Tea at Trianon: A Review of 'The Heft of Promise' by Frederick Wilbur

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, February 28, 2026

A Review of 'The Heft of Promise' by Frederick Wilbur

From poetess Maggie Quesenberry Smith:

Frederick Wilbur’s The Heft of Promise explores faith, doubt, and reason by recounting one man’s losses and setbacks, which he tries to endure throughout the labors of farm work, woodworking, and poesy. Many of these poems are meditations on submitting to the discipline of woodworking even though the art’s labor makes unruly clutter no one else understands—a host of tools, profuse wood shavings, deep scars marring his worn work bench. In the end, the poet experiences a watershed moment. He realizes that he will have to let go of his faith in the “dignity of labor” in the end. In “Asylum: Way of Being,” the poet says,
...My hand tools
become mantle shelf antiques,
valuable to collectors in pristine uselessness:
my making made me.
As the poems progress here, the poet’s “latch-bolt / snugs to its keeper.” The poet realizes that a man’s faith solely rooted in Earth cannot sustain him, even though the real world is sometimes all he believes in. In this collection, one man’s story unfolds as he learns from his labor that parables exist there, waiting to emerge as the natural world reveals them through his making.
This collection of poems also explores the pitfalls today in pursuing truth and beauty through poetry rooted in rural, place-based romanticism. This is an age where expeditious consumerism and complex technologies threaten neo-romantic perspectives, well-divorced from Virginia’s rural landscapes, so Wilbur realizes it has become difficult to convince newcomers that homeplaces have enough value for one to invest the work in their husbandry and upkeep. Throughout life’s joys and lamentations, the speaker weighs his worldly blessings and eternal hopes dependent on his earthly possessions and discovers even homeplaces will be too heavy to remember until death. These poems unveil the poet’s slow embrace of simple poverty and the freedom it brings once the poet’s hope and faith are authentic and unfettered by all the substitute “blessings” the materially poor seek in coincidental “finds” throughout the world’s auction houses and salvage yards.
Even the poet’s promises become too heavy to bear, even “empty promises.” While hopeful, people plan and promise, but they are ignorant of their flaws, fragilities, and blind sides. Often, they do not understand the long-term endurance and sacrifices their promises make. Also, the poet shows that the world can “befuddle” our hopes. Sometimes, the world exposes the well-meaning messiness our shortsighted labor and industries engender, much like Wilbur’s hapless cardinal in “Dustwings,” which hits a storm-window and leaves traces from its wings’ prints in the window’s dust. Likewise, Wilbur explores the fact that real world interferences, distractions, and redirections ever thwart our promises, and the guilt of falling short of one’s promises to finish well-laid plans grows too heavy for the poet to bear, driving him to winnow what to keep from what to get rid of—what to get out of his dwellings, out of his memories. What will that engender, though? (Read more.)