James Wright is not generally thought of as a visionary poet. The imagery of his poems has always been grounded in matter-of-fact realities, whether the plains and white houses of the Midwest in his earlier books or, more recently, factories and large cities. The poems are almost weighed down by physical details: Wright is careful to tell his readers which hand he uses to stroke a horse, what kind of tree he is standing under while he looks at a field. Nonetheless, in many of his best poems he is equally preoccupied with the spiritual world behind appearance; his best books, The Branch Will Not Break and Shall We Gather at the River, begin in this world and end in the other world.

These books differ so greatly in imagery and tone that it is necessary to look at them separately, but they have one thing in common in that each embodies a traditional myth of the other world. The Branch Will Not Break contains many images of the Earthly Paradise, while Shall We Gather at the River builds up a counter-myth of the Ohio River as the river of the dead. The differences in tone and imagery flow from the differences between these two myths. In The Branch Will Not Break every object can be seen as holy if only the persona of the poems can gain the insight to look at things properly; at any moment he might encounter “delicate creatures / From the other world,”¹ or his own body might “break into blossom.”² But in the later book the other world is localized and cut off from such possibilities. It is on the other side of the Ohio River, the side that can be reached only by death. Because the spiritual world is no longer within the natural world, physical life in Shall We Gather at the River is unrelievedly grim, while the natural world of The Branch Will Not Break is essentially pastoral.

Wright announces this pastoral theme with the epigraph of The Branch Will Not Break, lines from Heine's “Aus alten Märchen winkt es” in which the poet longs for the sight of the “land of delight” he knows from dreams and from “old fairy-tales.”³ This land, the traditional Earthly Paradise, will free him from all pain and constraint, and let him be free and happy. Heine's poem ends with a bitter acknowledgement that this is only a dream that “dissolves like empty foam” in the morning, but Wright's poems work in the opposite direction. He often begins by portraying himself in a fit of depression or dread, or with a hangover, and ends by recovering himself through finding wholeness in the life of nature. “The life of nature” is the central quality of the Earthly Paradise, the informing myth of these poems. Although this paradise goes by many different names—Eden, the Fortunate Isles, Beulah, Tír na nÓg—every version is essentially the same, an unfallen world in which every object of ordinary experience is made perfect. There is no death, disease, old age or unhappiness in this other world, and to those who live in it or perceive it through visionary insight every natural thing is perfect.

The Earthly Paradise obviously has nothing to do with city life, so, following tradition, Wright makes rural Ohio look something like Vergil's Italy. His titles define this pastoral quality by themselves: “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me,” “Two Horses Playing in the Orchard,” “Arriving in the Country Again,” “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” “A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place.” The last of these poems is a good example of the tone and imagery of most of the book:

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.(4)

Everything here is entirely conventional, but the poem communicates much more than the surface message that the country is much nicer than the “market place” of the city. Wright's persona is not necessarily much happier at the end of the poem than at the beginning—just as things seem to be getting under way, the poem ends abruptly with the disappearance of the pheasant. The longing for peace implicit in the title may or may not be gratified. The speaker of this poem may come to share in the “everlasting happiness / Of small winds,” or he may just as well drive back, disappointed, to St. Paul or Pittsburgh. Likewise, in the other poems I have listed, the speaker is an observer of nature rather than a participant in the life he sees around him; whether he is lying in a hammock at William Duffy's farm and feeling that he has wasted his life, or watching a bird through a window in “Two Hangovers,” he is not a part of what he sees.

Nonetheless there is a transforming power within the natural world, and these poems prepare for its appearance in the concluding poems of The Branch Will Not Break. These poems represent a breakthrough, a change from mere wistful observation of the countryside to sudden visionary insight that reveals the world of the numinous within nature; here Wright puts himself in the tradition of poets like Blake, who affirm that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”⁵ Wright is neither extravagant nor very specific about his “other world,” but it is certainly present in “Milkweed,” perhaps the most famous of these poems. Here the speaker, again brooding and depressed at first, achieves an epiphany that makes him whole:

While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At a touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.(6)

