[Here, Brissenden examines Wright's first three volumes of poetry. The critic praises many aspects of the poet's work, but worries that the metaphysical panderings in the third volume, The Gateway, denote a shift in Wright's focus, "away from the personal, the particular and the dramatic towards the abstract and the impersonal. "]

When Judith Wright's first book, The Moving Image, appeared it was greeted by the critics with enthusiasm, one writer going so far as to declare that its publication was 'the most important poetic event of 1946'. Another claimed that 'no book of poems has received such an enthusiastic reception here since O'Dowd's The Bush.' Since then she has brought out two more collections of verse: Woman to Man and The Gateway. The growth of her reputation has kept pace with her output of poetry: it would be quite safe to say that she is now widely regarded as one of our leading poets; and there are some who would even support Mr. H. M. Green in placing her 'among the principal poets writing in English today' [Modern Australian Poetry, 1952].

There can be no doubt that her work stands well out from the great mass of Australian poetry—indeed from much of the poetry which fills the pages of literary journals in England and America. Two things in particular lift her poems above the common ruck: their consistently careful and polished technique, and the demand which they make to be considered not just as single poems but as members of a unified body of work.

Judith Wright is first of all a craftsman. She is at her best in her shorter poems, and in the finest of these her mastery of form is always sure and unobtrusive: images and ideas that are often complex are brought together into a controlled and lucid unity in which everything contributes to the central theme; there is nothing superfluous, nothing wanting; the surface texture has that clarity and simplicity which can result only from a mature discipline; and the whole poem has that radiance which comes when each image shines not only with its own light, but also with the light shed on it by every other image in the poem.

This is true also of her work as a whole. The impression which any individual poem makes is deepened and intensified if one has a knowledge of the rest of her poetry: certain themes appear again and again in her poems, and there are certain human problems with which she seems to be constantly pre-occupied. These themes and problems are, moreover, related to one another—the comprehension of one helps to illuminate all the rest. It becomes obvious, once one is familiar with the main body of her work, that Judith Wright is a poetic thinker, someone with a coherent view of life, a view of life which is not only stated but also initially conceived in poetic terms. The problems with which she is concerned are seen through the eyes of a poet; even more significantly, poetry itself is seen to be an important part of their solution.

There is nothing unique about the problems with which she is most deeply concerned—they are those which have engaged the minds of most serious writers for the past fifty years or so: the problems of discovering, in an age of cultural disintegration and confusion, some significant pattern or purpose in life; the problems of merely existing which are presented by an age in which for so many people, as William Faulkner has remarked [in The Stockholm Address], 'There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: when will I be blown up?'

It has become something of a cliché to say that we live in an age of transition—a label which could be attached to almost any historical period. There are times however in which an unusually large number of things are all changing at the same time, and in which the process of change itself is not only extended but also vastly accelerated. Such is the character of our own age. Social institutions, moral values, the pictures which people have of man in relation to the universe and to other men—things in which the rate of change can usually be measured in terms of generations or even centuries—are today altering within the span of a single life-time. And the literature and philosophy of our age are haunted by the themes of time and change: it is no mere accident of titling which links together such seemingly unrelated works as The Time Machine, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, The Lost Childhood, Space, Time and Deity, Essay on Memory, Five Bells and The Moving Image. 'The cancer of time,' says Henry Miller, 'is eating us away.' No other civilization has ever been so obsessed with time as our own.

The 'moving image' of Judith Wright's first book is Time—Time conceived in an absolute sense as the very process of change itself, the flux of things, which carries us inexorably forward into the future; the shifting and impermanent world through which, according to Plato, we glimpse dimly those truths which are eternal and unchanging. Looked at in this way, Time becomes the enemy which brings us, as individuals, out of the paradise of childhood into the world of maturity in which 'the clock begins to race,' and

We are caught in the endless circle of time and star that never chime with the blood.

It becomes history, the rising tide of events which has brought us to our present crisis in which

Promise and legend fail us and lose power.
Words are rubbed smooth and faceless as old coins
and any story is only word upon word.
Each of us, solitary on his tower,
speaks and dares not listen to what he has said
for fear it lose all meaning as it is heard.

