[In this essay concerning Wright's Woman to Man, Lindsay asserts that Wright is the first woman poet to speak of love with a truly female voice.]

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. Usually we find that women poets were sexually inexperienced ladies, transmuting their desires into religious or metaphysical ecstasies, as with Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, or, like Emily Dickenson, they have had to invent a lover on whom they could pour the passion of their starved hearts. The last thing I wish is to start a discussion on this question, and, of course, exceptions can be found, but it remains broadly true that sexual repression has commonly been the inspiration of women's art. When I was an art-student, I was surprised to notice how many girls showing genuine promise abandoned their work once they were married. It was as though a hitherto unsatisfied yearning had found completion and the substitute of painting was no longer needed. This is often true also of poetry. Elizabeth Barrett certainly continued to write after her marriage but she might as well never have married for all the revelation it brought into her work and she never unveiled the secrets of her womanly delight in love, save abstractly.

This, Judith Wright has done for us, the Sphinx answering the cry of man down the ages: "What is love to you?" when he holds his beloved in his arms. To explain what I mean, it were best that I quote the title poem of her latest collection, "Woman to Man":

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.

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.

This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast
the precise crystals of our eyes.
This is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.

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.

By stressing this vital aspect of Miss Wright's poetry, I am liable to throw into darkness her other great qualities and the subtle beauty of her vision which sees with pity yet delight the colours of the world and its sounds and its unhappy people. There is haunting music in many of her lines which remain to sing in one's memory:

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.

Always her vision is a woman's vision whether she wonders on the miracle of a conch-shell or on the need for pain "that knifes us in blind alleys," on children or trees, on gardens, flowers or lonely spinsters lacking love, on the half-mad bullocky with his camp-fire in the bush, on the sick soldier Man-jack home from the war, on the dead snake and the ants that "drink at his hollow eye," on countrydances and the terrifying bush-fire, on the trapped dingo or the surfer or the half-caste girl, or whether she merrily laughs with a "Song in a Wine-Bar"?

Toss up your spinning silver,
wild boy, my sailor.
We'll dance till Time is done
who are hot with Time's fever.
Among the tilting buildings
gay boy, wild lover,
we will go on dancing
till our dancing day is over.

Toss up your shining money,
wild boy, my sailor,
like a Saturday fountain,
like a holiday river.

Fill the lit street full
of wine as hot as a lover;
and we will go on dancing
till Saturday night is over.

Such light-hearted gaiety is, however, rare in Miss Wright's work. Her feelings are too profound for such drunken moods to last, and continually she returns to contemplate that wonderful sensuous world of her own heart and to glory in her body that can contain her child. But as with all true lovers, her love embraces the world and rejects disgust. Even the sight of the "Metho Drinker" stirs in her, not horror or even pity; she who is rich with love must see even this castaway as a lover:

Under the death of winter's leave she lies
who cried to Nothing and the terrible night
to be his home and bread. "O take from me
the weight and waterfall of ceaseless Time
that batters down my weakness; the knives of light
whose thrust I cannot turn; the cruelty
of human eyes that dare not touch nor pity."
Under the worn leaves of the winter city
safe in the house of Nothing now he lies.

His white and burning girl, his woman of fire,
creeps to his heart and sets a candle there
to melt away the flesh that hides the bone,
to eat the nerve that tethers him in Time.
He will lie warm until the bone is bare
and on a dead dark moon he wakes alone.
It was for Death he took her; death is but this
and yet he is uneasy under her kiss
and winces from that acid of her desire.

Here, as in all her poems, no matter what the subject, one senses her intense femininity. Impossible, one feels, would it be for any man to have written this. Take her portrait of "The Bull":

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.
But summer's bubble-sound of sweet creek-water
dwindles and is silent; the seeding grasses
grow harsh, and wind and frost in the black sallies
roughens the sleek-haired slopes. Seek him out, then,
the angry god betrayed, whose godhead passes,

and down the hillsides drive him from his mob.
What enemy steals his strength—what rival steals
his mastered cows? His thunders powerless,
the red storm of his body shrunk with fear,
runs the great bull, the dogs upon his heels.

I have quoted largely, for quotations are essential if you would appreciate my claim for Miss Wright as being the first woman honestly to unbare her lover's heart in verse; and I wish I could quote poem after poem. Wherever I dip into her books, lines demand my repeating them; but I dare not continue lest I overspill my space. At her best—and it is far from often that she falls below the high standard she has set herself—her poetry has in it fire and joy and, sometimes, terror. Also—and in this she is unique—she offers the open cup of love to any of us unafraid to look into the naked heart that is both the possessed and the possessing, that is both courageous and timid, both demanding and submissive, of a woman above the cowardly evasions of so many of her sex, one honest and proud of her strong womanhood that can excite and satisfy love. Humbly, I offer thanks and salute her courage.