I

In 1958, James Wright received the following words of advice from his former teacher, Theodore Roethke:

Now to you. I hope you won't take it amiss: I worry, I worry my can off, practically. And I've spent nearly the whole of three sessions with my doctor yacking about you. Apparently you're more of an emotional symbol to me than I realized: a combination of student-young brother—something like that. (I even shed a tear or two.)

But the chief point now, as I see it, is you. I've been through all this before, through the wringer, bud, so please respect my advice. Once you become too hyper-active and lose too much sleep, you'll cross a threshold where chaos (and terror) ensues. And believe me, chum, it's always a chancey thing whether you get back or not. …¹

Roethke wrote that before publication of Wright's second book, Saint Judas [hereafter cited as SJ], in 1959, and well before Wright went on to publish some of the most dazzling and memorable affirmations in recent American poetry. It would seem Wright listened to Roethke's warning, for how else could he have written such unsurpassable poems as “A Blessing”? Roethke worried, however, because the “hyper-activity” which gives rise to such epiphanies is answered in the poet's progress by chaos and terror.² He knew that the epiphanies a poet like Wright stirs us with account for only part of his complete poetic vision. The other part of that vision necessarily includes the darker depths of despair. For this reason, Wright's affirmations need to be seen as the thesis to which his poems of despair are the emotional, if not logical, antithesis. The beautiful affirmations of poems like “A Blessing” should not be considered the goal and epitome of Wright's work. His central project was to move toward a synthesis of the oppositions of affirmation and negation, toward a reconciliation of the possibility of epiphany with the reality of despair.

In his earlier poetry, and by that I mean to include also the poems of The Branch Will Not Break [hereafter cited as TB] and Shall We Gather At The River [hereafter cited as SW], Wright quite deliberately segregates his experience of epiphany and despair in an effort to clarify and thus to control their disturbing opposition. At the same time, Wright presents the opposing emotions in poems of much the same form. The alternation of mood in Wright's poetry, therefore, is not nearly so prominent as it is in his friend Roethke's poetry. Roethke's alternations between the closed and the open form are obvious, and for some of these shifts Roethke was severely criticized. Perhaps Wright's awareness of that negative critical response motivated him all the more to render his broad range of emotion in a single poetic form which, after his stylistic breakthrough in The Branch Will Not Break, did not alter much thereafter. The form of Wright's poems did not change after The Branch Will Not Break, but his emotional outlook did. Wright indicates in the “New Poems” appended to his Collected Poems that he has discovered important connections between the contraries of epiphany and despair. In still later works, Wright continues his reconciliation of epiphany and despair by manipulating three sets of images he derives from the world of nature. With them, he tries to circumvent the despair aroused by fear of dying, and he begins to visualize death as but another segment in a larger process of an enduring creativity. In his last poems, Wright presents what might be termed an argument for physical resurrection of the body. While he eventually resigns himself to dying without despair, he bequeaths to the living his commitment to the immortality of inspiration.

II

Wright's poems which result in epiphany exist almost solely for the sake of their conclusions. Typically, such poems move from the facts of the everyday world to sudden and dramatic instants of revelation. These stand out like crystals in a coarse matrix. Just as Wright himself is seized and overwhelmed in the moment of epiphany, so too are we quieted by the beauty of the language he uses. Wright has more than aesthetic intentions, however. He wants to freeze the mortal moments he commemorates.

The argumentative thrust behind Wright's epiphanies is that miraculous events take place in real time and real space. Wright's moments occur in Martins Ferry, Ohio and in Rochester, Minnesota as well as in, more predictably, Venice and Verona. The titles of Wright's poems argue also for the ordinariness, the matter-of-factness, of epiphany. Wright rarely strains for mystique or for drama in a title. On the contrary, titles such as “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me” or “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” stress the occasionality of Wright's poetry.

The introductory lines of Wright's poems extend the tone their titles inaugurate. These are sets of lines chosen from the beginnings of three adjacent poems:

Today I am walking alone in a bare place,
And winter is here.(3)
The man on the radio mourns
That another endless American winter
Daybreak is beginning to fall
On Idaho, on the mountains.

(SW, 153)

Crouched down by a roadside windbreak
At the edge of the prairie,
I flinch under the baleful jangling of wind
Through the telephone wires, a wilderness of voices.

