SOURCE: "Some Poems of Judith Wright," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, May, 1968, pp. 201–13.

[McAuley was an Australian poet, critic, and educator who influenced his country's literature through his emphasis on traditional poetic forms and techniques and his opposition to the nationalistic tendencies of some Australian writers and critics, including those in the "Jindyworobak" movement that championed native Australian elements in the arts. In the following analysis of several of Wright's poems, McAuley studies both content and mechanics to contrast what he considers Wright's better poetry with her less successful work. He concludes that Wright's best poems are endowed with a consonance of form, content, and purpose that the others, while successful on certain levels, lack.]

I want to consider first of all some of the very good poems in Judith Wright's first two volumes. A few of these stand out in an order of excellence of their own, though surrounded by others of considerable interest.

In The Moving Image (1946) the poem 'Bullocky' has proved most durable in general liking and critical estimation. It is an evocation of the pioneer past of the Hunter River district. In the first stanza the word 'widdershins' catches the mind with its unexpected Tightness:

Beside his heavy-shouldered team,
thirsty with drought and chilled with rain,
he weathered all the striding years
till they ran widdershins in his brain:

'widdershins', meaning in the opposite direction or backwards, defines the movement of the rest of the poem, which is a backwards look into time. The bullocky is seen as leading the entry of a new people into a new Promised Land. The identification of the bullocky with Moses is imputed in stanzas 2 and 3 to the bullocky himself, more perhaps for dramatic emphasis than as a probability. The result is a double-image effect. We see the bullocky, but we see also a symbolic fiction superimposed on or coalescing with the natural scene:

All the long straining journey grew
a mad apocalyptic dream,
and he old Moses, and the slaves
his suffering and stubborn team.

Then in his evening camp beneath
the half-light pillars of the trees
he filled the steepled cone of night
with shouted prayers and prophecies.

The latter stanza presents the bullocky at his camp-fire, but the scene is also wrought to a cathedral-image: the trees are pillars, the firelight scoops out a steepled cone in the dark. There is thus the simultaneous presentation of type and anti-type: a meaningful symbolic pattern is adduced from the past, together with the new reality which fulfils the pattern in an unexpected way. The effect in the above stanzas is mainly a visual one: it is not just a stir of allusions in the words, for a definite picture is created.

In the next stanza the double-image effect is produced in sound:

While past the camp fire's crimson ring
the star-struck darkness cupped him round,
and centuries of cattlebells
rang with their sweet uneasy sound.

A delicate play of meanings and associations occurs on the word 'centuries', meaning hundreds, as well as ages of time. The bells are actual in the bullocky's time, but they also ring out of a deep and mysterious past (a 'star-struck darkness'), because the patterns of the past are being reenacted. It seems right to allow the cathedral image of the previous stanza to influence the reading, so that the suggestion of sanctuary bells is not excluded, though not unduly stressed. Perhaps there is also, in the use of the word 'centuries', a faint sidelong reminiscence of Traherne's use of the word in Centuries of Meditations. The word 'uneasy' in the last line is superbly right, combining as it does an accurate physical impression with a vague fleeting suggestion of uncertainty. It is surely permissible to explicate these subtle subordinate filaments of meaning or association, so long as it is understood that by bringing them to the surface in sharp focus we tend to distort their proper effect: the reader must restore the disturbed balance when he turns from the interpreter's laborious clumsiness back to the text—with perception nevertheless sharpened, one hopes.

In the last stanza of 'Bullocky' the double-image effect reaches its climax and justification. The bullocky lies buried in the soil as Moses was buried in the Promised Land. The root of the vine—the reference is to the vineyards of the Hunter River district—reaches down to grasp the bone:

O vine grow close upon that bone
and hold it with your rooted hand.
The prophet Moses feeds the grape,
And fruitful is the Promised Land.

Again the effect is sharply visual: the root becomes at the same time a hand reaching down to take hold of the past. The meaning is that the fruitfulness of the land is rooted in the lives and work of the pioneers, and it must hold close to its origins, its tradition, and be nourished by it.

The typology used in the poem, comparing the new settlement to the entry into the Promised Land, has been a natural and recurring one in colonial literatures. Sometimes it has been required to carry the burden of Utopian hallucinations, staling down to clichés of political rhetoric. But Judith Wright does not embarrass us with the crackpot portentousness that O'Dowd would have put into such an analogy. Equally, she did not feel compelled to make the analogy work with that evasive irony which is a disfiguring tic in modern poetry. There is an obvious tension between the hallowed grandeur of Moses and the raw actuality of the bullocky: but the poem accepts this and overcomes it. The bullocky's role is ennobled without being falsified.