The Midwestern setting could hardly be more ordinary, yet this farm and the milkweed growing in the field are charged with an emotional force that would be out of place if the poem were not about the other world as much as about the farm. As the poem begins, the speaker is cut off from the natural world: he is “in the open,” but at the same time “lost in himself.” He seems to have been brooding for some time, but has not resolved his problem, has not found what he has lost. Being lost in himself, he seems almost entirely unaware of anything close to him; for that matter, very few things that interest him are close to him. Wright is careful to stress the way he looks away from himself, at the rows of corn (not at individual cornstalks), another field with browsing animals, and a house still farther away. The effect is to make the speaker an insignificantly small figure lost in a vast flat field. The farm is not as comfortable as one might expect; it is a little frightening. But, when he looks down and forgets about his isolation, everything changes. The landscape suddenly focusses down to a milkweed pod. When he touches it he is freed from his failures of perception and can realize that both the natural and spiritual worlds are not remote, but stand in a close relationship with him.

It is never clear what he has lost, or thinks he has lost, and it doesn't matter. What does matter is his sense that he is lost in himself in a world that seems to recede almost infinitely from him. He is not seeing things properly because he imagines himself to be alone in the world that is indifferent to him, while in fact he is surrounded by love.

The emotional force of this experience is more than simple relief at escaping from the city or from his own undefined problems; it is his emotion that makes the other world visible to him as he watches the milkweed pod split open and scatter its seeds. It is hard to say just what that emotion is, but it is very intense, capable of transforming his perception of the world by its simple presence. The kind of experience Wright is presenting here is the traditional form of mystical illumination in which the presence of the other world is suddenly apparent through the agency of some trivial thing. The milkweed pod is like the gleam of light that inspired Yeats's “Stream and Sun at Glendalough” or the quiet garden surrounded by angels in Rilke's “Duino Elegies.”

The progression from anxiety to relief in “Milkweed” is, in outline, much the same as in “A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place,” but the image of “small dark eyes / Loving me in secret” sets this poem apart from simple pastorale. Wright uses the phrase “the other world” without defining it at all, but it is clear that he wants to suggest that there is a healing force, a sort of undirected but powerful love, within the natural world, and that it can be perceived in moments of vision. In such moments Wright's persona can see heaven in a wild flower, or even be transformed himself, as in “A Blessing.” In that poem, the speaker again reaches out of himself and touches a natural thing, this time a horse's ear; his delight in the horse leads him into a vision of change and growth:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.(7)

It is one thing, then, to stand on a country road and appreciate nature, but only through an intense concentration on some natural thing can the speakers of Wright's poems achieve their visionary insight. Further, human preoccupations, such as being depressed or fleeing from the market place, must also be put aside before the speakers can see creatures from the other world or “break into blossom.” In both “Milkweed” and “A Blessing” the undefined “love” that leads into vision is not human love but something residing in the natural world that is not forced or conditioned by human relationships but entirely simple and, apparently, always possible. It is not as complex, ambivalent or demanding as human love. Robert Bly, writing as “Crunk” in The Sixties, suggests that the difference between human and spiritual love is the crux of “Milkweed”:

“Milkweed” describes the realization that the longing to be loved, the demanding of love, the insistence that everyone around us show their love, was all wrong. All the time, the walker was being loved by something unknown, “the small dark eyes / loving me in secret.” The poem suggests that when we realize this, the world of saints and mystics becomes real and visible to us.⁸

The same things are true of “A Blessing,” and, in addition, Wright suggests that he can participate in the natural life represented by the horse.

This, then, is the essential pattern of Wright's poems about the other world in The Branch Will Not Break: a strong emotion, set off by some natural thing, transforms the speaker's perception of the world so that he is ready to enter a pure state of joy, the “Land der Wonne” of the epigraph. Only once, though, does he give any description of this state of joy, in “Today I Was So 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.(9)

Again, as in “Milkweed” and “A Blessing,” there is no logical relationship between the natural objects Wright describes and the emotional weight they carry; the moon has no more to do with immortality than a milkweed pod does with love. Both, however, are sufficient to lead Wright into a sudden perception of the other world. Any natural thing will do as well for this as any other, since the Earthly Paradise is earthly and dwells in every natural object. The oak trees of heaven are in the same places as the oak trees of this world. It is only Wright's perception that changes during the moment of illumination he records in this poem: by putting himself in the eternal present of nature, in which each moment is static and unchanging, he moves out of the usual human preoccupation with time, change and death. Like the squirrel and the eagle, he is fully in harmony with his surroundings.