(SW, 153)

A notable thing about each of these introductions is that we as readers learn instantly, from the outset, what the place, the time, or the situation of the poem is to be. Wright insistently orients us to the context of the poem to follow. In this respect, his work is some of the most refreshingly accessible in contemporary poetry. Wright gains more than the reader's eye with these easy beginnings, however. He establishes an extremely ordinary context against which he can place the dramatic event. The overall effect of the contrast is that Wright stuns the reader by the end of the poem. Invited into the poem by the conversationality of its title, lulled into a false sense of security by the orienting first lines, the reader is rendered speechless when the coordinates established are suddenly revoked.

In “Speak,” Wright has written “I speak of flat defeat / In a flat voice” (SW, 150). Surely the first five lines of “A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place” are applications of that principle. This is the ash from which the phoenix rises: “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” (TB, 132). The plodding chronology of these introductory lines accelerates, however, and the quality of time in the poem changes significantly: “Suddenly, a pheasant flutters, and I turn / Only to see him vanishing at the damp edge / Of the road” (TB, 132-3). With the emergence of the pheasant, a change occurs in Wright's dolorous perspective. That is verified by the metamorphosis of his language. Repetitive verbs of being give way to active flutterings and turns. Where before we read statements, ostensibly of fact, now we see an image. The image does not last long, apparently, but its duration bears little relation to its impact. It serves to diminish the depressed situation of the poem's original occasion.

If we associate the pheasant with epiphany, and I think we must, then why doesn't the “vanishing” of the pheasant arouse Wright's despair? To conclude the poem on so dramatic a note, Wright makes the moment of epiphany a speciously completed moment. By giving this moment a tangible beginning and an apparent end, he more effectively closes the poem. Thus the moment of epiphany stands ready for comparison to that dismal context which gave birth to it. Wright is actually unwilling, however, to let this epiphany end. He eternalizes his glimpse of the pheasant by casting it into the present tense. Because it is always only “vanishing,” the pheasant in this poem will never disappear.

With Wright's epiphanies, we are introduced to events which reorganize the everyday world. They revolutionize time, space, and perspective. Though we glimpse such events in Wright's poems, he refuses to explain how they work. According to Wright, epiphany not only does but should remain mysterious. Thus he balks at recording the entire natural history of epiphany, and this betrays Wright's anxiety that such moments may never take place again.

“Lifting Illegal Nets By Flashlight” is a figure for Wright's protective attitude toward epiphany. It is crucial for the poem that the fish get through his net:

The carp are secrets
Of the creation: I do not
Know if they are lonely.
The poachers drift with an almost frightening
Care under the bridge.
Water is a luminous
Mirror of swallows' nests. The stars
Have gone down.
What does my anguish
Matter? Something
The color
Of a puma has plunged through this net, and is gone.
This is the firmest
Net I ever saw, and yet something
Is gone lonely
Into the headwaters of the Minnesota.

(SW, 163)

Of course we have excellent reason to think that what broke through the net was a carp. Wright mentions that fish at the outset of the poem, and since carp are in fact bronze, they resemble the puma's color. Wright refuses to identify the fish's name in the poem, however. He prefers the word “something,” which he uses twice. The only way for him to find out for certain what escaped the net, and the only way for him to join it (and thus to rescind his own and this “something's” loneliness), would be to follow the fish toward the headwaters. Wright is unwilling to do that, and he can only empathize with the ardor of the fish.

Of his first two volumes of poetry, James Wright remarked, “I have tried very hard to write in the mode of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost.”⁴ Wright's avowed indebtedness to Frost is germane to this poem. The fishermen of this poem fish without licenses. Their nets are “illegal.” In Frost's opinion, no doubt, James Wright's poem itself would constitute an “illegal net.” It is a poem without meter or rhyme and Frost likened such vers libre to playing tennis without a net. And yet few would deny that Wright's poem is a tight composition. It is a firm net. The two lines which strain it the most are the fourth, where the poachers venture most boldly toward their own peril, and the twelfth, where the “something” they hope to contain finally escapes. In this poem, Wright is commenting upon the ability of language to do justice to what it represents. Here, the inspiration for the poem successfully breaks through Wright's verbal net. Wright's words cannot capture that “something,” but this does not anger him. On the contrary, he rejoices. Wright assures the survival of the epiphany by acknowledging the failure of his poem to contain it.

