[In the following essay, an obituary tribute to Wright, Martone examines the theme of transformation in his poetry.]

I. GARMENTS OF ADIEU.

It is difficult to speak retrospectively of James Wright's poetry, to think of it as a completed ouevre rather than as an ongoing body of work, for Wright's was very much a poetic of transformation. As Dave Smith puts it, “Wright insists that the most fundamental nature of poetry is in its affirmation of possibility.”¹ For Wright, transformation is implicit in the very notion of metaphor, in the figuring of one thing as another. The figurative process in poetry is kin to the processes of metamorphosis in nature. For Wright there is a vital bond between poetry and life in the fact that both are realms of change.

Transformation, though, most often means redemption in Wright's world—or restoration, or healing; and what needs to be healed is our humanity. The human figures of Wright's poetry, as William Heyen suggests, are always needy in an important way, are characteristically failures. His poems are inhabited by defeated saviours, bad poets, convicts, corrupt politicians, and drunks, and when the poet speaks in his own person, he most often speaks of moments of fear, laziness, or sorrow—of moments that can hardly be described as heroic.² In his discussions of the art of poetry, too, Wright recognizes and affirms our human shortcomings again and again. One of his favorite passages from Dante, Wright tells us, is the poet's advice in the De volgare eloquentia that one not attempt to do more than is humanly possible, that a poet recognize the limits of his / her art.³ If Wright's is a poetic of transformation that is, at least in part, because his is also a poetic of modesty.

Wright sees that we are needy, and he knows that we have made ourselves needy by hybristically isolating ourselves from the rest of existence, by setting ourselves apart from the world around us. In the process of his poetry, Wright sees and responds to the spiritual petrification that R.D. Laing finds to be characteristics of our age and to the loneliness which Philip Slater says we're all pursuing.⁴ The recognition in Wright's poetry of our neediness leads, though, to the reaffirmation of a world beyond us; it always allows us to look through to the possibility of change.

This is, I think, where Wright's poetry takes on its particular significance for our time. The Greeks implicitly associated the arts of poetry and medicine by naming Apollo patron of both, and Wright, too, thinks of the arts of poetry and healing as related. In an interview with Dave Smith, Wright tells us that writing The Branch Will Not Break involved not just the search for a new poetic idiom but a personal process of spiritual healing and regeneration.⁵ In his translation of “Three Stanzas from Goethe,” the poet shows us that “the self seeker finds nothing” except his own disease. But he goes on to pray:⁶

O Father of Love,
If your psaltery holds one tone
That his ear might echo,
Then quicken his heart.

The recognition of our neediness gives us a chance to see beyond ourselves to a larger nature, a more complete harmony. For Wright, the human soul is healed, is quickened, only when it steps beyond itself into the world, only when the self-seeker begins to seek another. At its source, the process of figuration in Wright's poems, I want to suggest, always partakes of this impulse to look beyond the limited, human self. A version of the Romantic quest motif that Peter Stitt traces in The Branch Will Not Break is at work at the most basic level of the poesis of Wright's poems.⁷

There is a rich heritage in American poetry for Wright's transformational poetic and what Charles Molesworth calls his “dissolving self.”⁸ Ultimately, Wright's poetry looks back to Emerson's “Nature” and to the twenty-fourth section of Whitman's “Song of Myself” with its unfolding vision of the human body as the body of the world, but it also stands in the more recent lines of Jeffers and Roethke.⁹ In his preface to “The Women at Point Sur,” the former poet wrote:

… “Humanity is the start of the race, the gate
to
                    break away from, the coal to kindle,
The blind mask crying to be slit with eye holes.(10)

Wright is a more generous poet than Jeffers, of course, and he never develops a harsh, quasi-evolutionary doctrine of Inhumanism. Wright, though, shares with Jeffers a belief that the human being is destined to give way to the natural and can only be fulfilled by doing so.

