SOURCE: "The Crystal Glance of Love: Judith Wright as a Love Poet," in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. VI, No. 1, June, 1971, pp. 42–52.

[Here, Kohli contrasts Wright's work with the more overtly sensual poems of Indian poet Kamala Das. Kohli argues that words and communication have a higher value in Judith Wright's poetic vision of love than they do in the poetry of Das, whose emphasis on passion "makes words irrelevant." The critic also maintains that Wright's work depicts love as a source of contentment and completion.]

Robert Graves describes our age as one of 'lovelessness' and asserts that true poetry comes from 'the state of being in love'. His vision is much more comprehensive and complex than it appears to be for the intensity with which his man-persona does homage to the Woman who is 'the more important partner in this difficult relationship' has a sense of terror and doom in it—perhaps because it grows out of the landscape of war. It is useful to turn to Judith Wright, whose love poetry, besides being a delicate and truthful communication of Woman to Man, is a distinct and fruitful assimilation of the darkness and light of the Australian landscape. 'The writer', says Judith Wright, 'must be at peace with his landscape before he can turn confidently to its human figures'. It is her strength that she writes poetry which has the physical richness of her landscape and an 'intellectual pride' in the contemplation of the continuity of life. There is a sense of largeness in her lyrical contemplation, a feeling of an open-hearted ease: 'It is because of the joy in my heart / that I am your fit mourner'. This feeling lies behind every gesture she makes:

We are the white grave-worms of the grave.
We are the eyeless beginning of the world.
Oh blind, kind flesh, we are the drinking seed
that aches and swells towards its flower of love.
['The City Asleep']

She takes into herself 'all living things that are', and thus 'My days burn with the sun, / my nights with moon and star'. This sense of an open-hearted ease, this receptive calm, as distinct from the constraining tensions of A. D. Hope, is reflected not only in her organic imagery but in the controlled assertiveness of tone, as well as in the traditional rhythms enacting the circular repetition of the organic life:

Here where I walk was the green world of a child;
the infinity of day that closed in day,
the widening spiral turning and returning,
the same and not the same, that had not end.
Does the heart know no better than to pray
that time unwind its coil, the bone unbuild
till that lost world sit like a fruit in the hand—
till the felled trees rise upright where they lay
and leaves and birds spring on them as they stand?
['The Moving Image']

Her passionate concern with earth and time, and her search for values which can resolve the dichotomy of 'the endless circle of time and star / that never chime with the blood', lead her to the realization of the power of love. Love is a true metaphor for her feminine interaction with life, for it turns upon the strength of a mother-child relationship. In 'Power', she summons the power of Love as 'awful voice', and then taking heart replies: '… even to rejoice / calling myself your child'. Or sometimes she personifies Love, and like a mother affirms its power and beauty, again, as in 'The Moving Image':

I am the maker. I have made both time and fear,
knowing that to yield to either is to be dead.
All that is real is to live, to desire, to be,
till I say to the child I was, 'It is this; it is her.
In the doomed cell I have found love's whole eternity.'

Unlike Kamala Das, the Indian poet, who notwithstanding the rich traditions available within her own national culture, turns to the intensity of love as the human affirmative, Judith Wright celebrates such an affirmative as a meaningful inter-relationship with the landscape. This is refreshingly valid in the absence of the alternative of a native tradition. Caught between her Australian identity and the identity deriving from the use of English, she attempts to revive 'the song [that] is gone'; 'the dance / [that is] secret with the dancers in the earth' manifests itself in terms of the most traditional of themes, love. The search for 'the hunter [who] is gone' fructifies in 'ordinary love' which offers to Judith Wright 'the solitudes of poetry', and also a sense of personal identity. Whether it is an organic kinship with the landscape:

All the hills' gathered waters feed my seas
who am the swimmer and the mountain-river;
and the long slopes' concurrence is my flesh
who am the gazer and the land I stare on;
and dogwood blooms within my winter blood,
and orchards fruit in me and need no season.
['For New England']

Or, in the narrower sense, with the lover and the child:

This is no child with a child's face;
this has no name to name it by;
yet you and I have known it well.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.
['Woman to Man']

Whether it is pain or joy, it is 'blood's red thread' which unites all her perceptions and gives them a sense of organic completeness. There is almost always a frank recognition of the incompleteness of the woman, for she can speak for the woman:

The heart can blaze with candour
as though it housed a star;
but this my midnight splendour
is not my own to wear:
it lights by what you are.
['Five Senses']