For us as readers, it is the shock of being intrigued which is the epiphany. Wright awakens our sense of mystery but he refuses, consistently, to explain the mystery away. He conserves it by selecting very carefully what he must leave out of the poem. Wright cuts the epiphany away from directions it might possibly take and then, as it were, he cauterizes those wounds and conceals them. If Wright did not withhold as much as he reveals, if he dove into the “headwaters of the Minnesota” to learn more about the nature of epiphany, he would somehow have to build into the poem some measure of the epiphany's dissolution.

“Mary Bly” is a clear example of Wright's powers of selection and omission. In this poem, Wright is not elevated suddenly into a visionary moment as he is in other poems we have seen. He is gentled toward it by the breath of the child that lifts him from the weariness of his long winter. The child brings spring back to him, quietly, and with the beautiful image in the conclusion his vision seems secure:

I sit here, doing nothing, alone, worn out by long winter.
I feel the light breath of the newborn child.
Her face is smooth as the side of an apricot,
Eyes quick as her blond mother's hands.
She has full, soft, red hair, and as she lies quiet
In her tall mother's arms, her delicate hands
Weave back and forth.
I feel the seasons changing beneath me,
Under the floor.
She is braiding the waters of air into the plaited manes
Of happy colts.
They canter, without making a sound, along the shores
Of melting snow.

(TB, 133-4)

“Mary Bly” is a very nice poem, but it is vulnerable by virtue of its perfectedness. The moment of this poem is poised and impossible to surpass because doing that would mean allowing the entrance of the freeze of the next winter which the child is unwittingly preparing. Wright refuses to look that far ahead, however, and he does not develop the implication of the “seasons changing beneath me.” Carefully circumscribed as it is and cut away from the dreary implication, Wright can describe confidently the progress of “long winter” to “melting snow” without having to mix memory with his desire. A step further beyond the “melting snow” would destroy the affirmative moment of the poem.

The perilous balance Wright achieves and then will not topple is fairly typical of his epiphanies. “A Blessing” is probably Wright's finest and most famous poem, and yet in none other of Wright's works can we see so clearly the major limitation of the epiphany. The poem deserves endless repeating:

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 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,
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.

(TB, 135)

Were the triumphant phrasing of the epiphany in the conclusion enacted in the context of this poem, what would the next line be? We recall that the ponies are “munching the young tufts of spring in the / darkness.” Were Wright to step out of his body and be transformed, were he in fact to “blossom,” the ponies would munch that new blossom, too. Had Wright pushed the poem that small step further toward its consequence, the image which concludes it would explode. “A Blessing” would descend into despair and it would enter that much shadier realm where Wright's dark desire is to be consumed.

This is the major limitation of Wright's epiphanies: the vision afforded is partial. Wright's epiphanies are beautiful ones and affirmative ones but very much because of the strict limits within which they are composed. The very best of these poems stretch to the edge of those limitations where any further expansion would deflate them. To say that it is impossible to go beyond these limitations is correct in an important sense. Going beyond their confines would complicate the epiphany with its inevitable dissolution. At that point, epiphany would become despair. However, going beyond the epiphany in the dialectical sense, going beyond it toward reconciliation, would mean interweaving that dissolution within the poem's progress as it moves.

“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” is a particularly interesting poem in this respect because in it Wright shadows epiphany with despair. As a result, the poem supports two consistent readings, one affirmative and the other ominous. The two readings cannot intersect, however. They are mutually exclusive. This poem may be a study for a poem of reconciliation but it shows only the great proximity of epiphany and despair.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in the green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distance 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.

(TB, 114)

At least one thread of consistency moving through this poem connects the five things Wright notices: the butterfly, the cowbells, the droppings, the evening, the hawk. Each awareness is a vividly sensual one and even through the title of the poem implies a certain sloth or relaxation, Wright's senses are working hard. The concluding line of the poem, then, is uttered ironically much as if to say “this is the way to spend, to waste one's life,” alert to the world around.

That is the affirmative reading of the poem. It is possible also to trace a considerably more ominous significance through the imagery of the poem. The butterfly blows like a leaf, the house is empty, the cowbells disappear, droppings and not horses blaze, and Wright himself shares in this gradual dying. He leans back. Evening itself, the dying of the day, is the only thing in the poem that advances. Everything in the poem has passed its point of greatest vitality. The last line simply emphasizes this. Wright sees himself as yet another part of all that is diminishing. He speaks the last line not with satisfaction but with a sigh.

