her customers leave satisfied; “It makes no difference that my lies are bald/ And my evasions casual.”

The mind-reader concludes with a brief revery, wondering about the existence of a divine level of intelligence: “Is there some huge attention, do you think,/ Which suffers us and is inviolate…?” She then notes that she distracts herself from the burdens of her talent by fleshly concerns. Yet she still yearns for the place where “the wrench beds in mud, the sun-hat hangs/ In densest branches, and the book is drowned.” The one who can find lost things wishes, above all, to lose herself.

Forms and Devices

“The Mind-Reader” is in the form of a dramatic monologue, a poetic form in which the poet assumes and speaks through the identity of another. (Nineteenth century poet Robert Browning is known for refining the dramatic monologue into a unique way of examining character and human nature and of producing unexpected or ironic revelations.) Within this framework, Wilbur achieves many of his poetic effects through introducing richly imaginative details that dovetail unexpectedly with metaphor. The reader, by the end of the first stanza, for instance, has vividly seen a sun-hat “plunge down/ Through mica shimmer to a moss of pines/ Amidst which, here or there, a half-seen river/ Lobs up a blink of light,” as well as a catapulted pipe-wrench, and the book lost to sea. As concrete and factual as these objects and events seem, by poem’s end they have come to represent an unattainable and immaterial goal: oblivion.

Metaphors serve the mind-reader well in describing her own mind and the minds of others. Finding lost objects becomes a search through strange landscapes with their paths and “dried-up stream-beds.” She describes a lost thing as someone waiting at a railway platform, where long cars with fogged windows arrive. There is “a young woman standing amidst her luggage,/ Expecting to be met by you, a stranger.” Elsewhere she describes her own talent, her “sixth/ And never-resting sense,” as “a cheap room/ Black with the anger of insomnia,/ Whose wall-boards vibrate with the mutters, plaints/ And flushings of the race.”

Wilbur composed “The Mind-Reader” in blank verse. Although many of the lines fall within a strict pattern of iambic pentameter, Wilbur freely adds syllables, sometimes resulting in hexameter passages. In the lines set in regular pentameter, he frequently employs elision, as in the following example: “See how she turns her head, the eyes engaging.” The vowels in “the eyes” elide to make a single syllable, making this line a regular ten-syllable, or five-foot, line.

Bibliography

Bixler, Frances. Richard Wilbur: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Hougen, John B. Ecstasy Within Discipline: The Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994.

Michelson, Bruce. Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Reibetang, John. “What Love Sees: Poetry and Vision in Richard Wilbur.” Modern Poetry Studies 11 (1982): 60-85.

Salinger, Wendy, ed. Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

Stitt, Peter. The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.