SOURCE: “Wright's Lyricism,” in The Southern Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, April, 1991, pp. 438-64.

[In the following essay, Scott explores Wright's lyricism, especially in the late prose poems.]

Above the River, which collects all of James Wright's poetry, coming as it does more than a decade after his death, reminds us of the stubborn persistency with which much of the poetry lasts. It is more frequently than not the case that the literary art that becomes immovably a part of the furniture of one's mind and spirit wins its place of settlement by reason of a pleasure it affords through the brilliant suasiveness with which it conducts a certain kind of argument. But this is a particular pleasure—offered, say, amongst the people of his generation by a Richard Wilbur or an Anthony Hecht—that is rarely to be come by in Wright's poetry, so greatly did he yield to that poetics of the “deep image” which he was persuaded to embrace by his friend Robert Bly.

In the late fifties and sixties when Mr. Bly was laying out his program he never revealed any real talent for theoretical formulation, and yet his various manifestos in the journal he edited (successively called The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies), though consistently marked by a windy sort of vagueness, proved to be remarkably successful in giving many young American poets of the time a sense of deliverance from the hegemony of that traditionalist formalism which had become, under the influence of the New Criticism, the reigning orthodoxy. He wanted poems “in which everything is said by image, and nothing by direct statement at all. The poem,” as he said, “is the images, images touching all the senses, uniting the world beneath and the world above.” But precision of definition regarding just what a “deep image” is was hard to come by. True, Mr. Bly registered an emphatic disapproval of the kind of Imagism classically instanced in William Carlos Williams' famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which says simply:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

Indeed, he declared the poetics of Imagism, as espoused at one or another point by such figures as Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, H.D., and Williams to be an affair of mere “picturism” which was calculated only to abort the true “poem in which the image is released from imprisonment among objects.” The deep image did not, in other words, posit a mimetic norm. But, beyond the proscription of any linear discursiveness and syntactical order, this new poetic of the sixties was highly nebulous and indeterminate. Paul Breslin is surely right in suggesting its hermeticism is little more than an attribution of “an inherent significance to a recurring symbolic vocabulary” and that learning to decipher the deep-image poem is “largely a matter of initiation into that vocabulary.”

Wright's poems, for example, are filled with ants, caterpillars, sparrows, finches, spiders, cicadas, roots, wings, stones, caves, bones, roots, darkness, the wind, and the moon. And it is with such an apparatus that deep-image poets—Bly and W. S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell and Charles Simic—have tended to work. But, of course, given their mistrust of the capacity of a rational poetic discourse to render, through regularity of meter, the rhythms of the collective unconscious, their procedure tends to be that of simply juxtaposing, say, stones and bones in the hope, as Cleanth Brooks remarked some years ago, that “the steel of the first will strike a spark from the flint of the second, and thus kindle the reader's imagination. But,” as Mr. Brooks said (in The Southern Review, Summer 1965), “my metaphor actually overstates the technique, for there is nothing in this poetry so violent as the striking of sparks. What is to happen is more nearly analogous to spontaneous combustion: the poet does no more than put one substance beside the other and leave the combustion to occur, or not to occur, in the reader's imagination”—as when Galway Kinnell in The Book of Nightmares bids us

                                                            to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones.

Wright's commitment to this mystique is clearly manifest, for example, in the kind of free-associational language employed in the Phi Beta Kappa poem which he read at the College of William and Mary in December of 1969:

The long body of his dream is the beginning of a dark
Hair under an illiterate
Girl's ear.

The first meeting between James Wright and Robert Bly did not occur, however, until the summer of 1958 by which time Wright's first collection of poems, The Green Wall, had already been issued by the Yale University Press in its Series of Younger Poets, and he had also then completed the manuscript of his second volume, Saint Judas, which was to be published by the Wesleyan University Press in 1959. He had happened to come upon the first issue of The Fifties, which Mr. Bly had begun to edit from his farm in Minnesota, and, as he said in an interview with Peter Stitt in the spring of 1972, by way of response he sent Robert Bly a sixteen-page letter to which the reply was but a single sentence—“Come on out to the farm.” Wright's journeying for their first encounter into the western part of the state from Minneapolis (where he was then teaching at the University of Minnesota) marked the beginning of one of the great friendships of his life.