The poem both suggests and supports both readings. Neither prevails because the Janus face of the concluding line points both to epiphany and to despair. Clearly Wright was not trying to present yet another epiphany here and he simply failed to provide a ringing last line. No, Wright undertook to swell the limits of epiphany by including the emotion of despair, but in this poem he did not achieve a reconciliation of the two antitheses. As a result, we as readers not only can but must split the two emotions apart to resolve the enigmatic tone of the concluding line.

III

The heights of ecstasy in James Wright's poetry are answered by the challenge of death and dying. Along with the beautiful poems of epiphany, we find frequent elegies, lamentations, ejaculations of an enduring loneliness, and terribly savage and bitter condemnations. Wright's despair leads in one of two directions: toward a stoicism from within which Wright waits, without hope, for intervention, or toward death itself, toward that drowning Wright flirts with throughout his work. By means of this second direction Wright moves toward reconciliation, but I want to focus first on the ordeals Wright endures because in poems re-enacting those we see the purest form of his despair.

I think it would be possible to convey the essential nature of Wright's despair simply by quoting extensively from poems in which that is the dominant mood. Such poems communicate stark and brutal emotion with a language nearly as reduced as is Wright's ability to alter his depressing circumstances. Like Wright's poems of epiphany, his poems of despair tend to silence the reader and repress comment, but through pain and not sudden beauty. Wright invites the reader into his despair in much the same way that he does in his poems of epiphany, but once past the title and the typically accessible introductory lines, nothing dramatically changes. Nothing intervenes to alter time or transform space. This bit of spleen, for example, is from an early poem, “At the Executed Murderer's Grave.”

Idiot, he demanded love from girls,
And murdered one. Also, he was a thief.
He left two women, and a ghost with child.
The hair, foul as a dog's upon his head,
Made such revolting Ohio animals
Fitter for vomit than a kind man's grief.
I waste no pity on the dead that stink.
And no love's lost between me and the crying
Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police
Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink.
Christ may restore them whole, for all of me.
Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who
Saddled nightmares thirty years ago
Can do without my widely printed sighing
Over their pains with paid sincerity.
I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.

(SJ, 83)

No visionary moment suddenly intersects with the grim reality and the rapid movement of this present tense. The only thing that shifts in the poem is the target of Wright's venom. The murderer George Doty occasions the poem, but Wright's bitterness toward him widens as the poem grows to include the entire society in which Doty was raised and lived: “If Belmont County killed him, what of me? / His victims never loved him. Why should we? / And yet, nobody had to kill him either” (SJ, 83). Wright's outrage turns around eventually to include even himself and he adds, when “the princes of the sea come down / … to judge the earth / And its dead … / Staring politely, they will not mark my face / From any murderer's, buried in this place. / Why should they? We are nothing but a man” (SJ, 84). Contempt for a killer blossoms in the conclusion to contempt for mankind in general.

When Wright thus turns his despair against others, it translates into a kind of misanthropy. When he turns it against himself, he considers how “suicide in the river” might transform his despair (SW, 140). Here, several people are caught in the baleful gaze of Wright's misanthropic despair:

2.
The Chippewa young men
Stab one another shrieking
Jesus Christ.
Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault.
High school backfields search under benches
Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich
Raw bacon without eyes.
The Walker Art Center crowd stare
At the Guthrie Theater.
3.
Tall Negro girls from Chicago
Listen to light songs.
They know when the supposed patron
Is a plainclothesman.
A cop's palm
Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs
Of a light bulb.
The soul of a cop's eyes
Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs
Of Juarez, Mexico.

(“The Minneapolis Poem,” SW, 140)

The recurrent verbs of being suggest that these lines contain facts as they were perceived. Wright's proven skill at constructing the image is here reduced by despair to the making of mere verbal equations. There is no doubt that he achieves a stark power with these metaphors, but the eyes we see through in this poem are so transparently angry that they see dimly. The people of these two sections of the poem are not rendered as individuals at all. They are stereotypes. If we are carried by the power of the verse, we may agree with those stereotypes. If we do not share Wright's obvious social sympathies, if we do not prefer his all-knowing prostitutes to his evil police, the reaction is to dismiss entirely this sordid affair. Oddly enough, this second reaction is what Wright would have us do, I think. More than pity for people, he would have us feel disgust. The poem becomes a short lesson on why to hate man. Such denial of mankind suddenly ranks us, then, with the blind people in the poem, with the “raw bacon” and the staring crowd. We enter that much more deeply into Wright's despair at this point because we learn with him how to hate ourselves.