The poem's quiet assurance in what it is saying is reflected in its simple firm structure. The iambic tetrameter quatrains, rhyming only in the second and fourth lines, regularly divide, according to their grammatical articulation, into matching halves: two lines plus two lines. Each of these halves tends, moreover, to form a single long line, an octameter with a crease in the middle:

Then in the evening camp beneath the half-light pillars of the trees
He filled the steepled cone of night with shouted prayers and prophecies.

Within this metrical framework the poem moves by successive statements, not by argument. The statements are for the most part grammatically co-ordinate, linked by 'and' or an equivalent. There is also a good deal of parallelism, though not too rigidly enforced:

Grass is across the wagon-tracks,
and plough strikes bone across the grass,
and vineyards cover all the slopes
where the dead teams were used to pass.

Particularly in the later part of the poem, the effect of this organization is responsorial: the second half of the stanza 'answering' the first as in the Ambrosian hymns. There is thus a fundamental constitutive dualism governing the poem in every aspect. [McAuley adds in a footnote: The stanzas also fall naturally into couples, with the exception of stanza 3, which stands on its own. It is devoted to making explicit the analogy underlying the rest of the poem. The additional (superfluous?) character of this stanza, with its slightly officious explanation by slightly strained phrasing ('mad apocalyptic dream' is questionable, and the inversion of 'slaves' and 'team' just a little awkward), seems evident. If I seem to be peering at the structure with niggling pedantry, my excuse is that I want to show how, when Judith Wright is at the height of her inspiration, there is an extraordinary intuitive coherence.]

In the second volume, Woman to Man (1949), the titlepoem is by common consent the summit of her achievement. I hope that a close and rather technical examination of the poem will illuminate its peculiar rightness.

The grammatical structure of 'Woman to Man' is the main engine of its expressive power. Phrase is laid by phrase, clause by clause in a continued insistent parallelism. The successive parallel statements are not linked by co-ordinating conjunctions. To use a technical term, the poem proceeds by parataxis. This simplest of all forms of grammatical articulation is the mode of a great deal of poetry. A complex grammar with subordination of clauses as well as varied coordination is natural when the logic is argumentative; but poetry often moves simply by successive strokes, whose relationships the mind supplies without the need of connective words. The first stanza moves by appositions: the second and fourth lines amplifying the first, and the last line amplifying the third:

The eyeless labourer in the night,
The selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day—
silent and swift and deep from sight
foresees the unimagined light.

In the second and third stanzas the parallel clauses and phrases unfold paratactically, except for the third line of stanza 2 which twists the paradox tighter:

yet you and I have known it well.

This rhetorical parallelism is not static, but dynamic and cumulative, moving forward with increasing urgency to the climax in the last stanza, when meditation on the mystery of conception and gestation changes into an anticipation of the moment of birth:

This is the maker and the made;
this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting at the dark,
the blaze of light along the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.

'The blaze of light' symbolizes the first flash of light and consciousness, but first of all refers literally to the knife cutting the cord. The sudden change of feeling and direction in the last line is very effective, as the woman turns from absorption in the inner mystery to utter a direct personal cry to the man.

It is a sign of complete inspiration when the phonic texture of the poem supports the meaning, giving a true registration of feeling and a sense of woven unity. For example, in the first stanza the sound announced in 'eye' recurs significantly, and together with other details creates an incantatory effect, drawing us into the woman's absorption in the mystery. One need hardly point out in the last stanza the reinforcement of the meaning by the heavy insistent alliteration and the management of stress.

Another sign of mastery is the expressive use of 'wordbuild'—the size, shape, and stress-profile of individual words. Thus in the first two lines there are four emphatic two-syllabled words with the same 'trochaic' profile, set across the iambic metrical frame, not coinciding with it:

The eyeless labourer in the night,
The selfless shapeless seed I hold

This has its own absorbed insistency, but it also enables the big word 'resurrection' in the third line to emerge more noticeably:

builds for its resurrection day.

In stanza 2, monosyllables notably predominate, tending to slow the lines and increase the effect of deliberation. Stanza 3 continues in the first two lines with monosyllables, and thus ensures that the peaked structure of line 3 stands out:

the precise crystals of our eyes.

(The metrical pattern again cuts across the word-build.) Similarly in this stanza the monosyllables of line 4 enable the important epithets in the last line to emerge with full effect:

the intricate and folded rose.