Now the frequently reiterated view says that it was under Robert Bly's influence that Wright forsook the metrical regularities and rhymes and quasi-metaphysical intensities of the kind of poème bien fait to the pattern of which much of the work in The Green Wall and Saint Judas had been cut, and thus a radical change in the general tonality of his work is declared to have been signalized by his book of 1963, The Branch Will Not Break. This is an assessment which over-dramatizes the sort of development that this phase of his career underwent. For already such a poem as “At the Executed Murderer's Grave” in Saint Judas, as one looks at it from the perspective of his later years, presages Wright's movement toward the “surrealism” of the deep image. At the grave of an executed Ohio rapist and murderer, George Doty, he reflects on how, when “the princes of the sea come down / To lay away their robes, to judge the earth / And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere, / … My sneaking crimes”—and yours!, hypocrite lecteur!, mon semblable!, mon frère!—will be found to be inseparably entangled with Doty's. His language, though rhymed and metrically ordered, is rough-cast and craggy, and then the final strophe says:

Doty, the rapist and the murderer,
Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear;
And where, in earth or hell's unholy peace,
Men's suicides will stop, God knows, not I.
Angels and pebbles mock me under trees.
Earth is a door I cannot even face.
Order be damned, I do not want to die,
Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe.
The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief.
(Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!)
I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,
Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness.
Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face
Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief:
Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.

In lines such as these Wright begins to forswear expositional discourse, begins to abandon logical connectives between images and to rely simply on images themselves for the conveyance of his meanings. Or, again, it is a similar bravura, in an even extremer form, that one notices in “The Quail” in The Green Wall, where he says:

The blue dusk bore feathers beyond our eyes,
Dissolved all wings as you, your hair dissolved,
Your frame of bone blown hollow as a house
Beside the path, were borne away from me
Farther than birds for whom I did not care,
Commingled with the dark complaining air.

But, of course, by the time he issued The Branch Will Not Break, as a result of his tutelage under such poets as Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Guillén, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Georg Trakl and through the influence of Robert Bly, this tendency had been greatly radicalized, though he was surely not without justification in resisting the suggestion (as he did in an interview for the Southern Humanities Review in 1970) that there is an absolute break between the idioms of The Green Wall and Saint Judas and the books that followed.

What it may be most important to remark, however, is that, for all Wright's commitment to the poetics of the deep image, his immense compassion for the poor and the unlucky and the disprized and his obsession with certain aspects of the American landscape could never allow him to elect any sort of enclosure within the infinite subjectivity of his own inwardness or to regard the external world as a mere assemblage of stimuli for poetic reverie. In the seventh of the Duino Elegies Rilke says: “Nirgends, Geliebte, wird Welt sein als innen”—“Nowhere, beloved, will be world but within.” And this, in a way, is what the poetry of W. S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell and Mark Strand and Robert Bly says: that the locus of the real is to be found not in the realm of men and beasts and mountains and stars but in that invisible world of the soul's inwardness into which it is the vocation of the poet to gather the things and creatures of the visible world. Wright, however, in his best moments is preserved from that solipsism courted by the deep-image poets in their fealty to what Hegel in his Aesthetik denominated “absolute inwardness”—and what saves him is simply the sanity of a tough, commonsensical intelligence and the deep impress upon his sensibility of certain American places and human types to which he was so anchored as never to have been able to desert them merely for the sake of descending into the depths of the psyche.

The opening passage of “At the Executed Murderer's Grave” says:

My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,
In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.
He tried to teach me kindness. I return
Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,
To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,
Had I not run away before my time.

That region of southern Ohio which is separated from West Virginia by the Ohio River had so deeply formed his sense of the world that the meditations recorded by the poetry rarely veer away from it for long. Indeed, this valley in which he grew up in the 1930s and early '40s, with its grimy factories and polluted air and water and with its landscape fearfully bruised and blasted by rampant strip mining, appears to have become for him the very definition of hell itself:

… the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.
And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

“My rotted Ohio, / It was only a little while ago / That I learned the meaning of your name. / The Winnebago gave you your name, Ohio, / And Ohio means beautiful river.” But today, as he reminds us in “Three Sentences for a Dead Swan” in Shall We Gather at the River (1968), the Ohio River is in fact, like William Carlos Williams' “filthy Passaic,” a thing of slops and slime “that is no tomb to / Rise from the dead / From.” So he does not find it at all surprising that “the good men who lived along that shore” in Martins Ferry, sensing that the Ohio River was dying, should (under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration) have chosen to dig a swimming pool for their families—which gives him the anecdote that is recounted in the beautiful poem in Two Citizens (1973), “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio”:

                                                                                                                        Uncle Sherman,
Uncle Willie, Uncle Emerson, and my father
Helped dig that hole in the ground.
I had seen by that time two or three
Holes in the ground,
And you know what they were.
But this one was not the usual, cheap
Economics, it was not the solitary
Scar on a poor man's face, that respectable
Hole in the ground you used to be able to buy
After you died for seventy-five dollars and
Your wages tacked for six months by the Heslop
Brothers. …
No, this hole was filled with water,
And suddenly I flung myself into the water.
All I had on was a jockstrap my brother stole
From a miserable football team.
Oh never mind, Jesus Christ, my father
And my uncles dug a hole in the ground,
No grave for once. It is going to be hard
For you to believe; when I rose from that water,
A little girl who belonged to somebody else,
A face thin and haunted appeared
Over my left shoulder, and whispered, Take care now,
Be patient, and live.