Judith Wright is not alone, even among Australian poets, in her pre-occupation with time. Time is both the theme and the inspiration of 'Five Bells' and 'Essay on Memory'; and Slessor and FitzGerald are as keenly aware as she of the tragic inevitability of change and death. In Judith Wright's poetry, however, the consciousness of time is accompanied by a feeling for history and tradition which is something new in Australian poetry. Slessor and FitzGerald tend to raise their voices, to pose with a somewhat self-consciously romantic air when they present us with their Captain Cooks or their bony hands of memory—these, after all, are History with a capital H.

The past is obviously just as fertile a source of inspiration to Judith Wright as it is to these poets—New England, where her family has lived for more than one generation, lies in the background of much of her poetry: 'part of my blood's country' she calls it in 'South of My Days'.

I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

But it is a background and a past which are perfectly assimilated: as a result her poetry is free alike from the bitter nostalgia of Hope and McAuley; from the strident nationalism which still lingers (in an inverted form) in the romanticism of Slessor, FitzGerald and D. Stewart; and from the pseudo-mysticism of the Jindyworobaks. (She has, by the way, inscribed the epitaph of this last group in a small poem called 'Bora Ring'.

The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.)

This balanced, easy and completely unaffected acceptance of Australia—both the land and its people—has, perhaps, its own defects; but it seems to me to be one of the most important of Judith Wright's qualities as a poet. No matter what criticism may be levelled at her, she can never (save for an odd phrase or two) be called immature or provincial. She is neither 'ashamed' of being an Australian, nor irrationally proud of the fact: she merely accepts the Australian landscape and the Australian people as inevitable and natural features of the milieu in which she lives and writes.

That she should be able to do this is a mark not only of her own maturity but also of the maturity of Australian poetry in general. She is not the only modern Australian whose work reveals this unselfconscious acceptance of Australia; but she is, I believe, the first in whose poetry it has been present from the very beginning. In years to come Judith Wright will almost certainly be regarded as the typical poet of the 'forties: the decade in which Australian poetry came of age and learned to forget that it was adolescent and antipodean.

Together with this awareness of history and tradition there is apparent in her work what I can only describe as a sense of society: a sense at once of the fundamental community of common humanity to which we all belong, and of the artificial barriers of race, religion and politics which grow up within this community, and which blind our eyes to its existence. The concluding lines from 'Nigger's Leap: New England,' illustrate very clearly her awareness of the inevitability of history and her feeling for the ways in which men are linked together and divided against each other. She is speaking of the aborigines:

Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tided up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
And there lie that were ourselves writ strange.

Never from earth again the coolamon
of thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history
that has sunk many islands in its good time.

The touch of the true poet is evident in almost every line of 'Nigger's Leap'. One overlooks the trite flatness of 'writ strange' in admiration of the sure and subtle integration of image and theme, the exact and evocative use of words: 'lips' and 'cools' for instance function perfectly at every level—in the sensitive precision with which they suggest the actual approach of evening; in the way which they strike an unobtrusive harmony with the central sea-metaphor of the poem; and most of all in their faint but distinct overtone of imminent menace. 'Lips' suggests not only the sound and movement of the rising tide, but also that 'dark throat' of the sea which has engulfed 'many islands in its good time'.

The sea—Time—Society—the natural processes of birth, decay and death: they are all forces in the face of which the individual can be lonely and powerless; and Miss Wright produces her best work when she presents such a situation—when she suggests through a dramatic, particular incident the general feelings and ideas which the contemplation of woman, man and time has aroused in her. 'Nigger's Leap' has for its subject two dramatic incidents—the suicide of the aboriginal, years ago, and the approach of dusk on this particular night—that 'fall of evening (which) is the rebirth of knowing'. 'The Company of Lovers', a relatively simple poem, gains its power not only from the honesty with which its theme is presented, but also from its note of urgent immediacy. And it is on a similar note that she concludes 'Woman to Man'—a poem so fine that it deserves to be quoted in full.

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.

The tone of the first two stanzas is metaphysical: it is brought about by the way in which rather abstract concepts and restrained but deeply felt emotions are blended and fused; and the poem as a whole is notable for the precision with which its paradoxes are stated and the delicate balance in which they are held. Its force and beauty, however, are focused and intensified by the naked simplicity and directness of the last line: the situation is suddenly made dramatic and individual—one woman speaking to one man at a particular time and place.

