We lately lost the American poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), who died last month. I have always admired him for the way he steadfastly refused to jump on the confessional bandwagon of the nineteen sixties along with the like of Lowell, Berryman and Plath, but continued to write his own restrained and lucid verse. This disinclination to give his time what his time thought it wanted may have made him temporarily unfashionable, but in the house of poetry there are many mansions and surely one of them has Richard Wilbur’s name on it.
I had always assumed that this particular poem was a ruefully affectionate tribute to the nineteenth-century cowboy of the kind who was such a standard in the ‘B’ movies of my childhood, godless, maybe, but possessing, along with his impressive physical skills, a rough decency and sense of fair play. However, it appears that the inspiration is more recent than that: Wilbur served in the Second World War, at Anzio, in France and in Germany, and the poem commemorates a fellow-soldier, Corporal Tywater, a one time rodeo man, who was killed while serving in the infantry after taking a wrong turn in his jeep and driving into German hands.
Tywater
Death of Sir Nihil, book the nth,
Upon the charred and clotted sward,
Lacking the lily of our Lord,
Alases of the hyacinth.
Could flicker from behind his ear
A whistling silver throwing knife
And with a holler punch the life
Out of a swallow in the air.
Behind the lariat’s butterfly
Shuttled his white and gritted grin,
And cuts of sky would roll within
The noose-hole, when he spun it high.
The violent, neat and practised skill
Was all he loved and all he learned;
When he was hit, his body turned
To clumsy dirt before it fell.
And what to say of him, God knows.
Such violence. And such repose.
Richard Wilbur
David Sutton 
Hello David, I thought poetry’s mansion has many rooms. Loved the poem. Are you still writing? I’d like to catch up with you having loved your poetry and learned about six by heart. You can really get to know a poem when it snuggles down in the warmth of the heart.
Thanks Nigel. No, the biblical quote is ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’ (KJV, John 14.2). I admit this always puzzled me as child, because I thought a mansion was a very big house, and I didn’t see how you could fit a lot of very big houses into one normal house. But it seems that ‘mansion’ in this biblical sense refers to a self-contained dwelling within a large complex, where the whole complex is regarded as ‘the house’. The OED explains this sense as ‘Each of a number of separate dwelling places or apartments in a large house, group of buildings, etc. Also in extended use. Now usually arch. as a translation of, or in allusion to, John 14:2’. And yes, I still write the occasional poem, and a manuscript of my ‘Collected Poems’ is currently with a publisher and should be appearing in due course, next year I hope. Thanks for your interest.
I found a quote by a critic called Robert Bagg: “The death of Corporal Lloyd Tywater, killed in a German ambush five hundred yards from where Wilbur was laying telephone wire, moved him to write his first distinctive and fully realized poem: …”
The lily stands for purity? The hyacinth stands for sincerity? The knight and Tywater both lack these qualities? “book the nth” – the knight dies at the end of a long tedious tale?
Yes. lily for purity, hyacinth for constancy and sincerity. But I think the knight would, at least in theory, have had such attributes, whereas Tywater has no pretensions to them, just to physical prowess. ‘Book the nth’ – I don’t take this as ‘book’ in the sense of one part of a long tale concerning a knight, just book in the sense of a whole series of dime novels about cowboys or fighting men generally where characters get killed in gunfights. Just my interpretation, I could be wrong.
I find it quite difficult to relate the first verse to the rest. Nihil = nothing. I’m tempted to assume that Nihil (like Tywater) has no virtues.
No, I think you’re getting the first verse a bit wrong. As I see it, Sir Nihil (= Sir Nothing, or perhaps better here Sir Nameless) is an ironic title for Tywater himself, given him because although some might see him as belonging to the lineage of the knights of old, in fact he has none of their supposed piety, their devotion to God and chivalric ideals: he is just another virtually anonymous grunt dying a death unredeemed by any noble purpose, the kind chronicled in so many works of cheap fiction. It’s a bleak vision of a wartime death, but it is balanced to some extent by a celebration of the man’s physical prowess when he was alive, even if dying took that from him instantly, turning him to no more than ‘clumsy dirt’.
Thanks. Yes Sir Nihil = Tywater makes good sense. I got confused (because Nihil is dead, then Tywater is alive, then Tywater is dead?).