need help asap?

Question

heres a poem by Richard Wilbur and i cant like understand it, can you plz explain it to me
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/juggler/
this is the site ^^^

Answer 1

My first piece of advice is to read the poem about 5 times, let each of the phrases and imagery sink in. Draw a diagram of the poem - like the balls bouncing less and less, and the juggler with the five red balls, and exchanging them for a broom, a table, etc...that's lots of images!

Here's the best I found in terms of explication:
RICHARD WILBUR'S 'THE JUGGLER'

In a recent essay, "The Companionship of a Poem," Billy Collins claims that when we memorize poems we allow them to inhabit our minds and to become our permanent companions. A close reading of a single poem may similarly forge a permanent relationship with that poem. In this article, I propose just such an encounter with Richard Wilbur's "Juggler." Such a reading may not compel us to abandon our idiosyncratic ways of responding to the poem; yet following the guide of a speech-act-based methodology, such as that used by Richard Hart in "The Lyric as Fictive Rhetoric," significantly enriches our reading of this poem (and hence, our pleasure in its company). Briefly, "Juggler" dramatizes the reflections of an adult watching a juggler's performance with an apparently sizeable audience of children. The adult, initially detached from the event, begins by philosophizing about the nature of balls in general-perhaps the juggler has been bouncing the balls before beginning his main act or perhaps he has upended a bag so that they have fallen out, bouncing "less and less" (line 1) and coming to rest around the juggler's feet. The speaker continues, shifting between simple, detached narrative and reflective meditation, and at the climax becoming completely caught up himself in the juggler's performance. His musings lead him to associate the uses of entertainment with the value of religion, viewing both as strategies for removing the "world's weight" from our backs (30).

The poem's speaker begins with a detached reflection on the way balls bounce-"A ball will bounce, but less and less [. . .]"(1)-turning it into a metaphor for human vicissitudes by attributing the qualities of lightheartedness, resentment, and love to inanimate objects, the balls. Thus, the terms "resilience" and "fall" (2, 3) also develop this personification, punningly naming qualities of human nature that double as physical properties of balls. Although resilient, a ball cannot bounce back fully to its original height, nor do people easily recover strength or spirit after a personal failure, disappointment, or betrayal. In fact, people tend to "resent" (2) others' expectations that they let go of a certain ill turn of fortune. When the speaker comments of the ball, "Falling is what it loves" (3), his metaphorical discourse also suggests that people would also prefer to remain depressed or cynical or bitter rather than try, heroically, to recapture a sense of the world's brilliance and their young wonder at it. Generally, his comment captures our youthful experience of things as large, with regard to the scope of our lives, but as less and less wonderful as we age, when we increasingly regard them from a utilitarian, often economic, point of view. For example, as we mature, Christmas becomes less enchanting and instead becomes more mundane and less mysterious. The progression from youth to adulthood generally diminishes the mystery of things and constitutes a fall of sorts.

At this point, the speaker's attention shifts to a remedy for this loss of a sense of mystery: a sky-blue juggler with five red balls, the circus that he is about to see. Only with the whole poem in mind does this reference deepen. The color sky-blue associates the juggler with heaven (12, 13, 16), and the five red balls evoke, by their number and color, Christ's five wounds on the cross. These associations draw out the etymological development of the word "juggler" from "juggle," meaning to joke or deceive, to exercise sleight of hand; the Middle English joglere, one who deceives by trickery; and significantly, in early Celtic history, a magician. Traditionally, trickster figures like the juggler and his kin supply the material world with a sense of mystery by amazing and astonishing their audiences with their sleight of hand. Similarly juggling with words, as poets and punsters do, upsets our gravity (literal- and serious-mindedness), injects levity-lightheartedness-into our world, and makes it, as Wilbur suggests through his speaker's reflections, more bearable. Such effects redeem the world, at least momentarily, for audiences and readers by reawakening youthful wonder in it and offering an opportunity to live, if even for a moment, in their early sense of the world's brilliance.