“Today I Was So Happy …” is the closest thing in The Branch Will Not Break to a complete escape from human life; in terms of visionary insight it is, as Richard Howard has called it, “the Summum Bonum of Wright's whole undertaking.”¹⁰ Nonetheless, its mood of pure joy is very short-lived; the imagery of the Earthly Paradise itself, however important to The Branch Will Not Break, disappears almost entirely in Wright's next book, Shall We Gather at the River. In this book the other world is no longer Eden or the Elysian Fields, but the other shore of the Ohio River, which is sometimes Kentucky and sometimes Hell. The dominant emotion is no longer joy at escape from the oppression of the world, but fear in the presence of death.

In Shall We Gather at the River love is not hidden in the natural world, only waiting to be found in a moment of vision, but, rather, it seems to have died with a girl who drowned in the Ohio River. Throughout the book, Wright pictures himself moving through a fallen world. This time his depression seems to be permanent, since there are no epiphanies to relieve his feeling that the world is indeed dead and his life meaningless. The book is a loose sequence of poems that starts in Minneapolis and takes Wright steadily closer to Ohio and, at the same time, back into his past, his childhood and family, and toward the other world. Ghosts multiply as he approaches the river, particularly the ghosts of failures and suicides. In the final poem, “To the Muse,” he reaches the suckhole where Jenny died long ago, and from which he tries to call her back to life. When Wright was asked in a recent interview what he meant to do in this sequence, he replied:

I was trying to move from death to resurrection and death again, and challenge death finally. Well, if I must tell you, I was trying to write about a girl I was in love with who has been dead for a long time. … I thought maybe I could come to terms with that feeling which has hung on in my heart for so long.¹¹

This description makes the book sound much simpler and perhaps more positive than it really is, as if writing it was a sort of therapy to clear up morbid thoughts about the distant past. Wright's comment has a strongly “confessional” tone, but the book, while vaguely autobiographical, is built not so much around incidents in his life as around images of death and resurrection. The geography of his personal life is transformed into a symbolic landscape dominated by the river of the dead.

The first poem, “A Christmas Greeting,” establishes the tone of the book. The ironic “greeting” is addressed to a suicide who died

… because you could not bear to live,
Pitched off the bridge in Brookside, God knows why.
Well, don't remind me. I'm afraid to die,
It hurts to die, although the lucky do.(12)

These lines introduce the main theme of death by suicide in the river, and also the secondary theme of pain and self-pity. The speaker of the poems, whom Wright consistently presents as himself, is a connoisseur of pain, attuned equally to suffering and its futility. He misses few opportunities to remind the reader that bodily pain and deformity are terrible. In “A Christmas Greeting” he points out that “The kidneys do not pray, the kidneys drip,” and in “The Minneapolis Poem”

The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted
And sown with lime.
The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses
Huddle together dreaming in desolation
Of dry groins.(13)

Imagery like this is not simply morbid, since dripping kidneys and dry groins are emblems of the pain of living. This pain is both physical and metaphysical: life is terrible, Wright insists, because there can be no escape from suffering, no comforting visions of the other world. Even the dead, having been failures in this world, are futile ghosts in the other world. In the first poems of the sequence, the speaker identifies himself with the poor and the outcasts who suffer constantly, who are “Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming / Of suicide in the river.”¹⁴ As the sequence continues, he identifies himself more and more with the ghosts of the failed dead. This shift in emphasis from the physical to the spiritual world is like that of The Branch Will Not Break, but this time the other world offers no relief.

On this side of the river there is nothing but pain and suffering, then, and no hope. On the other side is the mysterious world of the dead:

We have no kings
In this country,
They kept saying.
But we have one
Where the dead rise
On the other shore.
And they hear only
The cold owls throwing
Salt over
Their secret shoulders.(15)

This is not a very comforting other world. Clearly, the king is death, and the river is the Styx. (Another poem, “Old Age Compensation,” reinforces this image of the river as the Styx by introducing Charon: “All it will take is one old man trawling one oar.”¹⁶) Just as the myth of the Earthly Paradise carries with it the image of perfect life within nature, so this myth carries a definite picture of the dead: they are only shades who live without joy or hope of change. Any messengers who arrive from this other world are not likely to suggest that we are surrounded by love.