Wright probably hearkens back to Roethke more often than to any other poet, as especially to the Roethke of “The North American Sequence”:¹¹

The lost self changes,
turning toward the sea,
A sea shape turning around,—
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

In sequence after sequence, Roethke would make this loss of self a struggle and achievement of epic proportions, the heroic myth of our age. In Wright's poems, though, that same struggle and achievement are consciously reduced and redefined as the ordinary task, the task of the daily moment. Wright deliberately and firmly resists the temptation to the epic, and doing so is a mark of his faithfulness to his vision, a vision that moves between the modest and the miraculous.

II. THE BLESSING.

The human being is redeemed through a metaphorphosis, a metamorphosis in which a limited, partial, human self is abandoned and a larger, natural world is embraced as a source of meaning. It is in this context of metaphorphosis, I think, that we find the significance of his use of the deep image, of a language that so often makes a landscape out of subjective states. Wright does not turn to the landscape, to the world around us, simply in order to illustrate subjective moods. He does not see nature simply as a collection of spiritual symbols or—as some of his readers have suggested—as a means of writing a Jungian allegory of the psyche.¹² To be sure, Wright's landscape always has a richly symbolic content, but it is finally not so much an emblem of the soul as what the soul is destined to become. This transformative movement from the self to the world is apparent even in a poem as simple and unassuming as “I Was Afraid of Dying”:

Once,
I was afraid of dying
In a field of dry weeds.
But now,
All day long I have been walking among
damp fields,
Trying to keep still, listening
To insects that move patiently,
Perhaps they are sampling the fresh dew that
gathers slowly
In empty snail shells
And in the secret shelters of sparrow feathers fallen
on the earth.(13)

The poem depicts a spiritual change from the fear of death to the recognition of death as fullness, as the completion of life. The poem's straightforward, two-part structure reinforces that impression of change as we move from the short, clipped speech and past tense of “once” to the expansive rhythms and perfect tense of “now,” as we move from the barren dryness of the weeds to the lush dampness of the field. Most important, in this poem that deals with a change in spiritual state, is the attention which the speaker pays to the physical details of the new landscape. The poem clearly moves from the speaker's one-time mental conception of death as a “field of dry weeds” to his representation of an experience of an outer world. Whereas he once thought of death as a symbolic landscape, he now enters a living world.

He enters that world suddenly and inexplicably. In contrast to Ovid, for example, who often depicts his Metamorphoses step by step, and even to Whitman, who systematically unfolds the self to us in his poem, Wright most often moves immediately from a vision of the needy human being to a vision or intuition of the creature transformed. His poetry of leaping leaves something in mystery or silence; his poetry of leaping leaves us behind, leaves behind the fragmentary self and all it can understand. I think there is good reason for Wright's poetic strategy here: our neediness, he seems to be telling us, is finally a neediness of language; our neediness is our inability fully to speak of the world. The transformation that redeems the human being can only take place within an ordering of meanings, within a syntax, within a language beyond any we can understand. In a different context, Karl Jaspers tells us that the barrier between the self and Other can only be overcome, that we can only transcend ourselves “in an encounter with the world as cypher.” In such a meeting, “the world of phenomena becomes the cypher script of being.”¹⁴ We encounter, we state in wonder at the miraculous because we cannot decipher it.

“A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place” presents us with a sudden transformation. Appropriately, it is also a poem that alludes to the inadequacy of human language and the glyph-like character of the mysterious:¹⁵

I renounce the blindness of the magazines.
I want to lie down under a tree.
This is the only duty that is not death.
This is the everlasting happiness
Of small winds.
Suddenly,
A pheasant flutters, and I turn
Only to see him vanishing at the damp edge
Of the road.

In the scarcely comprehended glimpse of the pheasant the speaker attains a new order of vision. That new order of vision is emphatically partial: he does not see the pheasant or the pheasant-flying-away so much as the world-as-liberation, as liberation even from seeing. Appropriately, the poem can take us to the edge of the road, to the limits of human language, but no further. The wondrous sight lies beyond this.