This obsessive presence of the image of light shows why, despite the tonal directness of Judith Wright, her love poems modulate more into the intellectual than the sensuous. And it is the intellectual meditativeness which enables her to bring multiple levels of relationship to bear on the 'You and I'. 'You', which lights the passion of her heart, is both the world and the lover. It is also the child who is 'the maker and the made'. 'Blood's red thread … binds us fast in history.' She makes the world, but she is also made by it. She is the creator of the child, but she is incomplete without the man who brings the seed. But then it is the love for the unknown, 'the third who lay in our embrace', which unites the lovers and is

… the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.
That is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.
['Woman to Man']

Man, woman, and the child are the sap, the earth and the tree, and are united by 'blood's red thread' into an organic entity, like Yeats's image of the dancer or the chestnut-tree.

The power of the poems in Woman to Man, and of those like 'Ishtar' from the later volume, lies in the frankness and truthfulness with which Judith Wright celebrates the glory of childbirth. Thus Philip Lindsay [in Poetry Review XLI, No. 4 (July-August 1950)] is led to write ecstatically:

Of Judith Wright's poetry it might well be said that she is the only woman who has kissed and told. Other women have sung of love, but apart from Sappho—and she, after all, was a man in female skin—none have written honestly and without shame of their desires.

He pronounces Judith Wright 'as being the first woman honestly to unbare her lover's heart in verse', in contrast to Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Christina Rossetti, whose love poetry is inspired by 'sexual repression' and 'starved hearts' rather than sexual fulfilment. Without undermining these three poets, who, it might well be argued, wrote better poetry, Judith Wright can be compared with Kamala Das whose central theme is love, and whose spontaneity and uninhibited treatment of a woman's passions are unique, because, apart from their poetic merit, they are written against the background of a culture different from, and more conservative than, Judith Wright's. Kamala Das concentrates more particularly on sexual love, and her woman-persona, far from being repressed, speaks with a sense of confessional urgency which should make Lindsay qualify his opinion on Judith Wright:

We came together like two suns meeting, and each
Raging to burn the other out. He said you are
A forest-conflagration and I, poor forest,
Must burn. But lay on me, light and white as embers
Over inert fires, Burn on, elemental
Fire, warm the coal streams of his eternal flesh till
At last, they boiling flow, so turbulent with life.
['The Conflagration']

Both are at their best when they write short poems, though Judith Wright's range and skills are greater. Mrs Das has published only two volumes of poems. And although in the second, there is a noticeable falling-off, the admirable concentration on the feminine point of view, the burning introversion with sexual love never falters, even when, as in 'Composition' and 'The Looking Glass', the tone is patronizing and indulgent and the expression not too happy:

'Captive' describes her love as 'an empty gift, a gilded empty container' and herself as the captive of 'the womb's blinded hunger, the muted whisper at the core'. The poem is ambiguous in tone, but the theme of sexual love receives greater relevance from the unmistakable whisper at the core of the poem that love's fulfilment lies in containment not in emptiness. This theme of the glory of creation, of childbirth as the fulfilment of love, which is the theme of Woman to Man, and is also at the heart of Judith Wright's vision of organic continuity, finds a fine expression in Kamala Das's 'Jaisurya'. In a style which admirably combines the narrative and the meditative, she goes through the whole gamut of feelings preceding and following the birth of a son. Right at the start, she sets the interior mood by describing the outer:

It was again the time of rain and on
Every weeping tree, the lush moss spread like
Eczema, and from beneath the swashy
Earth the fat worms surfaced to explode
Under rain.

The rain is friendly; and by 'sighing, wailing, and roaring' it actually helps the persona briefly to forget her own 'pain'. It is only 'the unloving' who feel pain. And since the persona herself is involved in the loving act of creation, ' … the first / Tinge of blood seemed like another dawn / Breaking'. She feels and becomes earth, and finds meaning and fulfilment in love which is not an 'empty container' but is filled with a child:

Walk into the waiting room, I had cried,
When once my heart was vacant, fill the
Emptiness, stranger, fill it with a child.
Love is not important, that makes the blood
Carouse, nor the man who brands you with his
Lust, but is shed as slough at the end of each
Embrace. Only that matters which forms as
Toadstool under lightning and rain, the soft
Stir in womb, the foetus growing, for,
Only the treasures matter that were washed
Ashore, not the long blue tides that washed them
In.