It is this ability to invest typical human situations with a dramatic significance that gives the best of Miss Wright's poetry its power. In her earlier work this ability often finds its expression in lyrical portraits of individual people—poems such as 'Bullocky', 'The Hawthorn Hedge', 'Brother and Sisters', and others. And even when she ceases to portray individuals and cuts through to that fundamental world in which 'all men are one man', the basic human situation is still often presented dramatically—

Yet where the circle was joined
the desperate chase began;
where love in love dissolved
sprang up the woman and man.
('Eden')

There is nothing static about Judith Wright's poetry—her world is one of continual movement, change and development. And although she is always conscious of the inevitability of death, she is just as keenly aware of the inevitability of birth: she knows that change does not necessarily involve decay: she sees time not only as a destructive but also as a regenerative force. It is because her vision has this breadth that her work never reflects what is merely a sentimental pessimism. 'Those who are given to grief know grief only', she writes in 'Letter to a Friend'.

It is because of the joy in my heart
that I am your fit mourner.

And the source of much of her inspiration lies in the effort to comprehend in one vision the antinomies of birth and death; growth and decay; love and loneliness; union and isolation. In her best work this effort results in a tension of ideas and an intensity of feeling which remind one of Yeats. The finest poems in Woman to Man and The Gateway have the genuine metaphysical note; and they are, moreover, expressed with a disciplined clarity that is not common enough in modern poetry.

One can never resolve the paradoxes of death-in-life and life-in-death by explaining them away. By a conscious acceptance of them and their mystery, however, the difficulties they present can, in a way, be transcended. But the achievement of a single vision in which these things can be held is no passive thing: the note in much of Miss Wright's later poetry, is not one of mere acceptance but one of triumph and affirmation:

Darkness where I find my sight,
shadowless and burning night,
here where death and life are met
is the fire of being set.
('Midnight')

And in the poem which gives her latest volume, The Gateway, its title, the affirmation becomes even more explicit.

In the depth of nothing
I met my home.

All ended there;
yet all began.
All sank in dissolution
yet rose renewed.

This note of affirmation sounds most strongly in poems such as 'Woman to Man', 'Woman to Child' and (from The Gateway) 'The Promised One'; poems in which the mystical vision of 'the depth of nothing' is given weight and substance by some positive human action: a word or gesture of love. It is only through love that the threats and terrors of existence can be overcome: for love is at once unifying and creative. By bringing people together it destroys loneliness, isolation, intolerance and hatred; and through what it creates—peaceful communities as well as children—it defeats death and drives out fear. It is her passionate apprehension of this which gives to the best of Judith Wright's poetry its individuality and beauty. The love poetry in Woman to Man and The Gateway is unique in its combination of intellectual strength with feminine feeling. Only a woman could write poetry like this, and no other woman has done it in quite this way.

Poems such as these can obviously arise only out of deeply felt personal experience; but the strength of these poems probably comes as much from the poet's realization of the necessity of love for the happiness of other people—both as individuals and as members of a society—as it does from her awareness of her own feelings. She is conscious both of the misery of loneliness and of the danger to humanity of the fear and intolerance which loneliness can breed. Love is the solution: and since Judith Wright is a poet, she sees language—the word—as one of the most vital expressions of love, in the intimate, personal sense and in the general, social sense. As she has said in a recent article, it is only through language that the private world of one individual—'the flux of personal and relative experience'—can be made intelligible both to himself and to other individuals. 'Language is … a crystallization of our experience in common; it is the final achievement of men as builders of a picture of their world' ['The Writer and the Crisis' Language, April-May, 1952].

The various themes and problems which, as I have been suggesting, dominate the work of this poet, are not of course always all present in a single poem. But one is never completely unconscious of them: they form a background, a poetic world into which each individual poem can be fitted. And there are some poems which seem to present a focused and concentrated picture of this whole world—in which all its various aspects are gathered together into one pattern. Perhaps the best example of this sort of thing is 'The Bones Speak', with its dominant image of the 'untenanted hollow of this cave' into which 'man with his woman fled from woman and man'.

And the rock fell, and we dissolved in night
and walked the ceaseless maze of emptiness
hollow-socketed, alone, alone;
her once sweet flesh impersonal as stone,
for love is lost in terror, child of sight.