So the poetry is to be found sometimes sadly sighing and sometimes ferociously declaring that Ohio is a “dead place,” and it presents a variety of people—waifs and outcasts of one sort or another—who in diverse ways have been twisted and broken by the desolation of this midwestern backwater. But, amongst the large gallery of portraits it presents, there are many which are devoted to those who front the surrounding deadness with a quiet heroism and an unshakable decency and generosity of spirit. In, for example, the moving prose poem included in To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977), “The Flying Eagles of Troop 62,” Wright remembers his Scoutmaster back in Martins Ferry, Ralph Neal, who

… knew all about the pain of the aching stones in our twelve-year-old groins, the lava swollen halfway between our peckers and our nuts that were still green and sour as half-ripe apples two full months before the football season began. …

I think Ralph Neal loved us for our scrawniness, our acne, our fear; but mostly for his knowledge of what would probably become of us. He was not a fool. He knew he would never himself get out of that slime hole of a river valley, and maybe he didn't want to. …

Some of us wanted to get out, and some of us wanted to and didn't. …

When I think of Ralph Neal's name, I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me. … I feel a rush of long fondness for that good man Ralph Neal, that good man who knew us dreadful and utterly vulnerable little bastards better than we knew ourselves, who took care of us better than we took care of ourselves, and who loved us, I reckon, because he knew damned well what would become of most of us, and it sure did, and he knew it, and he loved us anyway. The very name of America often makes me sick, and yet Ralph Neal was an American.

Or, again, in the poem entitled simply “Paul” in Two Citizens Wright recalls the days of his boyhood in Martins Ferry:

Plenty of times
I ran around in the streets in that small
Place. I didn't know what in hell
Was happening to me.
I had a pretty good idea
It was hell.

He speaks of a day when he was picked up by a man named Paul, who drove a “cracked truck.” Paul said, “Come on, / Get in, and we drove down to Brookside.” He remembers the affectionate concern that Paul expressed when he got “a speck of coal” in his eye, and he says:

You were making less than twenty dollars a week.
You drove that cracked truck down to Brookside
                    lovelier and friendlier
Than Alcaeus loving Sappho.
You wouldn't even know what I'm talking about.
I wouldn't even know what you're talking about.
By God, I know this much:
When a fine young man is true to his true love
And can face out a fine deep shock on his jaw
(That scar so low off, that true scar of love),
And when a man can stand up in the middle of America
(That brutal and savage place whom I still love),
Never mind your harangues about religion.
Anybody could pick me up out of the street
Is good to me, I would like to be good
To you, too, good man.

Repeatedly, Wright elegized the steadfast gentleness and selfless beneficence of his father:

My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps
Of dumb honyaks.
Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?
Maybe. But my brother and I do know
He came home as quiet as the evening.

But, though such figures are gratefully remembered as having graced his “native country” of southern Ohio, he, even at the end of his life—in the poem “A Flower Passage” in the posthumous volume This Journey (1982)—marveled “That for some hidden reason nobody raped / To death” in Martins Ferry “The still totally unbelievable spring beauty” that Maytime brought each year.

So asperities abound when Ohio is in view, for it makes Wright think

                              of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

Its men are so enervated by their hard, dehumanizing labor as cogs of the modern industrial machine that they

                                        are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

In the logic of his symbolism Ohio stands, in short, as a figura of all those bright promises held forth by the American Dream that have been broken, and thus he faces it with a fierce kind of reproachfulness and wrath.

But crabbedness and acerbity do not define the predominating tone and spirit of Wright's poetry, as we will be reminded, for example, by the beautiful poem in The Branch Will Not Break, “Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem”:

As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying
This is what I wanted.

Or one will think of another poem in the same volume, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”—to which one ought perhaps to bring some recollection of Hawthorne's story, “The Artist of the Beautiful,” which concerns a young man, Owen Warland, who, in a difficult moment of his life, falls into the habit of chasing butterflies “through the woods and fields, and along the banks of streams. … There was something truly mysterious in the intentness with which he contemplated these living playthings, as they sported on the breeze.” But his sober, industrious neighbors were not pleased. “He wasted the sunshine, as people said. …” Which is the great line that, when summoned up in memory, will enable us properly to read Wright's poem:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Some commentators on this poem have expressed a sense of shock at the suddenness with which a tranquil bucolic reverie is interrupted by what appears to be the harshest kind of self-accusation—“I have wasted my life”—which is felt to have no organic relation to all that precedes it. But they fail to notice the playful irony with which the poet speaks in the final line. To be sure, he is speaking confessionally, but not in a spirit of self-reproach. Like William Blake, he says in effect: “Damn braces, bless relaxes.” He suggests there is a certain ultimate dimension in the life of the human spirit in which strenuousness is of no avail, that true sanity of mind is not won by grabbing at this and that—and he confesses that he has chosen to “waste” his life (sometimes in a hammock), in something like the way Hawthorne's Owen Warland “wastes the sunshine.” He confesses he has chosen such an exigent discipline as is exacted by a truly intransitive attentiveness before the things and creatures of earth—butterflies asleep on a tree, cowbells following one another into the distances of the afternoon, the droppings of last year's horses blazed up into golden stones, or a chicken hawk floating over as it looks for home.