Peter Stitt rightly suggests that “Fear Is What Quickens Me” is a poem about “The predatory destructiveness of America.”¹⁶ It is important, I think, that the poem ends not by finding a solution to that destructiveness but by transforming the speaker into a natural victim of it:¹⁷

1.
Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
They stared about wildly,
When the moon went dark.
The new moon falls into the freight yards
Of the cities in the south,
But the loss of the moon to the dark hands of Chicago
Does not matter to the deer
In this northern field.
2.
What is that tall woman doing
There in the trees?
I can hear rabbits and mourning doves whispering together
In the dark grass, there
Under the trees.
3.
I look about wildly.

Like “A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place,” this poem ends with an uncertain vision of wildness. The poet's inability in the previous poem to get a fix on the pheasant is complemented here by his inability to get a fix on his surroundings at all, indeed, by his inability even to get a fix on himself. The word “wildly” connotes the instinctual precision of the animals' quick (i.e. living) eyes; and the speaker's inability fully to understand the danger he is in leads him not simply to identify with but to give himself over to a larger, wilder, animal nature.¹⁸

Wright's most powerful poem is about the kinds of transformation we have been discussing:¹⁹

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no other loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

The poem is, of course, structured around the crossing of boundaries, of the road, of the barbed wire fence, of the speaker's human nature—it is a poem about “kindness” in its root meanings of “kin” and “kind.” Twilight is kin in its movement to horses; the horses' necks are kin in shape to the necks of those symboliste emblems of the poet, the monogamous swans. (And isn't the poem about the ultimate mono-gamy of all things!) The poet's touch mysteriously unites the human pulse of a girl's wrist with an animal's hearing. The poem's final, ecstatic moment may be—in the ease with which it draws together so many of these images—one of the most powerful intuitions of change in modern poetry.

The powerful simplicity of Wright's images contrasts, though, with the complexity of syntax and thought in the poem's final lines. To what extent, we naturally ask, is the poet's sudden realization literally a making-real? Why, we wonder, does the poet give us the emotionally most compelling moment of his poem in the form of a logical if-then construction, a construction which describes the relationship between something possible and something necessary? How, we finally ask and cannot know, is it possible to step out of the body in the first place? For this reader, the difficulty and miracle of Wright's poem lie not so much in the poem's final line, not so much in the figure of blossoming as in the ease with which the speaker can imagine stepping out of the body, in the fact that he can imagine it as an immediate possibility. The power of this poem lies in the speaker's imagining an ecstasy as possible. For him to imagine ecstasy is for him to be transformed.

III. DON'T WORRY.

In his posthumously published collection of poems, This Journey, Wright returns again and again to the theme of redemptive transformation. In “The Vestal in the Forum,” for example, he sees the processes of nature as artistic precisely insofar as they erode or un-do the work of man and lead us beyond the simply human:²⁰

This morning I do not despair
For the impersonal hatred that the cold
Wind seems to feel
When it slips fingers into the flaws
Of lovely things men made,
The shoulders of a stone girl
Pitted by winter.
Not a spring passes but the roses
Grown stronger in their support of the wind,
And now they are conquerors,
Not garlands any more,
Of this one face:
Dimming,
Clearer to me than most living faces.
The slow wind and the slow roses
Are ruining an eyebrow here, a mole there.
But in this little while
Before she is gone, her very haggardness
Amazes me. A dissolving
Stone, she seems to change from stone to something
Frail, to someone I can know, someone
I can almost name.

It is easy, I think, to see another version of the Pygmalion myth here. In contrast to the classical myth, though, the speaker of Wright's poem falls in love with the statue because and as it dissolves, as it comes less and less to resemble a human face. The poem's final line has a powerful irony in these terms, for the speaker almost recognizes the sculpture precisely at the moment in which it is about to become only so much natural stone devoid of human significance. Indeed, as nature erodes the sculpted figure even before the speaker's eyes, his language too undergoes a sort of erosion; we could even say that the erosive process of nature has been internalized. The speaker's soul is redeemed (he feels hope and not despair) because his soul has been penetrated like the stone and broken down.