Yet from this universe of vagrancy
always I hear the river underground,
the ceaseless liquid voices of the river
run through these bones that here lie loose together,
a quiver, a whispering, a promise of sound.

The river whose waters move toward the day
the river that wears down our night of stone—
I hear its voice of fall and flood deny
the reign of silence and the realm of bone;
its mining fingers work for this cave's ruin.

The fundamental symbols in this poem—the cave, the bones, the river with 'its voice of fall and flood' which at the same time carries in that voice a 'promise of sound', a hope of rebirth and regeneration—carry the basic and archetypal religious associations which they have borne for generations: but they are brought together into a fresh and individual design, the expected echoes are given a new timbre by our memory of other poems in which love and the word have been set against loneliness and silence.

There is nothing particularly novel in the themes or the images which symbolise them in a poem such as this—if there were it would perhaps not be so effective. But in this, and other poems, Miss Wright's interpretation of these themes is modern, unselfconsciously Australian, and often original.

Despite the individuality of her style, however, one becomes aware after a while of certain literary echoes—faint but inescapable. Mad Tom and Blind Jimmy Delaney are Yeatsian fools from the twenty-eighth phase, and not, I think, particularly successful ones. Mad Tom especially is a rather muddled rhetorician; and in 'The Blind Man', as in Miss Wright's other attempts at a long poem, such as 'The Moving Image' and 'The Flood', the movement of thought and the control of form tend to become hesitant and confused. Once she leaves the confines of the small lyric, or single dramatic statement, a dangerous tendency to philosophise appears—a tendency to talk about ideas and feelings rather than to crystallise them into images. The faint flap of the aged eagle's wings can be heard occasionally too, in the dry air of New England—

I would resolve my mind upon this faith
finding a meaning in annihilation.
Since blood has been your gift, let me accept it,
remembering that for spring's resurrection

some sacrifice was always necessary.
Osiris, Christ; your flesh broken like bread …

And there is obviously a certain similarity between Judith Wright's views on time, man and poetry and those of T. S. Eliot, to whom the purification of the dialect of the tribe is a sacred duty, and who can pronounce the discovery of a new verse form as the most important thing that can happen to a nation. The Four Quartets stand somewhere in the background of even such a fine poem as 'Niggers Leap: New England'; and the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral lies over the deliberately flat and understated imagery of lines like these—

The labourer thinks and spits and looks aside;
the young girls laugh and look frightened;
the fat man with pale eyes passes on the rumour
although he does not believe it.

The echoes are not always so obvious as this; and although it is clear that she has been influenced both by the theory and the practice of Eliot, I do not suggest that either her poetry or the structure of thought behind it is in any important way derivative. Literary influences are after all inevitable and, for those with independent personalities and strong literary digestions, usually beneficial. Superficially at any rate there are few echoes in Judith Wright's later poetry.

The way in which her poetry has developed, however, parallels in a disturbing fashion the pattern of development which can be seen in the poetry of Eliot. The general tone of The Gateway is noticeably different from the tone of the earlier books—especially The Moving Image. One can see that her poetry is moving away from the personal, the particular and the dramatic towards the abstract and the impersonal: a movement sanctioned if not inspired by the example set in the Four Quartets. The poetic aridity which blights certain passages in the Four Quartets is not immediately obvious, however, because of that superb rhythmical control which gives to even the most desiccated of Eliot's utterances the strength and life of vigorous speech. But it is in just this aspect of poetic technique that Miss Wright is at her weakest—the 'free verse' of 'The Flood', 'Letter to a Friend', 'The Gateway', and other of her later poems is slack and nerveless.

Far more obvious than the Eliot influence in The Gateway is the influence—again in a diffuse and fairly wellassimilated way—of Blake. Instead of finding eternity in the acts of woman and man, Miss Wright seems to be seeking it in the grain of sand. Flowers, trees, seeds, birds and insects are beginning to displace men and women as the subjects of her poems; and instead of using the cyclic processes of life which these things exemplify to throw light on the problems and questions of human existence, she does just the opposite. Woman and man seem to be no more significant than the cicadas or the cedar trees: in fact it is not even life but the process of life which seems to be engaging more and more of her attention.