In Wright's own sense of his development it was to the Austrian poet Georg Trakl more than to anyone else that he was most deeply indebted for the discipline of opening one's eyes, of being silent and listening and waiting patiently, as he phrased it in a brief essay on Trakl, “for the inward bodies of things to emerge, for the inward voices to whisper.” By the early sixties The Branch Will Not Break made it clearly evident that his meditations were increasingly guided by such a discipline, and nowhere to more brilliant effect than in the great poem entitled “A Blessing”:

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 loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I should 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,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
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.

It is difficult to specify what makes this poem so deeply affecting: it may be the utter surprise we are made to feel at the strange way in which, beginning as it does, it ends where it does. The opening phrase is ever so casual and matter-of-fact—“Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota.” But, then, immediately the independent clause that follows plunges us into a world of wonder and enchantment, where “Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.” And the spell instantly cast is no doubt consequent upon the radicality with which the poem jettisons anything resembling a subject-object dualism. As the speaker and his friend step over the barbed wire and enter the pasture, the purity of attention that they bestow upon these two Indian ponies is so unmenacing that the ponies, despite their shyness, walk over to them, as if bidden unto a relationship of complete reciprocity. The speaker finds “the slenderer one” nuzzling his left hand. He caresses her long ear—“delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist”—and, suddenly, he knows that, were he to step out of his body, he would “break / Into blossom”: in this moment in which the frontier line between nature and the human order is wholly transcended the spirit of the visitor literally flowers, and the poem itself becomes, as James Breslin so aptly observes, “a corridor … that opens a passageway between self and world.”

This lambent, gentle lyricism—so characteristically expressed in such a poem as “A Blessing”—is very much to the fore in Wright's late work, in To a Blossoming Pear Tree and This Journey, but it is also shaping many of the poems in Shall We Gather at the River, his book of 1968. And, there, in such a poem as “Brush Fire,” one cannot but remark how reminiscent his accent is of his early mentor, Theodore Roethke, particularly in his devotion to what Roethke called “the small things” of the world:

In this field,
Where the small animals ran from a brush fire,
It is a voice
In burned weeds, saying
I love you.
Still, when I go there,
I find only two gray stones,
And, lying between them,
A dead bird the color of slate.
It lies askew in its wings,
Its throat bent back as if at the height of some joy too great
To bear to give.
And the lights are going out
In a farmhouse, evening
Stands, in a gray frock, silent, at the far side
Of a raccoon's grave.

But in one important particular the general perspective of the poet of Shall We Gather at the River differs very considerably from that of Roethke, for Roethke's “minimalism,” his responsiveness to “littles,” to weeds and worms and moles and snails, tends to shut out of his poetry the hard, tough, concrete social realities that belong to the common experience of the daily round—whereas these are never lost sight of in Wright's book of 1968, which makes us feel that he was constantly impelled to test, as it were, “the visionary gleam” (as Wordsworth spoke of it) against the intractable circumstances of life in the workaday world. So, for example, in “Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store” the speaker recounts his experience of humiliation in the credit office of a Minneapolis department store by his inability to clear up an indebtedness:

The beautiful cashier's white face has risen once more
Behind a young manager's shoulder.
They whisper together, and stare
Straight into my face.
I feel like grabbing a stray child
Or a skinny old woman
And driving into a cellar, crouching
Under a stone bridge, praying myself sick,
Till the troops pass.
Why should he care? He goes.
I slump deeper.
In my frayed coat, I am pinned down
By debt. He nods,
Commending my flesh to the pity of the daws of God.

Or, again, a similar experience in “In Terror of Hospital Bills”:

I still have some money
To eat with, alone
And frightened, knowing how soon
I will waken a poor man.
It snows freely and freely hardens
On the lawns of my hope, my secret
Hounded and flayed. I wonder
What words to beg money with. …
Soon I am sure to become so hungry
I will have to leap barefoot through gas-fire veils of shame,
I will have to stalk timid strangers
On the whorehouse corners. …
I will learn to scent the police,
And sit or go blind, stay mute, be taken for dead
For your sake, oh my secret,
My life.

