Favorite Poems: In the White Sky
William Stafford Sees Roads Not Taken, But Keeps Going
William Stafford (1914-1993) is famous among poets for two things: a late start (at least in publishing) and his comment, quoted and prescribed often among writers and teachers, about “lowering his standards” when daily writing became difficult.
He kept a journal for 50 years and wrote an estimated 22,000 poems, but didn’t publish his first book, Traveling Through the Dark, until he was 48. The book won the 1963 National Book Award, and Stafford would go on to receive many honors, including his 1970 appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
Poems Evaluating One's Life
Whatever Stafford thought of his output or accomplishments, a later poem opines whether he could have done more with his life. The self-assessment theme has been explored in many famous poems, such as James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” with its depressing conclusion, “I have wasted my life.” In “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, to whose work Stafford’s deceptively simple lines are often compared, the speaker equivocates in advance, practicing what will later be a self-aggrandizing spin.
Stafford’s poem “In the White Sky,” looks back with wistful resignation. With characteristic understatement, Stafford echoes the simple beauty of a sky metaphor with flat speech to produce a masterful portrait of maturity.
In the White Sky
Many things in the world have
already happened. You can
go back and tell about them.
They are part of what we
own as we speed along
through the white sky.
But many things in the world
haven’t yet happened. You help
them by thinking and writing and acting.
Where they begin, you greet them
or stop them. You come along
and sustain the new things.
Once, in the white sky there was
a beginning, and I happened to notice
and almost glimpsed what to do,
But now I have come far
to here, and it is way back there.
Some days, I think about it.
Robert Bly called Stafford, “one of the great masters of the white poem,” the color symbolizing deepening emotional maturity. Of the poem’s opening line, Bly says, in a New Dimensions interview with Michael Toms (Sounds True Audio, 1991), “When you’re in the white, you realize there’s a world bigger than you, it’s bigger than your anger, and a lot of things have been going on for centuries. That’s so wonderful.”
Bly also notes the poem’s unemotional directness, a sign of entering the “black,” that final stage often marked by honesty, understatement, and humor. “It ends with that beautiful turn towards black…He says ‘I could have done more in my life, but I didn’t get it done.’”
Ultimately, “In the White Sky” celebrates life by flattening emotions surrounding anger or regret into an observation that is inescapable, yet fearless.
William Stafford in 1993
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