Summary Of The Juggler By Richard Wilbur

In Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Juggler,’ the speaker describes the juggler as someone who is attempting to lift the spirits of his audience with his talent to distract them from their tedious and arduous daily lives. Through this description, the speaker reveals about themselves that they too are suffering from a tedious and arduous daily life. The description of the juggler and what it reveals about the speaker are expressed in each stanza through the use of diction, figurative language and tone. The opening lines of the poem demonstrate personification, saying, “[The ball is not] A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience. / Falling is what it loves.” The use of personification humanizes the balls, providing them emotions, as it loves to fall because it is being active in the air, a contrast from being tediously set on the ground, for it “settles and is forgot.” Like the balls, the audience too loves to be active, rather than settle and ‘be forgot.’ The first feature of imagery in the poem is in line six, in which the speaker states, “It takes a sky-blue juggler

The diction in the stanza is notable, as ‘Heaven’ is conspicuously used twice in the stanza to indicate how highly the speaker thinks of the juggler and his performance: they consider it heavenly, for the performance that the juggler puts on is intended to serve as a distraction from the aforementioned hardships of human life. The speaker states that “he reels that heaven in,” a metaphor for the end of the ball’s cycle, unexpectedly reeling the reader back into reality. However, this is not the end of this heavenly sequence, as the juggle begins the next phase of his show with the broom, plate and