It is true that “The Minneapolis Poem” concludes with what some will consider an epiphany. In the last lines, Wright presents a wish, but this desire for escape is not anywhere fulfilled by the 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.

(SW, 141)

The desire Wright expresses in this conclusion is not for justice or fair housing or good food for the poor. He wants to be made anonymous. Despair turns inward and he asks for the destruction of the self.

Wright's sympathy for selected people in “The Minneapolis Poem” is social and political and, finally, rhetorical. In the last poem of Shall We Gather At The River that sympathy is intensely personal. Wright addresses the poem “To The Muse.” These are the first lines:

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.

(SW, 168)

One of the dark beauties of this poem is that Wright sustains his direct and yet consolatory tone up to the point where even he cannot be convinced by his reassurances. His deliberate speech breaks down in the fifth verse paragraph when he says “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” (SW, 168-9). It is not only James Wright's suffering which surfaces in these lines, but the uninvited emergence of our own. By the conclusion of the poem, Wright has regained his composure and he refuses to remain utterly helpless. He refuses only to endure his ordeal of despair: “Come up to me, love, / Out of the river, or I will / Come down to you” (SW, 169). When we recall that this poem is the last one in Shall We Gather At The River, that these lines are what Wright left his readers with in 1968, the concluding lines seem somehow even more desperately suicidal. In fact, however, they point to the way that Wright resolves the problem of despair and dying. The desire for the dissolution of the self leads Wright to his reconciled vision.

IV

The river is the significant figure in James Wright's poetry. It functions as the site for drownings, as a figure for the process of dying itself, and it functions also as the agent of regeneration. On the one hand, the river dissolves the individual, quite literally, and reduces identity to anonymity. On the other hand, it enacts a baptismal cleansing. The title of Wright's fourth volume, Shall We Gather At The River, combines both aspects of the river. The title celebrates the possibility of renewed life while it acknowledges also the darker implications of drowning and suicide. The river, then, holds the potential both for epiphany and for despair. It is too much to say, though, that the river signals reconciliation in Wright's poetry. The river itself must be cleansed and transformed before it can return to earth, in the form of rain, as the agent of reconciliation.

In certain of the earlier poems, Wright explores the affirmative and negative attributes of the river that I have outlined above, and it is possible to detect his attempt to blend together these two attributes in order to achieve a durable reconciliation. In none of these earlier poems does the focus of the poem rise entirely above the river, however. In these earlier poems, he concentrates upon the transformation persons undergo when they immerse themselves.

“In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned” concludes, of course, with considerable irony about both Wheeling and Bridgeport, Ohio, but the poem contains also Wright's admiration for those women who “poured down the street to the river / And into the river” (SW, 165). It is crucial to note, though, that Wright only observes this procession. He hides “upstream from the sewer main” as the women “drown every evening” downriver. He does not himself participate in the metamorphosis he describes with this question: “What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore, / Drying their wings?” (SW, 165). The answer, of course, is encased in the question. Wright's conviction that they emerged could not be firmer. He figures the ascent of the women from their night in the river as that of butterflies coming out of the chrysalis. The poem is an important one in Wright's evolution toward a reconciled vision because here for the first time he suggests that one can drown in the river and then ascend. Wright himself does not enter the river in this poem, however. “I will grieve alone” he remarks in the present tense at the outset, and the remainder of the poem is a remembrance.

In Two Citizens [hereafter cited as TC] and To A Blossoming Pear Tree [hereafter cited as PT], Wright accounts in a more complete way for resurrection from the river. Where before Wright broods upon the dissolving powers of the river rather than exulting at the possibility it offers for metamorphosis, in his last poems he works to lay an empirical foundation that will indicate and assure resurrection. This is most apparent in the way he transforms the figure of the river into that of the rain. In earlier poems, in “Living by the Red River” (SW, 151), for example, or in “A Prayer to the Lord Ramakrishna” (SW, 160), the rain is something to avoid. It is relentless, fearsome, and inevitable. Instead of reawakening life, rain wears the living down. It dissolves the dead. By the time of Two Citizens, however, rain has come to represent the return of the dead.

