[In the following essay, Vendler examines Wright's meditative approach to history, time, art, and the physical world in Zone Journals.]

Lashed to the syllable and noun,
                                                            the strict Armageddon of the verb,
I lolled for 17 years
Above this bay with its antimacassars of foam
On the rocks, the white, triangular tears
                    sailboats poke through the sea's spun sheet,
Houses like wads of paper dropped in the moss-clumps
of the trees,
Fog in its dress whites at ease along the horizon,
Trying to get the description right.
                                                                                If nothing else,
I showed me that what you see
                                                            both is and is not there,
The unseen bulking in from the edges of all things,
Changing the frame with its nothingness.

(“A Journal of True Confessions”)

Restless and observant senses provide the words for the unseen in Charles Wright, as they did for the religious poets Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne, both (given that their subject was the unseen) unnervingly visual writers. All ways of formulating the paradox of the unseen felt in the seen falsify the experience of that paradox, in which the reports of the senses are accompanied by some aura (not felt by most of us, perhaps) of what is not there but makes its presence felt—eternity, death, transcendence, extension, rhythm: the unseen can go by many names. Visual reports in poetry rarely go unattended by such an aura; but the creation of the aura in words puts a bizarre stress on the writer. Fog along the horizon could be described by any number of analogies; here, the aura lies in the complex personification, “Fog in its dress whites at ease,” but the relaxed formality of that comparison does not exhaust the aura, since the disturbing note of a sheet of water “torn” by sails participates in it, as does the reassuring and slightly absurd metaphor of foam antimacassars on the rocks, and the disorderliness of the littering houses. If the aura of this landscape is the aura of a long habitation (“17 years”), then a sense of arbitrary military posting, relaxation in a parlor, seamless experience punctuated by painful rips, and a fate careless of its scatterings of habitation all combine in the “seen unseen” of the bay. Valéry draws a similar harbor with an aura of its own in “Le Cimetière Marin,” but he takes care to give a logical air to his images, and would not combine antimacassars and dress whites in the same stanza. The freedom to follow the aura without respect to thematic consistency of imagery is a mark of modernist verse (Eliot's ragged claws cohabiting with bats with baby faces and so on). But this freedom is also peculiarly and necessarily the mark of poets whose concerns turn inward to the screen of contemplation, away from the sociopolitical world and the world of narrative. For such poets neither narrative (which confers a clue through the labyrinth of consciousness) nor sociopolitical reality (which confers contemporary “urgency”) is an available option. They turn inward, and skyward: “There is no sickness of spirit like home-sickness / When what you are sick for / has never been seen or heard” (“A Journal of English Days”).

The title of Wright's recent book, Zone Journals, suggests time modified by space. The time is the region around his fiftieth year; the zones traversed in the volume include California, Virginia, England, and Italy. There are other notable modern journal-volumes of the fiftieth year: Lowell's Notebook, Ammons's Snow Poems, Merrill's Divine Comedies. These books, far more quotidian (in the best sense) than Wright's bring into sharp relief the very different nature of Wright's journals—brooding, lyrical, painterly, contemplative. No marches on the Pentagon here, no historical emperors and tyrants, such as figure in Lowell; none of the sanguine dailiness or scientific curiosity of Ammons; none of the domestic comedy of Merrill (Wright mentions his wife and son only glancingly in his verse). Wright's poetry reproduces the circling and deepening concentration that aims at either obliteration or transcendence, blankness or mysticism. But Wright stops short of either polarity because he remains bound to the materiality and the temporal rhythm of language, whereas both Eastern nothingness and Western transcendence, at their utmost point, renounce as meaningless both materiality and time.

The very nature of poetry—a temporal art forever reformulated—suggests that no object or scene of present contemplation can last any longer than the moment of attention (a Keatsian point dwelt on by contemporary poets other than Wright, such as Ashbery in “Self-Portrait”). Seeking recourse against the evanescence of contemplation, Wright turns to the abiding memory of his predecessors in contemplation, who compose an aesthetic pantheon including Li Po, Dante, Petrarch, Leonardo, and Sidney; Keats, Poe, and Dickinson; Picasso, Rothko, and Pound. The exemplary quality of the life of the artist, and the question of the function and survival of art, preoccupy Wright in these journals.