“The Vestal in the Forum” is a characteristic poem of Wright's last book, a book in which the poet consistently looks beyond his own role as poet to the universal, destructive artistry of nature. And “The Vestal in the Forum” is not the only poem in the collection to allude to the metmorphoses of classical mythology. The spider—always reminiscent of Ovid's Arachne—plays an important role throughout the book as a figure of the poet in his encounter with mortality and death. In the collection's magnificent title poem the poet bends down to rinse the dust of Tuscany from his face. He discovers a spiderweb covered with dust, and a spider. He meditates:²¹

Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling. The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don't worry.

Whereas “The Blessing” culminated in an intuition of ecstasy, in a vision of the poet about to step out of himself, this poem ends with the world taking back its own. In her myth, Arachne is transformed into a spider by vengeful Pallas for too faithfully weaving the images of life. Wright longs for a similar transformation here, and indeed we see him being changed back into the earth out of which he was shaped in a veritable unmaking of the Genesis creation story. Wright is man (adamah) returning to the earth (adamah). The secret of the journey, Wright tells us, is to welcome that transformation, is simply not to hold on to the self.

Important, too, is the apostrophe of the poem's last line, is the fact that the poet finally turns his attention to us. It's appropriate for my paper to end here, with Wright's admonition, “don't worry.” That admonition involves us personally and immediately in the world of his poem, and in that way, it transforms us. Indeed, Wright seems almost to be consoling us.

Notes

1. Dave Smith, “That Halting, Stammering Moment,” in The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright (Urbana, 1982), p. 176.

2. Joseph McElrath, “Something to Be Said for the Light: A Conversation with James Wright”, Southern Humanities Review, VI (1972), 135.

3. See Wright's comment on poetics in Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey's The New Naked Poetry (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 478.

4. For Slater, see The Pursuit of Loneliness (New York, 1970); for Laing, The Divided Self (New York, 1979).

5. For the text of Smith's interview of Wright, see The Pure Clear Word, pp. 3-42. Smith notes that Wright “demanded the right to speak not as a persona or mask but as himself, a man in the midst of chaotic experience who means to achieve a cohesive view of the real.” Smith goes on to cite Wright's description of the poetic journey as “neither more nor less than the attempt to locate and reclaim those healing powers within oneself.” See The Pure Clear Word, pp. xix, xx-xxi.

6. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break (Middletown, 1959), p. 14.

7. Stitt argues convincingly that The Branch Will Not Break is structured around the quest motif (in The Pure Clear Word, pp. 65-77) but has little to say about how the motif informs the structure of individual poems. This essay tries, in part, to build on Stitt's very helpful work.

8. See “James Wright and the Dissolving Self,” Salmagundi, 22-23 (1973), 222-233.

9. For a discussion of Wright's relationship to Jeffers see David Dougherty, “Themes in Jeffers and James Wright,” Robinson Jeffers Newsletter 33 (1972), 7-11.

10. Robinson Jeffers, The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems (New York, 1977), p. 9.

11. Theodore Roethke, Collected Poems (New York, 1975), p. 201.

12. Dennis Haskell points to the use of a Jungian symbolism by all the deep image poets in “The Modern American Poetry of the Deep Image,” The Southern Review (Australia), 12 (1979), 139-66.

13. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break (Middletown, 1959), p. 56.

14. Karl Jaspers, Truth and Symbol (New Haven, 1959), p. 12.

15. Wright, The Branch Will Not Break, p. 51.

16. Peter Stitt, “The Quest Motif in The Branch Will Not Break,” in The Pure Clear Word, p. 71.

17. Wright, The Branch Will Not Break, p. 19.

18. I think Wright goes beyond what Stitt calls “an identification with” the animals. See “The Quest Motif …,” p. 72.

19. Wright, The Branch Will Not Break, p. 57.

20. James Wright, This Journey (New York, 1982), p. 15. I first suggest this reading of the poem in my review of This Journey in World Literature Today, 57, 1 (Winter, 1983).

21. James Wright, This Journey, pp. 30-31.