“The Snail's Road” is perhaps the best example of this. Though there is great potential for grisliness here (in the “snail on Max Jacob's grave / At Fleury-sur-Loire” Poe would have seen the “conqueror worm”), for Wright the snail represents the first step in a process that moves from death to resurrection. “The snail beneath the right foot, / The toe pointing toward thunderclouds” indicates how long it takes to complete the distance between the start and end of that process (TC, 49). Wright telescopes the time's length, however. “The Jerusalem of the Loire” is transformed into the “bronze Jew snail of the rain,” the two lovers themselves become creatures spinning the paths of their own “long journey,” and their hands intersect, “coil within coil,” like a snail's “tiny whorl of colors” (TC, 49). The transformation of the dead poet at whose grave the two lovers are standing, through the snail, the river, the rain, culminates in the love the two find: “We walked … both looking / For love Max Jacob in the rain. We found him. We found our hands” (TC, 49).

When the river, Ohio or Loire, collects the effluence of mountains, plains, and valleys, it carries that runoff into the greater anonymity of the sea. Water vapor arising in the course of this process is re-individuated into separate and identifiable drops. These fall as rain, eventually, as the river purified. When applied to the spiritual process implied by Wright's river and rain, the facts of the water cycle give an especially intelligible framework. One problem for Wright's imagery, however, is that the cycle continues perpetually. Rain falls, it rises, and it falls again. That facet of the analogy is not comforting when applied to the soul's progress. Wright is not blind to this difficulty. In “The Snail's Road,” he suspends the eternal return momentarily, and he has the rain stop. The sun comes out for “long enough, / And too late be damned” (TC, 49).

Though surely it is the most important in his poetry, the water imagery is not the only way Wright indicates his reconciliation with death. He develops a zoological and a geological motif as well as the meteorological. We have seen the zoological motif in “In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned” where the women are led out of the chrysalis, presumably, to become butterflies. They dry their “wings” beside the river. Wright's zoological motif is not restricted to the metamorphoses of insects, however. In “Poems to a Brown Cricket,” the horse, another of Wright's favorite figures, is joined with that of the wing. The result is this vision of Pegasean horses:

As for me, I have been listening,
For an hour or so, to the scampering ghosts
Of Sioux ponies, down the long road
Toward South Dakota.
They just brought me home, leaning forward, by both hands clinging
To the joists of the magnificent, dappled feathers
Under their wings.

(SW, 167)

Wright's image of the wing is less literally tied to the facts of the natural world, but he employs it because things endowed with wings, insects, birds, mythical horses, can fly. Even a “sycamore just / Outside Martins Ferry” inspired Wright for the first time, and he “rose” in the poem “Voices Between Waking and Sleeping in the Mountains” (TC, 36). Though not joined to bird or beast, that branch functioned as a wing which lifted him.

Wright's third image to indicate his reconciliation with dying is an odd one, at first sight. Wright's water motif makes a certain kind of literal sense and his figure of the wing, though less convincing, also replicates the essential structure of Wright's idea of the move through death toward life. Jewels and crystals are beautiful and precious but hard and unyielding things. Yet, there are implications Wright derives from these images which fit very nicely with his other conceptions. Some jewels are embedded in the earth and they have to be exhumed from the darkness by mining; some, like the diamond, are metamorphic, and they have been refined by great pressure out of coal, itself the dross of dead plantlife. And Wright's favorite jewel, the emerald, is crystalline. It orders itself, molecule by molecule, from a solution. The main thing Wright likes about jewels, though, is that when faceted they are animated by refractions of the light.

In The Branch Will Not Break, the poem “The Jewel” stands out from all other poems in the volume because of the peculiarity of its dominant image. Wright inaugurates his image of the jewel in this poem, but this early in his career, he does not develop it. In this short poem, Wright uses the jewel simply as a way of proclaiming his identity. We should hear the pun embedded in the penultimate line.

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

(TB, 114)

The jewel emerges again in Two Citizens and this time it is joined to the image of the wing. The poem is “Voices Between Waking and Sleeping in the Mountains.”