In an interview with Michael André in 1972 Wright was asked if such poems had been “taken from life,” and he said:

The one in the drunk tank [“Inscription for the Tank”] and “In Terror of Hospital Bills,” yes, that's right. I didn't have enough money to pay a hospital bill, and it's very frightening. And the one about not being able to pay my bill at, what the Hell's the name of that department store in Minneapolis? Of course, I got out of that very easily, but I realized after their fish eye that there were a lot of people who weren't going to go back as a professor at a university. As Huck Finn's father said, “He was a professor at a college.” There are plenty of people who can't do that, and I just got a flash of that, in the moment. And it's no goddam joke, to have people look at you like that.

The admission of this gritty reality into such poems as “The Minneapolis Poem,” “Gambling in Stateline, Nevada,” “The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter,” “Willy Lyons,” and “The River Down Home” gives a special power to Shall We Gather at the River, particularly as this strain feeds and wins incorporation into a lyricism that, though not unaware of what is stained and broken and scurvy in the human actuality, can yet take wing—as in the concluding strophe of “The Minneapolis Poem”:

I want to be lifted up
By some great white bird unknown to the police,
And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden
Modest and golden as one last corn grain,
Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives
Of the unnamed poor.

Among Wright's most impressive achievements are the thirty-one “New Poems” in his Collected Poems of 1971. In one, “Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black Child,” he says:

The kind of poetry I want to write is
                    The poetry of a grown man.
The young poets of New York come to me with
Their mangled figures of speech,
But they have little pity
For the pure clear word.
I know something about the pure clear word,
Though I am not yet a grown man.

It was indeed “the pure clear word” of which, by this stage in his career, Wright was beginning unmistakably to be in full command. One of the most poignant of the “New Poems”—“Small Frogs Killed on the Highway”—puts us in view of what Hank Lazer has remarked (in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1983) as a central motif in the late poetry:

Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
If I had the chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know.
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.
Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Of the moon. They can't see,
Not yet.

Increasingly evident, “light” was for Wright an image of the Sublime: he thought of it as a figura of Glory, what eye hath not seen nor ear heard, what the tongue can stammer only brokenly but which, in its splendor, overwhelms the heart. So great is its allurement that, when little frogs on a highway at night see light, they leap at it. The pity is that the light they are facing comes from oncoming automobiles by which they will be overrun. Yet, as the poet says, were I a frog, “I would leap too.”

Theodore Roethke exclaimed: “To have the whole air! / The light, the full sun. …” One imagines Wright also wanted to exclaim, “Oh, the light! the light!” In, for example, “A Letter to Franz Wright,” one of his prose poems addressed to his son, he speaks of having visited with his second wife Annie “a place in Tuscany in late autumn” that could be reached only by a very circuitous journey. Midway, they “finally found the sign” which they needed—San Gimignano. Then they “drove up, and up, and around, and up, and around, and up again, till we found ourselves picking our way in semi-darkness. … It was almost like being in Ohio, and I felt a momentary convulsion of homesickness”:

Then we emerged on a town square, not a very large one as piazzas go, and checked in at a hotel over in the corner. The town seemed pleasant enough. We were road-weary and hungry. We stepped a few doors down the street to a trattoria for a small late meal, and went back to bed.

The next morning Annie rose first, opened the curtained doors to bright sunlight, and went out on the balcony. I thought I heard her gasp. When she came back into the room again, she looked a little pale, and said, “I don't believe it.”

San Gimignano is poised hundreds of feet in the air. The city is comparatively small, and it is perfectly formed. We felt ourselves strange in that presence, that city glittering there in the lucid Tuscan morning, like a perfectly cut little brilliant sparkling on the pinnacle of a stalagmite.

Oh, the light! the light!

Another prose poem with an Italian setting, “The Turtle Overnight,” speaks of Wright's experience one evening of watching an old turtle taking “a pleasant bath in his natural altogether”:

When it began to rain, he appeared in his accustomed place and emerged from his accustomed place and emerged from his shell as far as he could reach—feet, legs, tail, head. He seemed to enjoy the rain, the sweet-tasting rain that blew all the way across lake water to him from the mountains, the Alto Adige. … All the legendary faces of broken old age disappeared from my mind, the thickened muscles under the chins, the nostrils brutal with hatred, the murdering eyes. He filled my mind with a sweet-tasting mountain rain, his youthfulness, his modesty as he washed himself all alone, his religious face.

Then the next morning Wright from his window watches the old turtle lying in the grass below, as he lifts his face toward the sun. “It is a raising of eyebrows toward the light, an almost imperceptible turning of the chin, an ancient pleasure, an eagerness.” But after a time the turtle leaves, and Wright cannot descry even the merest “footprint in the empty grass. So much air left, so much sunlight, and still he is gone.” Thus the poem ends, with something like a sigh of wonderment at the turtle's departure. Yet, while he lingered in the grass, he, as he lifted his face upward, made a perfect example of docile and reverent acceptance of the grace and glory that indwell the world.

Or, again, in one of the most beautiful poems in This Journey, the poem which is itself entitled “The Journey,” Wright says:

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.