Judith Wright seems to me to have been at this period of her work a poet who worked intuitively, almost gropingly, towards the expression of a particular sense of the mystery of organic life and process and of human passion. 'Woman to Man' brings these two things into a single focus. When her intuition succeeds, the formal elements of the poetry follow suit: image, grammar, phonic texture, versification come together and co-operate. The phrasing in 'Woman to Man' puts some strain on our understanding, but I think it justifies itself. All the references to the unborn child develop one of two ideas. (1) The child is the product of two persons who have become one; by a metaphorical leap, the child is these two: the man's strength of body, the passionate tension of the woman's breast, the clarity of the eyes of both, constitute the being of this 'third who lay in our embrace'. (2) The child is not just the effect or result of their union: it is also its 'final cause', teleologically speaking: that is, it is the end to which their love is ordered, the end which also determines the process, unconscious but unerring, of growth in the womb.

I should like to consider two other poems in Judith Wright's second volume, which also seem to me to exhibit the coherence of her art at its best. 'The Bull' combines a splendid celebration of organic life—in particular of fulfilled sexuality—with a kind of lament and fear. The first stanza presents an image of sensuous magnificence, to which everything contributes:

In the olive darkness of the sally-trees
silently moved the air from night to day.
The summer-grass was thick with honey-daisies
where he, a curled god, a red Jupiter,
heavy with power among his women lay.

Among the expressive felicities of this texture I hope it won't seem too fanciful to draw attention to the word 'olive' in the first line. Its consonants are picked up again in 'silently moved'; the 'l' sound is then carried forward into 'curled god', while the 'v' sound is carried forward into 'heavy with power'—prominent and highly expressive words which make these linkages of sound effective. This may be conscious artifice on the poet's part, or intuitive Tightness: the distinction is rather unreal. In regard to meaning, 'olive' begins as a colour-descriptive word, but its latent possibilities of suggestion are, it seems to me, stirred retroactively by the image of the curled god, the red Jupiter. The latent suggestions are of ripeness, fullness, oil, anointment, an athletic body gleaming. Again one must admit that explicit analysis tends to distort the text by its thick-fingered laboriousness; but the problem is to make the text account for a complex significance and a sensuous effect which are certainly there.

The poem goes on to show us this sovereign power suddenly lose its godlike authority. It is introduced by the obvious but delightful ingenuity of expressive sound-play in the lines:

But summer's bubble-sound of sweet creek-water dwindles and is silent '

where the kinaesthetic element in the use of sounds may also be noted. The bull is driven by dogs, humiliated, unable to cope with these harrying forces of the outer world. I won't stop to comment on the management of sound-quality and rhythm and word-build in these lines; but I want to draw attention to the grammatical and rhetorical structure. Again parataxis prevails, though some of the clauses have a simple co-ordination. Again the rhetoric relies heavily on parallelism in phrase and clause. Monotony is avoided in several ways. For example, one of the statements is cast in the form of a command, and two in the form of a question. Moreover the parallelism does not always coincide with the line-structure:

What enemy steals his strength—what rival steals his mastered cows?

In such a poem we may ask what is the full meaning, of which the presented subject is the overt surface? Poetry always has human reference. If it deals with the nonhuman, it does so with some implicit or explicit reference to human concerns. It is noteworthy that the bull is anthropomorphized: he lies heavy with power 'among his women', and the image of the 'curled god, a red Jupiter' is anthropomorphic. Here too there is a visual doubleimage effect: we see the bull in the field, at the same time as we see him as a god. The total result is a rich emblem of human instinctual potency and fulfilment.

Again we may note that the poem does not move dialectically or argumentatively, as if proving a thesis. And there is no prepared irony of the routine contemporary kind. The second part, when the bull is discomfited and humiliated does not react destructively on the values affirmed in the first part. The poem does not say: although the bull seems a god he is only a creature that can be ignominiously reduced to servitude. The paratactic structure preserves the correct relationship: both of the moments of the bull are true and valid, and we must comprehend both in our grasp of reality.

The other poem in the second volume which I want to commend is perhaps a slighter one. 'The Old Prison' does not exhibit the brooding sensual power, the concentrated vehemence of 'Woman to Man' or 'The Bull'; but it has its own intensity and lyrical expressiveness, and again the various factors combine to form a coherent rightness. I should like to point out especially the intonation: that is, the effect of tune created by the varying pitch of the vowels, especially in the first two stanzas. This is a factor of variable importance in poetry, but here it is of the essence:

The rows of cells are unroofed,
a flute for the wind's mouth,
who comes with a breath of ice
from the blue caves of the south.