The poem brings together light and darkness, fire and water, to weave a pattern of feeling which holds itself with the joy of creation. When the rain stops and 'the light was gay on our / Casurina leaves, it was early / Afternoon'. Then comes the child itself 'the sun-drenched golden day'. It is characteristic of Kamala Das, so deep is her assimilation of the Indian landscape, that meaningful things happen to her at or around noon time under the virgin whiteness of the sun. The child is a day that is 'Separated from darkness that was mine / And in me'.

This symbolism of light and dark is at the heart of Judith Wright's love poems, especially those dealing with childbirth. In 'Woman's Song' the woman longs for the birth of the child; she asks it to 'wake in me' for

The knife of day is bright
to cut the thread that binds you
within the flesh of night.

In 'Woman to Child', the act of separation of the child from the mother is seen not as a disunity but an affirmation of an abiding relationship between the day and night:

I wither and you break from me;
yet though you dance in living light
I am the earth, I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit,
the link that joins you to the night.

In 'Conch-Shell' the poet glorifies this abiding relationship. After the childbirth, the house is washed clean and

The spiral passage turns upon itself.
The sweet enclosing curve of pearl
Shuts in the room that was the cell of birth.

But this is a new beginning for the 'windless shelter housing nothing'. The child who is the 'delicate argument and hieroglyph / of flesh that followed outward from the germ', is both a culmination of one and a beginning of another argument in organic mystery. In the state of mind following on childbirth, she can 'half-guess' that the creative force 'burns forward still in me against the night':

And here, half-guess, half-knowledge, I contract
into a beast's blind orbit, stare deep down
the cliffs not I have climbed …

The Eliotic echo in 'half-guess, half-knowledge' and the Yeatsian cadences in 'beast's blind orbit' and 'stare' have been made fully her own, though these echoes enrich our understanding of Judith Wright's metaphors of 'the house' (for the womb), 'delicate argument' (for the child), the 'puzzle' (for birth)—all intended to give the weight of history to the persona's sense of continuity of the orbit. Like Kamala Das, Judith Wright is rejoicing in the captivity of 'the womb's blinded hunger'. Though both poets are aware of the pain that its absence or the fulfilment involves, neither successfully relates this pain to the paranoia of contemporary history, as, for example, John Berryman does in 'Homage to Mistress Bradstreet', one of the greatest love poems of this century. Berryman's attempt to discover his poetic voice in the voice of Anne Bradstreet, since he cannot do it in the voice of any particular tradition, involves him in a passionate relationship with the woman persona herself. With the help of tortured rhythms and the vocabulary of guilt, suggesting seventeenth-century Calvinism, Berryman dramatizes his personal poetic problem and the need for certitude:

The stanzas which describe the sexual experience and childbirth are perhaps the most lyrical in the poem. It is the woman persona who, retrieved from oblivion, comes alive, and in describing her sexual experience conveys the terror of history:

faintings black, rigour, chilling, brown
parching, back, brain burning, the grey pocks
itch, a mainic stench
of pustules snapping, pain floods the palm,
sleepless, or a red shaft with a dreadful start
rides at the chapel, like a slipping heart.
My soul strains in one qualm
ah but this is not to save me but to throw me down.

It is not only an orgasm but a qualm; and the language of ecstasy is also the language of delirium. Though the relationship is adulterous and hence guilt-ridden, it is not lust. It is the poet's impassioned search for meaning and certitude. What is true of sexual love is also true of the outcome of it. As the persona becomes aware of the 'ingrown months, blessing a swelling trance', the world appears both 'strange and merciful'. And instead of a sense of release, we have in her an uneasy feeling for liberation:

The poem culminates in the recharged stillness of

In the rain of pain & departure, still
Love has no body and presides the sun,
and elfs from silence melody. I run.
Hover, utter, still,
a sourcing, whom my lost candle like the firefly loves.

These lines remind us that Berryman's poetic adultery with Anne Bradstreet reverberates with an ironic sense of certitude in love and in poetry.

Although Judith Wright has written poems about war, and although her vision encompasses life and death, love and pain, her faith in existence, in the certitudes of beauty, is unflinching. Her relationship with the external world has a strong sense of family. So has her relationship with her lover and child. Graves, whose idea of love is 'nondomestic' and is dominated by the woman, does not delight in the birth of children; he describes 'love at first sight' as the misnaming of 'Discovery of twinned helplessness / Against the huge tug of procreation' [Collected Poems, 1965]. In 'Call it a Good Marriage', he suggests, with some irony, that love can be intense despite a lack of children:

Call it a good marriage:
More drew these two together
Despite a lack of children,
Than pulled them apart.