There is something in you that is able to discover the crystal.
Somewhere in me there is a crystal that I cannot find
Alone, the wing that I used to think was a poor
Blindness I had to live with with the dead.

(TC, 35)

And in “One Last Look at the Adige: Verona in the Rain,” as he observes the crumbling of his own body (“This is another river / I can still see flow by” [PT, 5]), he figures the jewel as the irreducible element of himself:

In the middle of my own life,
I woke up and found myself
Dying, fair enough, still
Alive in the friendly city
Of my body, my secret Verona,
Milky and green,
My moving jewel, the last
Pure vein left to me.

(PT, 6)

In these increasingly dense, reflective, and self-conscious poems, the immersion Wright courts and yet fears takes place. The river moves inside and Wright recognizes this. “Fair enough,” Wright says. He is reconciled to the dying that previously aroused such despair.

With this emotional foundation established, Wright looks forward to the time after his own death when his efforts will be continued by others. No longer isolated and alone, he imagines the others to whom will be passed his particular gifts of perception, even as he himself sinks down. In one of his most deliberate and self-conscious poems, in the prose piece “The Secret of Light,” Wright combines the geological image with that of the water cycle. He sees himself dispassionately, as if from another person's eyes, and he finds his own struggle for an enduring epiphany is itself part of a larger process:

Directly in front of my bench, perhaps thirty yards away from me, there is a startling woman. Her hair is as black as the inmost secret of light in a perfectly cut diamond, a perilous black, a secret light that must have been studied for many years before the anxious and disciplined craftsman could achieve the necessary balance between courage and skill to stroke the strange stone and take the one chance he would ever have to bring that secret to light.

While I was trying to compose the preceding sentence, the woman rose from her park bench and walked away. I am afraid her secret might never come to light in my lifetime. But my lifetime is not the only one. I will never see her again. I hope she brings some other man's secret face to light, as somebody brought mine. I am startled to discover that I am not afraid. I am free to give a blessing out of my silence into that woman's black hair. I trust her to go on living.

(PT, 38)

The incident is figured as the “one chance” for this “anxious and disciplined craftsman” and that chance is embodied in the lengthy second sentence of the first paragraph quoted. The sentence is a risk, stylistically, and as the reader moves through it without the benefits of punctuation, he senses the possibility that the sentence may flounder or trail off into incoherence. But the sentence does not fail. It triumphs as it ventures forth from the descriptive “inmost secret of light” only to return bringing “that secret to light.” When the woman, the object of the inspiration, moves off, Wright is not unsettled. There is no despair that the epiphany fades. He is satisfied that she appeared to him, he knows the strength of his own particular success, and he knows also that something larger than that will survive. The opportunity for such epiphany to devolve on other craftsmen endures, and that thought helps Wright to defeat the otherwise deranging spectre of his own death. He can say without despair, “it is all right with me to know that my life is only one life. I feel like the light of the river Adige” (PT, 39).

We should notice also that the appearance of the black-haired woman is proof of Wright's assertion about the immortality of inspiration. In fact, she is a reappearance, a revisitation. She is the “slenderer” of the two Indian ponies Wright touched in his poem, “A Blessing.” In that poem, Wright himself was given the blessing. In this poem, he returns it.

Notes

1. Ralph J. Mills, Jr., ed., Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 220.

2. Roethke's own experience of manic-depression is discussed in detail in Allan Seager's The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), and Neal Bowers has recently devoted an entire book to discussing the relation between Roethke's mysticism and manic-depression [Theodore Roethke: The Journey From I to Otherwise (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982)].

3. James Wright, “Late November in a Field,” Collected Poems (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), p. 152.

   Documentation of Wright's poems is provided in parentheses in the text. Abbreviations used include: GW for The Green Wall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), SJ for Saint Judas (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), TB for The Branch Will Not Break (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), SW for Shall We Gather At the River (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), TC for Two Citizens (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), PT for To A Blossoming Pear Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).

   The first four volumes of Wright's poetry are most readily available in his Collected Poems. Pagination in this collection is continuous and I have followed that, but to help indicate the course of Wright's career, I have included in parentheses in the text the abbreviated title of the work in which the poem originally appeared.

4. Richard Howard, Alone With America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 580.