O dark and fierce day:
the wind like an angry bee
hunts for the black honey
in the pits of the hollow sea.

These stanzas give the images which control the poem. The unroofed prison cells suggest a broken deserted hive: but with an inner contrast in the comparison; for this hive was never fruitful, it is sterile, stored with bitterness not sweetness. The other image is that of a flute with holes, through which the wind blows; and again there is a contrast, for this is a stone flute, its music is bitter and desolating, a cry of despair and isolation.

Once more we may note that the grammatical structure of the poem is mainly paratactic, though there is some simple co-ordination by 'and'. Again monotony is avoided by rhetorical means: one statement is turned into a question, another into an O-exclamation. The parallelism and responsorial effect have a cumulative power in the later part:

Who built and laboured here?
The wind and the sea say
—Their cold nest is broken
and they are blown away.

They did not breed nor love.
Each in his cell alone
cried as the wind now cries
through this flute of stone.

The stanzas do not all, as they do in 'Bullocky', break into two matching halves: there is some local asymmetry within the general dualistic balance of the whole.

Many of the poems in the first two volumes seem to me interesting and valuable, but not to attain the order of excellence of those I have been commenting on. If I have succeeded in showing how the very best poems work, I may provide some clues about what happens in poems of a perceptibly lower order of achievement, admirable as some of these may be in their own way.

The well-liked poem 'South of My Days' in the first volume seems to me to be of a second order of achievement. The poet is in Queensland, thinking back to New England, and summoning up the New England past as 'Bullocky' did in a different way:

South of my day's circle, part of my blood's country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter. …

The poem starts with a well-cadenced memorable rhythm. The phrases are striking, though already with a hint of manufacture and proliferation. Gradually the versification spreads out into that treacherous loopy laxity which has been the snare of many Australian poets since Douglas Stewart showed the way. The line hovers and oscillates uneasily between accentual verse and traditional iambic metre; it prefers the loosening effect of feminine endings—26 out of 40 here—free from the stiffening of rhyme. This kind of verse needs to be constantly galvanized by special devices. The poem rather advertizes its free access to colloquial speech.

Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn
when the blizzards came early. Brought them down; we brought them
down, what aren't there yet. Or driving for Cobb's on the run
up from Tamworth—Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill,
and I give him a wink. I wouldn't wait long, Fred,
not if I was you: the troopers are just behind,
coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny,
him on his big black horse.

The colloquial phrasing is accommodated, not in strict counterpoint to a metrical pattern, but rather by bending and relaxing the metrical framework.

In its method the poem belongs to the idiom of the forties in Australia. The formula, which is still in use, was fresher then. Again we may note the paratactic structure, with occasional simple coordination ('and', 'or'). Again there is habitual use of rhetorical parallelism. But now the effect of these forms of organization is not cumulative, but simply one thing after another, strung along a thematic thread. This poem lacks the dynamic development of 'Woman to Man'. Its organization is not much above the level of the shuffled pack of cards to which the old-timer's reminiscences are compared. The theme—the poet's feeling for the New England past—is merely an outline, a hold-all for an assortment of impressions. The poem has to live by the varied momentary attractiveness of its component pieces. The poet is also not fully absorbed in the theme: there remains a touch of self-consciousness, the matey hearty knowingness of the Australian littérateur showing his easy familiarity with outbackery—the very thing that Judith Wright is blessedly free from for the most part.

Another poem that provokes analysis is the attempt in 'Woman to Child' to repeat the success of 'Woman to Man'. It is akin in theme, similar in method, so that the difference is instructive. Though by no means a mere failure, it does not reach the height of the other poem, and does not, to my apprehension, have the same coherence.

As one tries to analyze it, one can see that instead of all factors coming together co-operatively, there is a continuous incipient disorganization.

For example in stanzas 1 and 2 the child is apparently already born and is being spoken to. In stanza 3 the child being spoken to seems to be back in the womb, not yet born. In stanza 4 the child is again already born.

But even in the opening lines there is a disturbance of the time perspective:

You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.

The child is already an embryo in the first line when the seed 'rises' out of the darkness in the second line. Such an objection may seem ridiculously captious in an individual instance; but these imprecisions and dislocations have a cumulative effect. One becomes aware also in the above lines that the poet is under strain to produce phrasing adequate to the sense of mystery intended. The repetition of 'darkness' is a perfunctory expedient rather than a real find. In the rest of the stanza a new symbol is taken up, the child as microcosm. This does not spring out of the first two lines but is a fresh start, and the two parts of the stanza thus created are not successfully integrated. It is significant that the sounds clash: the rhyme-words 'me' and 'see' chime dissonantly against 'seed', and the off-rhyme 'seed' and 'blood' seems not to accord with the tonality of the poem.

