Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, March 7th, 2025.

Today's poem comes from Richard Wilbur, and it's called A Dubious Night.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

A dubious night.

A bell dip thonging in an atmosphere of shying night air,

some in some to prayer down in the town,

two deep lone miles from here.

Yet wall is faint or sudden everywhere, in every ear as if the twist wind

wrung some ten years tangled echoes from the air. What Kyrie's, it says, are mauled

illusions of the mist and murk, of lights and shapes, the senses were unstrung, except that one star's synch-dokic smirk

burns steadily to me, that nothing's odd and firm as ever is the master work. I weary of the

confidence of God.

Wilbur does something in this poem with his language that I think is very intentional, very unusual,

and very fascinating.

Beginning even with the title of the poem, he uses words, he makes particular choices in his diction to create a kind of barrier between what he's saying, what we're hearing or reading, and the meaning behind them. He's not being

obtuse, but he is making that membrane between the words as they appear to us and the meaning communicated by them extra thick.

If wading through a stream is some sort of metaphor for understanding, then this is like wading through a stream

of gel rather than water. He hasn't thrown up actual obstacles for us, but there's something

that slows us down and, again, acts as a kind of veil maybe is the right metaphor for the meaning.

Beginning with the word dubious, a dubious knight, is at face value a doubtful night.

When we use the word dubious, it is often used to modify things that are of a questionable

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