At some moments, nothing seems more alive to Wright (as to anyone responsive to the headiness of aesthetically formulated language) than the voice of the great formulators, no matter how long dead. Dante appears here and speaks live words to the poet (as he had appeared to Eliot in the Quartets, as Joyce appears and speaks to Heaney in Station Island). “The voice that cannot be stilled by death or the passage of time”: this is one definition, the most assuaging one for the poet, of poetry. There are lesser definitions, though still powerful. “The presence that haunts the place it dwelt” might be the definition that for Wright fits Dickinson and Poe, whose houses in Amherst and Baltimore the poet is seen visiting, hearing no voices but finding a place where “the spirits come and my skin sings” (“Journal of the Year of the Ox,” 23 May; henceforth quotations from this long poem will be identified by date alone). But presences themselves fade: Petrarch's full life (“the tapestries and winter fires, / The long walks and solitude”) comes down after a half-millenium to “the one name and a rhyme scheme” (3 August). What are artists, in fact, but dust? “Fulke Greville lies in his stone boat in the church of St. Mary … / Hermetically sealed in stone” (“A Journal of English Days”). As if to emphasize equally both the importance of the artist's birth and his eventual remoteness in time, Wright keeps note of birthdays in his English journal:

“October 17th, Sir Philip dead / 397 years today.”

“Cézanne … died there today / 77 years ago.”

“Sunday, October 30th, Pound's birthday 98 years ago.”

And he includes a “Short Riff for John Keats on his 188th Birthday.” Our ahistoric “eternal voices” are thereby placed firmly in lost time, where Wright also places, as a past but unobliterable piece of American history, the defeated Cherokees of Virginia, who in 1806 ceded their sacred burial lands to the invaders. Wright knows that as the earlier inhabitants of his territory are, so will he be.

At the same time, history itself preserves not only the shame of massacres and exploitation but also the exemplary lives of saints and artists who confirm the poets' faith in the extension of imaginative possibility, not only in themselves but in us. Cézanne “made us see differently, where the hooks fit, and the eyes go,” says Wright's English journal; and the “Journal of True Confessions” carries even further the example of what being imaginative means, by way of a story about Leonardo told by Vasari. Presented with an unusual lizard, Leonardo, dissatisfied even with the uncommon, proceeded to embellish it:

[He] made wings for it out of the skins
Of other lizards,
                                        and filled the wings with mercury
Which caused them to wave and quiver
Whenever the lizard moved.
                                                            He made eyes, a beard and two horns
In the same way, tamed it, and kept it in a large box
To terrify his friends.
                                        His games were the pure games of children,
Asking for nothing but artifice, beauty and fear.

Leonardo's coalescing of the biologically real lizard (“The real is only the base. But it is the base,” said Stevens), the scientifically invented mercury-wings, the anthropomorphic beard, and the mythological horns becomes a parable of aesthetic energy, delight, and imaginative intimidation.

Artifice, beauty, and fear, all in the elaborate game of metered language, are the materials of Wright's art as well. Leonardo's humor and wit (the lizard, once unmasked as artifice, must have amused) are not present in Wright, whose liturgical solemnity is corrected only by the ironies of death and futility. But at least these powerful ironies are always present: the ultimate evanescence of everything, the round of the seasons making and breaking natural forms, the inevitable self-replaceability of language.

It is in his evocations of the seasons that Wright displays both the gorgeousness of his descriptive equipment and his gift for the pathetic fallacy. At the same time, these recurrent seasonal tableaux, by their ostentatious substitutiveness, call their own reliability into question. If on one day the clouds are “cloud banks enfrescoed,” on another they are “Mannerist clouds,” on another “cloud-tufts that print a black alphabet / along the hillsides.” An infinite number of adjectival substitutions, one feels, are possible for the clouds; and although in another poet visual accuracy would be uppermost, in Wright the symbolic arbitrariness of the mind's play is at least as visible in such passages as any putative appearance of the clouds. For all Wright's debt to Hopkins and Pound and Stevens, he is less hard-edged in description than any of them, more dreamy. His beautiful landscapes are a symbolic means, rather than a visually specific end.