It is an intensity which grows out of tension: there is no 'comfortable point-of-rest' in Graves's love relationship. Judith Wright uses images of marriage to embody her sense of completeness and 'comfortable point-of-rest'. The sisters in the poem of the same title are old and look nostalgically back to the days of their youth. They can do so with a sense of ease, because they have found their fulfilment in marriage and children:

Thinking of their lives apart and the men they married,
thinking of the marriage-bed and the birth of the first child,
they look down smiling. 'My life was wide and wild,
and who can know my heart? There in that golden jungle
I walk alone', say the old sisters on the veranda.
[Woman to Man]

'In Praise of Marriages' glorifies marriage as a means of knowing 'all possible' of 'this field of power' which 'spreads' out of the marriage of 'the I and the you'. In Kamala Das there is some sense of union, and in The Descendents, it is, happily, viewed in the framework of a family. This gives to some of her old themes a new perspective and to her work a sense of progression, despite the faults of style. One hopes that she will bring to her words a wider range of associations and the quality of irradiation.

Although these two woman poets seem to have similar poetic concerns, they differ in their attitudes to the 'place' of words in the love-experience. For Kamala Das, the intensity of passions makes words irrelevant. In 'Spoiling the Name', she associates name with abstraction:

… why should this name, so
Sweet-sounding, enter not all the room
Where I go to meet a man
Who gives me nothing but himself, who
Calls me in his private hours
By no name …

Words can be a 'nuisance', a distraction. In 'Substitute' they are a filling, and suggest discord:

Our bodies after love-making
Turned away, rejecting,
Our words began to sound
Like clatter of swords in fight.

In 'Convicts', words are submerged in the darkness of the passions, the music of the silence:

… We were earth under hot
Sun. There was a burning in our
Veins and the cool mountain nights did
Nothing to lessen heat. When he
And I were one, we were neither
Male nor female. There were no more
Words left, all words, lay imprisoned
In the ageing arms of night.

Kamala Das's preoccupation with the intensity of sexual love does not bring her to the brink of inarticulation. It is an unconscious irony perhaps that despite her frequent gestures of denial of power to words, despite her view that words are inadequate for love, her own affirmations of love are striking, eloquent, and concrete.

Judith Wright, on the other hand, believes that 'love takes no pains with words / but is most eloquent'. To love is to communicate and thus to feel divine; and to communicate is to feel creative. Language is an affirmation of the power of love. Words are necessary for interpreting one's passions: º cannot know my heart's beauty /—say all the creatures—till you interpret me in god-made words.' In 'Birds', the desire to escape into 'the forest of a bird' is an impassioned attempt to 'find the words that lie behind all these languages'. In 'Water', the simple perception of the movement of water can stimulate a perception of a profounder process:

Such sentences, such cadences of speech
the tonguing water stutters in its race
as may have set us talking each to each
before our language found its proper pace.

Concern with the relationship between language and creation is at the heart of 'Camping at Split Rock'. Each perception is an involvement within a word:

The finger of age-old water splits the rock
and makes us room to live: the age-old word
runs on in language and from obstinate dark
hollows us room for seeing.

And though 'the birds go by', 'we can name and hold them', for each of them is a 'word' that goes beyond the mortality of the bird. In 'Prayer', confronted with the thought of death herself, she prays that she retain love which includes the power 'to see the words', as well as the power to speak words:

And you, who speak in me when I speak well,
withdraw not your grace, leave me not dry and cold.
I have praised you in the pain of love, I would praise you still
in the slowing of the blood, the time when I grow old.

Judith Wright never gets breathless even when she is at her most intense in Woman to Man. In 'To Hafiz of Shiraz', she suggests that with the repetition of experience, there is corresponding simplification of words but that repetition and simplification need not mean the loss of intensity, for 'every word leads back to the blinding original Word'; there are no two ways for her, 'the way up and the way down', but one way only.

It is an unconscious irony in Judith Wright, one ventures to say, that she is concerned with words in the sense of a theme in poems which seem, on the whole, inferior to those in Woman and Man. The tone of most of these poems is discursive, and although one notices the simplicity of the words one also misses in fact, the blinding light of the original Word. In Woman to Man, she does not seek to assert explicitly the power of words as she does, for example, in The Other Half, because, in the former, language is a mode of feeling and thus the power of words is felt in the power of the experience of love that she undergoes:

The burning wires of nerves, the crimson way from head to heart, the towering tree of blood—who travels here must move, not as he would, but fed and lit by love alone he may.