The bleakness of the other world is apparent in several poems; for example, in “Willy Lyons,” Wright pictures his mother mourning Willy, his uncle:

Willy was buried with nothing except a jacket
Stitched on his shoulder bones.
It is nothing to mourn for.
It is the other world.
She does not know how the roan horses, there,
Dead for a century,
Plod slowly.
Maybe they believe Willy's coffin, tangled heavily in moss,
Is a horse trough drifted to shore
Along that river under the willows and grass.(17)

These horses have nothing to do with the horses of “A Blessing,” or the many horses who run through the orchards and fields of Wright's early books. Rather they, along with the coffin, the moss, and the slow, choked movement of the river, suggest that death (particularly death in the river) is a sodden affair with no grace at all.

The sequence moves from death to resurrection, yet there are many suggestions that resurrection is futile, as in “The Life”:

And if I come back to my only country
With a white rose on my shoulder,
What is that to you?
It is the grave
In blossom.(18)

The Ohio, he says in “Three Sentences for a Dead Swan,” is “no tomb to / Rise from the dead / From.”¹⁹ In any case, this is the wrong myth for any kind of resurrection, since even Orpheus could not get Eurydice back across the Styx. The two shores are always separate, so the “challenge to death” Wright mentioned in his interview must inevitably fail.

The challenge comes in the last poem, “To the Muse.” This poem is the culmination of the sequence; the speaker has worked his way back to the Ohio, and is now trying to resurrect Jenny, the girl whose rebirth can, he seems to feel, bring love back into the world. He images that her body is still in the river after many years; this idea, combined with the image of the human body and its suffering that has been with him throughout the book, results in the fantasy that a terrible operation, performed by “Three lady doctors in Wheeling,” might bring her back to life. Because this poem combines the grotesque images of pain that characterize the book with Wright's most prolonged treatment of the river, it must be quoted in full:

It is all right. All they do
Is go in by dividing
One rib from another. I wouldn't
Lie to you. It hurts
Like nothing I know. All they do
Is burn their way in with a wire.
It forks in and out a little like the tongue
Of that frightened garter snake we caught
At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny
So long ago.
I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up
Out of the suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you
What you know:
You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back to this world.
Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don't have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.
It's awkward a while. Still, it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don't
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
Keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny,
I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn't, I can't bear it
Either, I don't blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring,
Muse of black sand,
Alone.
I don't blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.(20)

This is Wright's longest and most grisly treatment of physical suffering, and also the natural extension of his images of disease and decay. It is the last and most important of many deaths by water, which include the suicide of “Charlie” in “A Christmas Greeting,” the nameless old men in “The Minneapolis Poem,” the prostitutes in “In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned,” Hobie Johnson in “The River Down Home.” Death in the river is a constant in the sequence, but resurrection is not. The poems do move from death to resurrection, but the rebirth of “In Response to a Rumor” is ironic, the vision of the Earthly Paradise in “Poems to a Brown Cricket” is a dream, and the rebirth of Jenny in “To the Muse” is a nightmare. Jenny is, in effect, being invited to move from one world of death to another, since the living people in the book are all spiritually dead, like the crowds on London Bridge in “The Waste Land.”

Jenny's rebirth, then, is only an extension of the suffering that the living go through; Wright suggests strongly and repeatedly in this book that life is essentially a matter of walking around being drained by the world while waiting for it to “stab your heart.” Jenny's corpse, returned to an artificial life by the three lady doctors, would be as alive as anyone else in these poems. Her resurrection is meaningless: it is the grave in blossom again. She is in the same situation as the prostitutes of “In Response to a Rumor,” who rise from the dead only to find themselves in Bridgeport, Ohio.²¹

In The Branch Will Not Break, rebirth and vision are possible because the other world, while not often tangible, seems to be available when it is needed to counter despair. In Shall We Gather at the River, the other world is beyond reach. The best Wright's speaker can do is fantasize about leading Jenny “back to this world.” But his demands are impossible: surrounded by what he sees as an empty world, he demands that love should come out of the other world in the form of a dead woman. But such an idea, as Bly suggested about the speaker's despair in “Milkweed,” is all wrong. It is hardly surprising that the poem should end with a suicide threat, since the speaker of “To the Muse” can find no help either in this world or the other world. The poem is not really about resurrection, but rather about the futility of hope in resurrection, and the permanence of death. When Wright described the sequence as ending in a “challenge to death,” he was correct, but might have added that it is no more effective than any other such challenge.

