Trolling for Blues by Richard Wilbur
"Trolling for Blues" by Richard Wilbur is a multifaceted poem that explores the relationship between humanity and the natural world through metaphorical language. The poem is structured in five-line stanzas written in loose pentameter, devoid of rhyme. It begins with the poet reflecting on the act of creating metaphors, particularly how human traits are attributed to elements of nature, such as "dapper terns" and a "cloud that moils in the sky." As the poem progresses, Wilbur examines the metaphor of fish as reflections of human experience, illustrating how humans often impose their characteristics onto other beings.
However, the poem humorously critiques this tendency by highlighting the inherent differences between humans and fish, pointing out the fish's instinctual behaviors and its connection to humanity's evolutionary past. The fish serves as a symbol of the unconscious mind, representing the depths from which human thought and intellect arise. The title encapsulates this duality, as "trolling for blues" can refer both to the act of fishing and to the pursuit of deeper, melancholic reflections on human existence. Ultimately, Wilbur's work offers commentary on the complexities of human psychology and the potential pitfalls of anthropomorphism, inviting readers to reconsider their perceptions of both nature and themselves.
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Trolling for Blues by Richard Wilbur
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1987 (collected in New and Collected Poems, 1987)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Trolling for Blues” could be styled a work whose metaphor takes over the poem and changes it into something other than what it started out to be. It is written in a five-line stanza of loose pentameters without rhyme. As it begins the poet talks to himself about metaphors: The “dapper terns” and the cloud that “moils in the sky” like an embryo are seen in human terms—humanity is projected upon them. (Only a person could be “dapper.”) Wilbur then analyzes his fish-is-like-man metaphor. Humans make the fish, he points out, a “mirror of our kind.” Immediately he begins to mock the poet in everyone: The fish is human only if, he says, one sets aside the fish’s “unreflectiveness,” his habit of leaping up out of the water, and his strange practice of swimming a hundred miles out to sea to spawn.
One conceives of the fish, the poet says, as blue, “which is the shade/ Of thought.” He becomes at this point a symbol of the intellect “on edge! To lunge and seize with sure incisiveness.” The fish, however, does not cooperate with the poet; suddenly he strikes the lure and dives into the deep, “Yanking imagination back and down/ Past recognition” to the dark places at the bottom of the water. There the fish becomes a symbol of the unconscious, of the place where there is no intellect. He is also a symbol of the evolutionary past—the dark, mindless Devonian age when there were no people. This is where humanity began, coming up from the depths to find the cool, blue intellect.
This poem, then, by a whimsical, circuitous route, mocking the poetic power that created it, sets up an allegory of human psychology. This fact begins to explain the title—as usual in Wilbur, a play on words. If one thinks of the fish as “blue,” one is trolling for “blues,” but if one thinks of the fish as intellect, one is trolling for a kind of melancholy reflection; the reader catches the idea that humankind’s “roots” are far from intellectual, that its beginnings are at the bottom of the sea in “the unlit deep/ Of the glass sponges, of chiasmodon.” The poem also reveals the dangerous human habit of projecting humanity onto things which only remotely resemble humans: In humanizing everything, it may be that one begins to fail to understand one’s own humanity.
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.