In stanza 2, the microcosm idea is amplified by parallel clauses which don't quite do their work. There is a faint Shakesperean echo in the platitudinous 'multitudinous' stars—the connection with 'multitudinous seas' prompting the oceanic images which follow. The third line fills out the stanza by adding a phrase alliterated to give it life, but lacking in precision:

There swam the sliding continents.

Motion in respect of what? Surely this is not an early reference to the hypothesis of continental drift? Are the continents 'sliding' through air but also 'swimming' because surrounded by water? In the next two lines the segmented phrasing is not rhythmically strong, and the last line leaves us suspended between three possible meanings:

and love that knew not its beloved.

I presume that this means that the unborn child did not know whom it would love in the future. But this idea is blurred by other possible interpretations: that the child did not yet know its mother; or that the mother held within herself love for the child she did not yet know. An unresolved triplicity of possible meaning could, of course, be the precise intention of the poet; but there is nothing to suggest that this is so.

By the third stanza the poet has sunk into deeper difficulty. An O-exclamation tries to give the poem a new impulse, producing an infelicitous tricycle of sound, O-o-o, in the first line. The difficulty of seeing the syntax of this stanza, or grasping it when it is read aloud reveals that something is wrong.

O node and focus of the world;
I hold you deep within that well
you shall escape and not escape—
that mirrors still your sleeping shape;
that nurtures still your crescent cell.

The child—now an embryo awaiting birth—is 'node and focus of the world' and this 'node and focus' is in a well. The well 'mirrors' (reflects in water? conforms in shape to?) the child's 'sleeping shape'. One has to scratch up tentative meanings, which prove unsatisfactory. Evidently the poet was worried about this intractable stanza, because in the 1963 selection entitled Five Senses she attempted a re-punctuation, which created the appearance of new logical connections, but without clarifying the sense or making it move more naturally:

O node and focus of the world—
I hold you deep within that well
you shall escape and not escape—
that mirrors still your sleeping shape,
that nurtures still your crescent cell.

Is it now the world that 'mirrors' the sleeping shape and nurtures the crescent cell, as a macro-womb? The poet abandoned this unprofitable 1963 revision in the 1965 Australian Poets selection, which goes back to the original version.

In the last stanza, a partial recovery gets under way, but even here the parataxis and parallelism suddenly get out of hand and set up a thumping burlesque rhythm with an inappropriate House-that-Jack-Built effect:

I am the earth, I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit….

I have been pulling rather gracelessly at the fabric of this poem because I think it shows how some failure, however slight, in the poet's intuitive grasp of the theme has spreading ill-effects which ingenuity cannot fully overcome. Meanings, images, syntax, phonic texture, versification do not grow perfectly together; there are hair-line cracks, and bits of patchwork. Nevertheless, we do respond to the imaginative riches of the poem: the possibilities of the theme, the images, the symbolism, are actualized to a considerable extent, whether or not I am right in the foregoing analysis of certain defects.

At a certain point, in the career of most poets, the first élan ceases. There is a time of re-assessment: a need to deepen or widen one's range, a change in values or emphasis. The passage from one state to another is often through darkness and bafflement. Sometimes the poetic solution lies precisely in including this experience of defeat within a new victory. This seems to me to happen in some of the fine later poems of Judith Wright, such as 'Phaius Orchid' and 'The Forest', where it is not only a metaphysical search that is expressed but also the sense of being foiled in that search. The best of Judith Wright's later poetry is not an attempt to reproduce the 'primitive' intensity of the earlier successes but represents the emergence of a more critical awareness, and a fuller conscious control. 'For My Daughter' is a return to the subjectmatter of 'Woman to Child'; it is better articulated, though not as sensuously rich. 'Sports Field' develops an extended allegory, which is not a mode used earlier. It has a poignancy which is a gift of the experienced heart. In The Other Half (1966), 'Portrait' and 'Naked Girl and Mirror' and 'A Document' stand for a continuing conquest of personal experience—I must admit that I shy away from some other poems which go on about poetry and being a poet. A close formal analysis of the best of the later work would certainly reveal some continuity with the earlier work, but also some difference in spirit, reflected in change and development in method and organization.