The Juggler Richard Wilbur Summary

In “Juggler” by Richard Wilbur, the speaker highlights how the juggler’s act brings up the audience and how he amuses not only the crowd, but also the speaker. The speaker uses diction and detail throughout the poem to describe the juggler as entertaining and defiant towards gravity and earth. The word choice that the speaker uses helps him show how he entertains the crowd. At first, the scene is set as low. The speaker begins talking about “falling” and “forgot” but as soon as the juggler comes in, he comes to “shake our gravity up.” The juggler begins to juggle the balls and do extraordinary things with them like “wheel on his wheeling hands” and “swinging.” When the juggler comes in the scene suddenly alters and become joyful. Everything seems possible, the balls roam free and are not part of this world anymore instead they swing in “a small heaven.” The speaker saying that the balls are in a heaven show how the juggler take the people to a whole different place and a place that is happy and again, anything is possible. Balancing even brooms , “up on his nose.”-but that is not all. Additionally he is also twirling a

The fact that the rhyme scheme is so peculiar shows that the things that the things the juggler does are also anomalous. In a normal rhyming poem, the scheme is usually a traditional abababab or aabbccdd or at most abcabcabc. But the rhyming scheme this poem has with abcbac is very abnormal. Just like the things the juggler does. Rhyming when you least imagine, the juggler does things with the balls and brooms when you least expect. The juggler has seem to have figured out how to defy the laws of physics and earth to do as he pleases with the balls and has “won..over the world’s weight.” Which can be the audience, because the population of the earth give it a lot of weight and also the laws of earth’s gravity and