Although there are some fine poems in The Gateway, and, as always, the standard of poetic craftsmanship is remarkably high, one misses the depth and passion which make the best poems of Woman to Man so outstanding. This slackening of tension, and the emphasis on speculation rather than symbolic statement, are due perhaps to the fact that she has lost some of the philosophical certainty on which her ealier work was based. Judith Wright is after all a remarkably honest poet, and one cannot blame her for trying to work out her difficulties in her poetry. The results however do not seem to me to be always satisfactory. In particular the attempt to create some sort of private mythology, as in poems like 'Legend', 'Nursery Rhyme for a Seventh Son', 'Fairytale'—and some earlier poems—are flat, disappointing, and obviously artificial.

This is not to say that The Gateway is an unrewarding book. Occasionally she achieves the authentic simplicity she is seeking—

Lion, let your desert eyes
turn on me.
Look beyond my flesh and see
that in it which never dies.

And some of the love poems—'Song', 'All Things Conspire'—take us back to the world of Woman to Man. In general, however, the poems in The Gateway lack that directness and intensity which distinguish the best of her earlier work. It is interesting in this respect to compare 'Dark Gift', the first poem in The Gateway, with 'Woman to Man', the poem which opens the previous collection:

The flower begins in the dark
where life is not.
Death has a word to speak
and the flower begins.

How small, how closely bound
in nothing's net
the word waits in the ground
for the cloak earth spins.

The root goes down in the night
and from night's mud
the unmade, the inchoate
starts to take shape and rise.

The blind, the upward hand
clenches its bud.
What message does death send
from the grave where he lies?

Open, green hand, and give
the dark gift you hold.

Oh wild mysterious gold!
Oh act of passionate love!

The same sort of symbolism is being used in 'Dark Gift' as was used in 'Woman to Man', only in this later poem the symbols are themselves the subject of the poem: they are not being used to illuminate a human situation but for their own sake. As a result there is a slight forcing of the emotion: the 'pathetic fallacy', instead of intensifying the feeling in the poem draws attention to itself: the last two lines,

Oh wild mysterious gold!
Oh act of passionate love!

form a neat climax, but it is weakened by the fact that the poet has had to describe the feelings which, in the earlier poem, were implicit. There is no need for any overt statement of the emotion in 'Woman to Man': the poem is self-contained: it suggests its own mystery and passion.

Judith Wright's attempts at creating her own allegory and mythology are not always unsuccessful. Some of them—such as 'The Forest Path' and 'The Lost Man'—though rather highly pitched, do succeed in creating their own atmosphere. 'The Traveller and the Angel' I find particularly interesting. It tells how, in the strength of his youth, the traveller sets out on his journey. At the ford he meets the first of his tasks: the angel with whom he must wrestle to test his strength.

Marvellously and matched like lovers
we fought there by the ford,
till, every truth elicited,
I, unsurpassably weary,

felt with that weariness
darkness increase on my sight,
and felt the angel failing
in his glorious strength.

Altering, dissolving, vanishing,
he slipped through my fingers,
till when I groped for the death-blow,
I groped and could not find him.

But his voice on the air
pierced the depths of my heart.
"I was your strength; our battle
leaves you doubly strong.

"Now the way is open
and you must rise and find it—
the way to the next ford
where waits the second angel."

But weak with loss and fear
I lie still by the ford.
Now that the angel is gone
I am a man, and weary.

Return, angel, return.
I fear the journey.

Is it too much, I wonder, to see in this poem a parable of the poet's own poetic development? It seems obvious, at least, that Judith Wright herself feels that she has reached the end of one phase of her growth as a poet and thinker—and also that she is not quite certain where she is going next. 'Go easy with me, old man', she says in one poem; 'I am helping to clear a track to unknown water.' At the risk of appearing unkind, I would suggest that unless she discovers the water she is seeking her work may not develop any further. One can only hope that she finds her new source of inspiration—and that when she does she can translate it into new and more vital poetry. Unless she can do this it seems to me that her work stands in real danger of becoming repetitive and stagnant.

It would be a lasting pity if this were to happen. Even if it should, however, it could not take away from the excellence of what she has already achieved: a body of poetry more coherent and self-consistent than that produced by any contemporary Australian poet; and a few poems which are fit to stand with the best that have appeared in England and America during the last ten or fifteen years.