These religious associations extend the implications of "Falling" and "falls" in the poem's first three lines to include the Fall of humankind from the Garden of Eden, which creates the need for the Easter redemption. The poem's theological dimension expands the puns on "gravity" and "levity" throughout to enhance our understanding of Christ, the light of the world, as savior, and to enrich our appreciation of the juggler's performance, which, on the face of it, is just a child's show.

In stanza 2, the speaker seems to be distracted from his philosophizing and to become caught up in the performance itself, comparing the balls circling the juggler's head to "spheres," their paths to "courses," and the whole image to a "heaven" (9, 11, 12). In effect, the speaker depicts the juggler as a deity at the center of a cosmos that he puts in motion and maintains in order, an image resembling Aristotle's understanding of the Unmoved Mover. Discovering the metaphor, however, appears to prompt the speaker's return to reflection in stanza 3, particularly his observation that the act of deity, making a heaven of "nothing at all" (13), is easier than the heroic act required of humankind, regaining the earth. That is, it is easier to create a world than to revive a sense of brilliance about the world once it is lost-especially without a god. The rest of stanza 3 confirms the divine power of the juggler, described as "still and sole" (typically a deity is unique, singular), performing a gesture "sure and noble" (god-like, expressing high moral qualities), as he "reels that heaven in" (13, 15, 16).

What the juggler does with the balls is not possible with the actual earth, but by trading the heaven for a "broom, a plate, a table" (18), the juggler performs a similar act of magic with these appurtenances of daily life. He has given up the celestial for the worldly, and though he cannot create a heaven, he can triumph over gravity. At this point in the performance, the speaker becomes completely caught up in the action, exclaiming over the juggler's tricks with the broom, plate, and table and, with the use of "we" (21), including himself in the audience. The juggler's act has made the world brilliant again for all of them, if only briefly. To borrow language from Wilbur's "Beautiful Changes," the juggler sunders the table, plate, and chair from themselves for a "second finding" (17), so breaking their normal mundane relationship with humans to reestablish it in a different way. As a result, the speaker, along with the rest of the audience, experiences a kind of levity during the performance that he has said earlier is very hard to achieve. "Damn, what a show, we cry" (21), the speaker records. They have all enjoyed the show and been relieved of their daily burdens temporarily: "The boys stamp, and the girls / Shriek, and the drum booms" (22). When the juggler ends his act, the speaker tells us that "all comes down," depicting the juggler still master of his act, still in control, the broom, plate, and table coming down purposefully rather than falling.

After the performance ends, the speaker returns to his philosophizing, acknowledging the juggler's humanness in his probable tiredness (gods do not get tired) but also suggesting the lingering presence of his divinity in the audience's enthusiastic applause. His closing remark acknowledges the redemptive value of the juggler's performance:

For him we batter our hands

Who has won for once over the world's weight. (29-30)

The juggler himself, more powerful and skillful than his audience, has restored their sense of wonder at the mystery of the material world. Similarly, the deification metaphor suggests that Christ saves us from our burdens and in our appreciation "we batter our hands," signal our gratitude with struggle and service. We, the poem's readers, likewise may wonder at Wilbur's intricate interweaving of the spiritual and the material that redeems for us the value and pleasure of sharing an afternoon with children at the circus and of reading, perhaps memorizing, a poem to, in Billy Collins' words, "make our minds more ample" and slow ourselves down to the "leisurely pace of deliberation."

[Reference]
WORKS CITED
Collins, Billy. "The Companionship of a Poem." Chronicle of Higher Education 23 (Nov. 2001): B5.
Hart, Richard H. "The Lyric as Fictive Rhetoric: Skeptical Deconstructions of Poems in the Major British Tradition." Diss. U of Texas at Austin, 1983.
Wilbur, Richard. "Juggler." New and Collected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 297.
_____. "Beautiful Changes." New and Collected Poems. 392.

[Author Affiliation]
MARY BUZAN, McMurry University

[Explicator, Spring 2004]

Answer 2

Juggler Meaning