The landscapes consequently abound in the pathetic fallacy, which aims in Wright not at its classical unobtrusiveness but rather at an overt and unashamed pathos:

The rain lying like loose bandages over the ground;

(“English Journal”)

The rain, in its white disguise,
                                        has nothing to say to the wind
That carries it, whose shoulders
It slips from giving no signal, aimlessly, one drop
At a time, no word
Or gesture to what has carried it all this way for nothing.

(“Journal of the Year of the Ox”)

These passages may be arbitrary when considered as visual descriptions of rain, but no longer seem purely contingent when considered emotionally as resonances of a suffusing inner life.

The realm of meditation which Wright has made his own has been often described in the vocabularies of theological, philosophical, and psychological speculation. Nonetheless, it does not feel, as we inhabit it, like a place called “mortal sin,” or “proprioception,” or “the superego.” It feels by turns soft, or hard, or brilliant, or drifting, or pallid, or violent. In his discipleship to the Italian futurist poet Dino Campana, whose Orphic Songs he has translated, Wright learned a sensuous, rich, and seductive vocabulary for inner sensation. Here, for comparison, are some images from Campana, in Wright's translation: “The moon … rose up in a new red dress of coppery smoke … in solitary and smoky vapor over the barbaric clefts and slices.” “The Telluric melody of the Falterona [mountain range]. Telluric waves. The last asterisk of the Falterona's song gets lost in the clouds.” “A long veranda … has scribbled a many-colored comment with its arches.” Like Wright, Campana was a pilgrim homesick for the eternal (“O pilgrim, O pilgrims who go out searching so seriously”), but his violence of color and utterance have been modulated in Wright into something which, while still sensual and ecstatic at once, is more mournful and less hallucinatory.

Journal-poems are for Wright a departure from his earlier crystalline short lyrics and exquisitely finished sequences aiming for inevitability of effect. A journal-poem allows for the chanciness of travel, and the form serves Wright especially well in the long poem “Journal of the Year of the Ox,” the centerpiece of Zone Journals. The year 1985, covered by the journal, is crowned by some summer months spent in Italy (where Wright did his military service and studied as a Fulbright scholar). The glowing set piece in the center of the sequence describes the opulent Renaissance frescoes in the Schifanoia Palace of the dukes of Este in Ferrara. These frescoes are important to Wright because they so ideally represent the world as he conceives it—an ampler, more beautiful, and more ordered cosmos than that perceived by the senses alone (though including the testimony of the senses, and expressible only in sensuous forms).

The frescoes, covering the upper portion of the large palace hall, are divided into three levels: the highest level displays the triumphs of gods invoked as patrons of Ferrara (Ceres, Apollo, Venus, and so on); the middle level displays the signs of the zodiac and their graceful attendant wardens or “deans” (so called because each figure is responsible for ten days of the month); and the lowest level displays various civic and social activities of the duke of Este. All three levels are of a striking beauty, but in each case the beauty is of a decorum to match the subject: the gods move in a radiant anagogical atmosphere of light, glory, and throngs of divine attributes; the zodiacal signs and their deans, by contrast, exist in a fixed and allegorical emblematic simplicity of outline against a solid-colored background; while the duke acts in a busy social sphere of Italian civic and geographical detail. Here is Wright responding to the art that so perfectly complies with his sense of life, allowing as it does not only for ideational panoplies and seasonal symbols but also for the realities of courtiers, horses, peasants, and grapevines:

Through scenes of everyday life,
Through the dark allegory of the soul
                                                            into the white light of eternity,
The goddess burns in her golden car
From month to month, season to season
                                                                                high on the walls
At the south edge of Ferrara: …
Reality, symbol and ideal
                                                            tripartite and everlasting
Under the bricked, Emilian sun.
.....Borso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara and Modena, on a spring day
On horseback off to the hunt:
                                        a dog noses a duck up from a pond,
Peasants are pruning the vines back, and grafting new ones.
.....Such a narrow, meaningful strip
                                                            of arrows and snakes.
Circles and purple robes, griffins and questing pilgrims:
At the tip of the lion's tail, a courtier rips
A haunch of venison with his teeth;
At the lion's head,
                                        someone sits in a brushed, celestial tree.
.....Up there, in the third realm,
                                                            light as though under water
Washes and folds and breaks in small waves
Over each month like sunrise:
                                                            triumph after triumph
Of pure Abstraction and pure Word, a paradise of white cloth
And white reflections of cloth cross-currented over the cars
With golden wheels and gold leads,
                                                            all Concept and finery:
Love with her long hair and swans in trace,
Cybele among the Corybants,
Apollo, Medusa's blood and Attis in expiation:
All caught in the tide of light,
                                                            all burned in the same air.

(25 July)

A hymn of such passion and distinction justifies both itself and the fresco it celebrates. The lavish iconography of the Renaissance, with its fertile mixture of classical, neo-Platonic, alchemical, astrological, and Christian elements, was after all a human invention:

Is this the progression of our lives
                                                            or merely a comment on them?

Wright's question suggests that the extent to which such a fresco represents our lives, or is an analogy to them, is an earnest of what the fully rich life of consciousness can be, how it can place the “real” (the duke's daily round) in the light of cosmic orderly change (the zodiac) and suffuse it with the light of human motives idealized (Love, Wisdom, Art, Commerce). Here, it is not a political superstructure that gives significance to personal and civic activity; it is rather the superstructure of the sensuous, the affective, and the intellectual that gives meaning to the political.

Summer in Italy releases in Wright a flood of responsive exaltation. At home, in the winter, he is more likely to feel the downward pull of mortality; this is made gentle, in the following quotation, by the song-like mode that Wright allows his meditations to assume from time to time:

One, one and by one we all sift to a difference
And cry out if one of our branches snaps
                                                            or our bark is cut.
The winter sunlight scours us,
The winter wind is our comfort and consolation.
We settle into our ruin
One, one and by one as we slip from clear rags into feathery skin
Or juice-in-the-ground, pooled
And biding its time
                                        backwashed under the slick peach tree.
One, one and by one thrust up by the creek bank,
Huddled in spongy colonies,
                                                            longing to be listened to.
Here I am, here I am, we all say,
                                                                                I'm back,
Rustle and wave, chatter and spring
Up to the air, the sweet air.
Hardened around the woodpecker's hole, under his down,
We all slip into the landscape, one, one and by one.

Folk song and the blues hover here, as elsewhere, behind Wright's poetry, and distinguish him from his most potent mentor, Pound. He is the only one of the tribe of Pound not to feel Pound's aversion to syntax, and Wright's poetry, in its play of syntactic subordination and dominance, reclaims an elaborate intellectuality for the Poundian image. In spite of their intellectuality, the poems remain finally sensuous objects in a pilgrim shrine. “Our lines,” says Wright in “A Journal of True Confessions,” “seem such sad notes for the most part, / Pinned like reliquaries and stop-gaps / to the cloth effigy of some saint.” Wright's Christian upbringing remains imaginatively present to him, secreting a nacreous nostalgia for the vocabulary that, had it only suited his century, would have best suited his sense of things. Without the ability to assert, at least in any conventional dogma, the intuitions of faith, he is left with the biological conservation of matter as the only resurrection he can count on, “juice-in-the-ground, pooled / And biding its time.” In his zones of dislocation—between the Christian and the biological, between Europe and America, and between the allegorical and the visible—Wright finds a scene of writing unique to himself and to his historical moment, and phrases it over and over in his musical and grieving half-lines, themselves the very rhythm of contemplative musing.