Recurrently in the late poems he discloses in various ways how ineluctably he was drawn to that mysterium tremendum et fascinans which was for him imaged forth in light. So committed was he to the deep image that Wright's poetry is rarely touched by systematic ideas, and thus the trance into which he can be quickly thrown by his intoxication with the Sublime is never conceptualized in terms that would allow its formal explication. No doubt this mystical strain in his sensibility is a type of “natural supernaturalism,” but his reticence makes it difficult to measure just what his religious vision entailed; yet one often feels Wright wanted to approximate the word of the seventeenth-century poet and mystic, Thomas Traherne, that “Eternity … [is] manifest in the light of the day.” Indeed, it would appear that the unconfessed assumption underlying much of the late poetry is expressed in Traherne's Centuries:

Your enjoyment of the World is never right, till you so esteem it, that everything in it is more your treasure than a King's exchequer full of Gold and Silver. …

Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father's Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. …

Yet further, you never enjoy the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. … The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. …

The riches of the Light are the Works of God which are the portion and inheritance of His sons, to be seen and enjoyed in Heaven and Earth, the Sea, and all that is therein: the Light and the Day, great and fathomless in use and excellency, true, necessary, freely given. …

In the last decade of his life Wright fell deeply in love with Italy, and one important meditation prompted by his various Italian experiences is in Two Citizens, “Bologna: A Poem about Gold.” He recalls the hours in Bologna he spent gazing at Raphael's St. Cecilia. His attention was chiefly captivated not by St. Cecilia, for it strikes him that, in Raphael's rendering, she is one who simply stands “in the center of a blank wall,” “Smirking” and “Adoring / Herself.” No, it is Mary Magdalene, positioned at the far right of Raphael's canvas, by whom he was most deeply stirred. She, he says, “the lowly and richest of all women eyes / Me the beholder, with a knowing sympathy.” She is, of course, said to have been a prostitute, but St. Luke's Gospel tells us her many sins were forgiven, “for she loved much” (Luke 7:47), and she became one of Jesus's most steadfast followers. She was, though “lowly … [yet] richest of all women,” and Wright says:

Oh,
She may look sorry to Cecilia
And
The right-hand saint on the tree,
But
She didn't look sorry to Raphael,
And
I bet she didn't look sorry to Jesus,
And
She doesn't look sorry to me.
(Who would?)
She doesn't look sorry to me.

Indeed, in the old church in which Raphael's great canvas hangs, he is moved to address an apostrophe to his beloved Horace: “Give me this time, my first and severe / Italian, a poem about gold, / … And the heavy wine …, / The glass that so many have drunk from.” In the idiom of the poem, Mary Magdalene was herself “gold,” pure gold, and she kept a great “love / For the golden body of the earth.” But the poem is also about the “White wine of Bologna” whose actual color is golden, and in this church it is natural for a man of Protestant background, forgetting that Catholics usually receive only the eucharistic wafer at the communion rail, to think of the chalices filled with the golden wine of Bologna “that so many have drunk from” over generations. (It is a pardonable mistake of one whose nurture in southern Ohio was Baptist!) And, moreover, quite apart from its use in the Missa Fidelium, his own private enheartening by the great local wine is for him a foremost fact of his time in the city:

I have brought my bottle back home every day
To the cool cave, and come forth
Golden on the left corner
Of a cathedral's wing. …

So it makes a splendid kind of sense for Wright to conclude this poem about gold, about how much Mary “looks like only the heavy deep gold,” by exclaiming:

Mary in Bologna, sunlight I gathered all morning
And pressed in my hands all afternoon
And drank all day with my golden-breasted
Love in my arms.

Gold was Mary Magdalene, gold is the wine of Bologna which may be used not only as one species of the Christian sacrament but also as a catalyst of erotic communion (“with my golden-breasted / Love”), gold is the sunlight which is the medium of theophany—which allows the poem to assert the essential coinherence of the sacred and the profane. This vision of the unsunderable unity of nature, man, and God informs and underlies the poems in Wright's last books, To a Blossoming Pear Tree and This Journey.

Among the “New Poems” included in the Collected Poems of 1971 there is one entitled “A Secret Gratitude” in the course of which Wright says:

Man's heart is the rotten yolk of a blacksnake egg
Corroding, as it is just born, in a pile of dead
Horse dung.
I have no use for the human creature.
He subtly extracts pain awake in his own kind.
I am born one, out of an accidental hump of chemistry.
I have no use.

