In Richard Wilbur’s poem Mind, the speaker compares the mind to a bat in order to portray the mind’s instinctual knowledge and awareness. Wilbur’s bat, for example, is perfectly aware of all of its surroundings, discerning them “by a kind of senseless wit” (line 3). It finds its surroundings not through thought, but through instinct, without having to struggle. The bat “beats about in caverns all alone”; these caverns represent the confusing and distracting world in which the body dwells (line 2). However, despite this dark and confusing cavern, the bat can easily navigate its path as soon as it gets its bearings, "And so it may weave and flitter, dip and soar / in perfect courses through the blackest air" (7-8). The speaker asserts here that, despite these distractions or obstacles, the mind has an innate ability to find truth and knowledge by digging deeper and avoiding the obstacles. Even when the air is at its blackest, that is, when the world is at its most hostile or confusing, the mind is inherently able to navigate its intellectual environment and to freely imagine and explore.
My analysis
ReplyDeleteWilbur, in the first two verses, suggests ways in which the mind and a bat are the same. He intentionally makes some of the comparisons questionable, as a foreshadowing of the topic of the 3rd verse. In this verse he changes course:
Wilbur is saying in this final verse that, unlike a bat, the mind is willing to explore, even falter, without the risk of ‘concluding against a wall of stone’. As an answer to his own question as to whether the poem, as a simile, shares the perfection afforded to the bat’s ‘perfect coursing through the blackest air’, he responds immediately by making a statement that is intentionally untrue: ‘The mind is like a bat. Precisely’. He states ‘The mind is like a bat’ to show that the mind is NOT like a bat! The word ‘Precisely’ only strengthens his claim, by making the notion even more untrue. This choice to explore and even ‘falter’ (qualities that are not shared by the bat, as stated in line 1 of the 2nd verse) displays wit and humor that he then labels as ‘the very happiest of intellection’, leaving the reader with no doubt of his intention. He then states that this ‘graceful error’ is committed to show that the simile developed in the first two verses falls short in its comparison between the bat’s cave having perilous walls of stone and the mind’s ‘caverns’ having places that the mind can strategically go.
The mind’s caverns prove to not only lack peril but to be a strength that the mind can draw on. In this case the strength is the author’s mind’s humorous and erroneous statements ‘The mind is like a bat. Precisely…’. Thus the flaw in the simile that tries to make a comparison between a bat’s cave and the mind’s ‘caverns’ is corrected, exposing the simile’s weakness.