It is this insistence on death, and the pain of life that drives Charlie, Jenny, and the rest to their deaths, that gives Shall We Gather at the River its air of morbidity. In, for example, “To the Muse,” he gives detail after detail of the operation in a completely unnecessary attempt to intensify the horror of his fantasy. Here, as in the picture of Willy Lyons floating down the river being nuzzled by ghostly horses, or the grotesque imagery of the Artificial Limbs Exchange, Wright nearly overwhelms his poems with bathos. His poems are most moving when they are not so insistent on their horrors. “To the Muse,” like other poems in the sequence, derives its real power not from the bizarre fantasy of three lady doctors but from the simple language of lines like “You come up after dark, you poise alone / With me on the shore.” Here, as in such poems as “Today I Was So Happy …,” the physical and spiritual world are balanced and united within the terms of the poem—and, just as importantly, Wright is able to say so in direct language.

There is the same balance and simplicity in “Poems to a Brown Cricket,” the next-to-last poem in Shall We Gather at the River. Here the other world is just a dream that will, as Heine said, dissolve like mist in the morning. Still, while it lasts, the dream restores the pastoral world of The Branch Will Not Break:

We shall waken again
When the courteous face of the old horse David
Appears at our window,
To snuffle and cough gently.
He, too, believes we may long for
One more dream of slow canters across the prairie
Before we come home to our strange bodies
And rise from the dead.(22)

The irony of “rising from the dead” into “strange bodies” marks this off from poems like “Milkweed,” as does the fact that the other world is a dream and “resurrection” is waking up. Nonetheless, while Wright is waking up on this particular morning he balances once more between the world of observation and the world of vision. It is from this point of balance that his best poetry comes.

In both of these books, and to a lesser extent in his earlier and more recent work, it is the presence of the other world, half-seen and undefined as it is, that gives force to his otherwise conventional poetry. The poems off The Branch Will Not Break achieve their effect through reticence: they affirm that the other world is real and accessible, but refuse to say much about it. The reader must understand the “Land der Wonne” for himself. Shall We Gather at the River develops its opposing myth more fully, through classical references and a complex set of related images, and thereby depends even more on the other world. In neither case can the reader ignore this elusive presence: whether the other world is dwelling within the objects of this world, or cut off by the river of the dead from a world that is itself half-dead, it gives Wright's commonplace images their power. Further, its presence places Wright in the tradition of Blake, Yeats, Rilke and other visionary poets for whom, as Yeats said, “The rivers of Eden are in the midst of our rivers.”²³

Notes

1. James Wright, Collected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 136 (“Milkweed”).

2. Collected Poems, p. 135 (“A Blessing”).

3. From Lyrisches Intermezzo, 43. For a complete text, see Heinrich Heine, Historische-kritische Gesamtausgabe de Werke, I, i, Buch der Lieder, ed. Pierre Grappin (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1975), pp. 175-76.

4. Collected Poems, pp. 132-33.

5. David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 39.

6. Collected Poems, pp. 135-36.

7. Collected Poems, p. 135.

8. Crunk, “The Work of James Wright,” The Sixties, 8 (Spring, 1966), 52-78.

9. Collected Poems, p. 133.

10. Richard Howard, Alone With America (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 584.

11. Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry XIX: James Wright,” The Paris Review, 16, No. 62 (Summer 1975), 34-61.

12. Collected Poems, p. 139.

13. Collected Poems, pp. 140-41.

14. Collected Poems, p. 140 (“The Minneapolis Poem”).

15. Collected Poems, p. 146 (“An Elegy for the Poet Morgan Blum”).

16. Collected Poems, p. 148.

17. Collected Poems, pp. 158-59.

18. Collected Poems, p. 155.

19. Collected Poems, p. 156.

20. Collected Poems, pp. 168-69.

21. Collected Poems, pp. 165-66.

22. Collected Poems, pp. 166-67.

23. W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, Ed. Denis Donoghue (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 127.