But the kind of sour, black sentimentality expressed here, though it frequently disfigures his earlier work, rarely appears in Shall We Gather at the River and Two Citizens. In an essay on Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd Wright said of Hardy's protagonist Gabriel Oak: “… we find Oak a man of deep and serene feeling. He is always surrounded by things which fill him with inexorable affection, and with which, at last, he becomes miraculously identified: sheep, dogs, plants, trees. …” So it tends to be with the poet of To a Blossoming Pear Tree and This Journey. True, the world sometimes appears to him to be a very imperfect place—and yet, often when least expected, he finds things to be strangely suffused with light. In “Beautiful Ohio,” the final poem of Blossoming Pear Tree, he recalls how, as a boy, he would sit on a railroad tie above a sewer main. Earlier, the remembrance of what this great pipe disgorged into the Ohio River would have occasioned a savage indictment of an industrial society's pollution of the natural environment; he now considers the noisome discharge of that sewer main to have shone with “the speed of light,” since its way of quickening the river revealed something of what is primitively marvelous in that ceaseless flux that feeds and sustains the essential dynamism of the world. Indeed, as he thinks of the 16,500 people “more or less” who dwelt in his hometown, Martins Ferry, and, as he thinks of how that sewer pipe was lit up with radiance, he says:

And the light caught there
The solid speed of their lives
In the instant of that waterfall.
I know what we call it
Most of the time.
But I have my own song for it,
And sometimes, even today,
I call it beauty.

Or, again, the glory wherewith the world is charged flames out for Wright in his late phase in even the merest insect. In “To the Cicada” (This Journey) he remembers how on an Ohio field at twilight he listened to cicadas singing:

Still, now, I hear you, singing,
A lightness beginning among the dark crevices,
In the underbark of the locust, beyond me,
The other edge of the field.
A lightness,
You begin tuning up for your time,
Twilight, that belongs to you, deeper and cooler beyond
The barbed wire of this field, even beyond
The Ohio River twenty-five miles away,
Where the Holy Rollers rage all afternoon
And all evening among the mud cracks, …
But you, lightness,
Light flesh singing lightly,
Trembling in perfect balance on the underbark,
The locust tree of the southeast, you, friendly
To whatever sings in me as it climbs and holds on
Among the damp brambles:
You, lightness,
How were you born in this place, this heavy stone
Plummeting into the stars? …
You, lightness, kindlier than my human body,
Yet somehow friendly to the music in my body. …

But nell'ultima parte del cammin di sua vita Wright swayed and vibrated not merely with cicadas and spiders and lightning bugs and moor birds and turtles, for ever so much more frequently than in his earlier years he found his human neighbors also to be vessels and conduits of grace. One thinks of the prose poem, “The Silent Angel,” in Blossoming Pear Tree which speaks of Wright's having taken a bus out of Verona and having seen a man “standing in one of the pink marble arches at the base of the great Roman Arena”:

He smiled at me, a gesture of the utmost sweetness, such as a human face can rarely manage to shine with, even a beloved face that loves you in return.

He seemed dressed like a musician, as well he might have been, emerging for a moment into the sunlight from one of the secluded and cool rehearsal chambers of the upper tiers of the Arena.

As the bus driver powered his motor and drew us slowly around the great public square, the Piazza Bra, the man in the half-golden rose shadow of the Arena kept his gaze on my face. He waved goodbye to me, his knowing eyes never leaving me as long as he could still see any of me at all, though how long that was I don't precisely know.

He raised his hand at the last moment to wave me out of Verona as kindly as he could. …

The musician had not played me a single tune, he had not sung me a single song. He just waved me as gently as he could on the way out, the way that is my own, the lost way.

I suppose I asked for it. And he did his best, I suppose. He owns that heavenly city no more than I do. He may be fallen, as I am. But from a greater height, unless I miss my guess.

Precisely such experiences in his late years lead Wright toward the deeply affecting poem, “To a Blossoming Pear Tree.” He contemplates the splendid self-sufficiency of this blooming tree which, as it stands “without trembling,” appears to be “unburdened / By anything but … [its] beautiful natural blossoms,” and the very nonchalance of its self-containment prompts him to feel that it is quite “beyond my reach”:

How I envy you.
For if you could only listen,
I would tell you something,
Something human.

Here his story of graciousness concerns an encounter he had had years earlier, when an old homosexual, ashamed and hopeless, paused on a Minneapolis street and stroked his face, declaring in his desperation that he would “pay … anything.” “Both terrified, / We slunk away, / Each in his own way dodging / The cruel darts of the cold”:

… He was so near death
He was willing to take
Any love he could get,
Even at the risk
Of some mocking policeman
Or some cute young wiseacre
Smashing his dentures,
Perhaps leading him on
To a dark place and there
Kicking him in his dead groin
Just for the fun of it.

This young tree, of course, could not “possibly / Worry or bother or care / About the ashamed, hopeless / Old man,” for it knows nothing of the terrors and desolateness that win tenancy within the human heart, but, says Wright, “the dark / Blood in my body drags me / Down with my brother.” One's neighbor, whoever he or she may be, makes an unignorable claim on one's sympathy and understanding—to disregard which is to diminish one's own selfhood.

