Richard Wilbur A Fire Truck

A fire truck explication

“A Fire Truck” is a display of excellent poetry writing. Although a passing fire truck is a menial topic and the poem itself is brief, Richard Wilbur is able to brilliantly recreate this ordinary event through the use of rhythm, sounds and figurative language. The author captures, absorbs and retells this event in a way that the readers could almost physically experience the passing of a fire truck as did the speaker.

The essence of this poem is the author’s mastery of sound and rhythm and his excellent use of figurative language. Richard Wilbur purposely chose words that have few a syllables and require little to no change in mouth size and tongue movements to appease to the reader when read aloud. There is an ABAB rhythm scheme

on the last word of each line in every stanza, rhymes in first stanza such as blast with past and curb with verb.

The author is able to so descriptively express this common event by dedicating each stanza to a different perspective involved. The author begins the poem with a protruding inexplicit situation, captivating the reader’s interest and provoking curiosity to help create imagery. Much like a thesis of an essay, the author states “blurring to sheer verb” at the end of the first stanza, he restates the true simple nature of this topic. Wilbur next describes the surrounding in reaction to the fire truck, showing the reader the flamboyancy and power of the fire truck. At the end of the second stanza, the author italicizes the line “thought is degraded action!” This could be interpreted as the speaker’s thoughts, suggesting that those ringing bells remind him that thinking is but the inferior form of action. In the third stanza, the author focuses on the effects of the fire truck on the speaker, helping relate the reader to the thoughts of the speaker as he experiences this event. Corresponding to the ending of the second stanza, the speaker is reminded of the true nature of thoughts, thus letting go of his worries “I stand here purged of nuance and my mind a blank. All I was brooding upon has taken wing.”

Lastly to conclude, Wilbur restates the speaker’s thoughts and feelings towards the fire truck, allowing the readers to further visualize the moment as the fire truck drives away, the siren sounds become dull and the speaker continues his walk while thinking about fire trucks. The author’s true intentions for each stanza might remain unclear, but it is without a doubt that Wilbur purposely arranged this poem to follow a specific rhythmic pattern. All of the stanzas have only 4 lines; the first two stanzas have a 5 5 5 3 foot pattern and the last two stanzas follow a 6 5 5 3 foot pattern. In each of these stanzas, Wilbur extensively uses rhythmic devices such as consonance, assonance and alliteration, these rhythmic devices might have had a contribution to the reader’s auditory imagery.
This poem is compact, immediate and brief, similar to a passing fire truck. To write about such a simple and common event in everyday life, the piece should be a fitting length so that the readers do not lose interest, however a short piece does not amount a simple piece. In just 16 lines and 159 syllables, Wilbur is able to express a common event to its fullest details through the use of well-planned rhythm patterns and rhyme scenes.