Despite what appears to be implied by “To a Blossoming Pear Tree,” Wright does not intend to posit absolute disjunction between the human order and the natural world. A pear tree may not be able to “listen” to a story of “something human,” but this is not to say that there is no point of union or contact between nature and the human spirit—which is what “A Blessing” and “Brush Fire” and “Milkweed” and numerous other poems want very much to insist upon. One will think, for example, of the late prose poem “A Reply to Matthew Arnold” which carries an epigraph drawn from Arnold's early sonnet, “In Harmony with Nature”: “‘In harmony with Nature?’ Restless fool … Nature and man can never be fast friends.” Wright wants to say that, notwithstanding Arnold's word of denigration, he is himself just such a fool. Wright describes preparing to leave the Italian coast town of Fano, after a happy visit of five days, when he brought a “wild chive flower down from a hill pasture” and, in the manner of a farewell salute, offered it to the Adriatic—as a “fast friend”:

I am not about to claim that the sea does not care. It has its own way of receiving seeds, and today the sea may as well have a flowering one, with a poppy to float above it, and the Venetian navy underneath. Goodbye to the living place, and all I ask it to do is to stay alive.

True, many think of the sea as a place of turbulence and perishing, as (in the words of Melville's Ishmael) “a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs,” says Ahab's young probationer, “so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it.” But though there is “the Venetian navy underneath,” Wright chooses not “to claim that the sea does not care.” “It has its own way of receiving seeds,” and it “may as well have a flowering one, with a poppy to float above it.” He speaks without any abeyance of the sympathy with which he regularly approaches the things of nature.

Such a pietas almost unintermittently informs Wright's late poems. Everywhere there is “light,” and, since things “shine,” he himself shines. In “Lightning Bugs Asleep in the Afternoon” (This Journey) he remarks these “fluttering jewels,” “this little circle of insects / Common as soot, clustering on dim stone, / Together with their warm secrets.” And then he says:

I think I am going to leave them folded And sleeping in their slight gray wings. I think I am going to climb back down And open my eyes and shine.

Or, again in the prose poem “The Secret of Light” (Blossoming Pear Tree), as he sits “alone in a little park near the Palazzo Scaligere in Verona, glimpsing the mists of early autumn as they shift and fade among the pines and city battlements on the hills above the river Adige,” he turns his face toward this beloved river and thinks: “It is all right with me to know that my life is only one life. I feel like the light of the river Adige.” In the closing poem of This Journey, “A Winter Daybreak above Vence,” he is at dawn looking down at the valley below, and he hears “the startled squawk / Of a rooster” and “The gumming snarl of some grouchy dog.” The “night still hangs on,” but the break of day is coming, so that here and there things below begin to take form. He hears “a bucket rattle or something, tinny, / No other stirring behind the dim face / Of the goatherd's house,” and he imagines that the herdsman's “goats are still sleeping, dreaming. …” But then, after a time, he finds himself “On top of the sunlight”:

I turn, and somehow
Impossibly hovering in the air over everything,
The Mediterranean, nearer to the moon
Than this mountain is,
Shines. A voice clearly
Tells me to snap out of it. Galway
Mutters out of the house and up the stone stairs
To start the motor. The moon and the stars
Suddenly flicker out, and the whole mountain
Appears, pale as a shell.
Look, the sea has not fallen and broken
Our heads. How can I feel so warm
Here in the dead center of January? I can
Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is
The only life I have. I get up from the stone.
My body mumbles something unseemly
And follows me. Now we are all sitting here strangely
On top of the sunlight.

To be on “top of the sunlight” is, in the manner of St. Francis of Assisi, to call all creatures by the name of brother and to declare (with Thomas Traherne) that one is “pleased with all that God hath done.” James Wright, as he matured, increasingly found the world, often in even the unlikeliest places, to be suffused with “light.”

True, anger and despondency and despair appear in Wright's poetry and he sometimes seems to have lost the Good Place, but he sees time and again to that point of vantage from which he can discern that what is ultimately called for is a resounding affirmation that ours is a dispensation “immeasurably good.” As he said in the closing poem of Two Citizens, “… I ain't much. / The one tongue I can write in / Is my Ohioan.” His lyricism was never a thing of suave, easy mellifluousness. In “Among Sunflowers,” from This Journey, he says simply: “Any creature would be a fool to take the sun lightly,” and the song Wright always wants to sing is regularly rendered in such a plainspoken parlance. So capably does it carry its freight of naked feeling that for the young in the 1960s and 70s he spoke more persuasively and movingly than did perhaps any other American poet of the time.

It is this entire career that is wonderfully brought before us by the handsomely published new edition of his poems with a moving memoir-introduction by Donald Hall. Above the River collects not only all of the poetry but also Wright's many splendid translations of work by Juan Ramón Jiménez and Jorge Guillén and Pablo Neruda and Georg Trakl and numerous others. What asks now for happy acknowledgment is the perduring strength of his legacy. Few will refuse James Wright that.