SOURCE: "Judith Wright's World-View," in Southerly, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1956, pp. 189–95.

[In the following essay, Scott places the philosophical underpinnings of the poet's work within the context of a Platonic worldview, noting her dual views of nature: on one hand it represents the immediate world and worldly concerns, while on the other it symbolizes an unchanging cosmos that is sensed unconsciously and idealized as Eden.]

Most of the 155 poems in Judith Wright's four books make manifest love and birth and death, which are abstract ideas having in themselves no single form, in terms of such concrete particulars as lovers, old people, little children and Australian landscapes. These subjects, love and birth and death, are shown as all inter-related and aspects of time, and as provoking questions we continue to ask, but never finally answer, about what and why we and life and time are.

Our philosophies are formed in part by what we read, and the epigraphs of Judith Wright's books suggest what world-view her poems present. The epigraph of her first book, The Moving Image (1946), is from Plato's cosmography, the Timaeus: "Time is a moving image of eternity". Plato based his philosophy on, among other things, the ideas of three earlier Greek thinkers, Pythagoras, Herakleitos and Parmenides. Pythagoras (or his followers) held that our souls and consciousnesses are identical, are immortal, and pass through many cycles of birth and death in different bodies until they gain their goal, some unchanging eden, out of time, and for which all life and time and this earth itself are but a drab prelude. Such poems as "The Bones Speak" and "Fire at Murdering Hut" are Pythagorean in that Judith Wright speaks in them in terms of other consciousnesses than her own, showing us what bones and fire presumably might feel in order to show us what bones and fire (and we) are. In such poems as "Woman to Man", "The Cedars", "Transformations" and "Landscapes", she concerns herself with the cyclic transformations which love and birth and death effect within the seasons of our lives and of the years. This is the Herakleitean world in time.

According to Herakleitos, everything changes but change itself. Parmenides claimed that reality does not change; what changes is only illusion. Judith Wright's poems report Herakleitean sense-data, and, in seeking some Parmenidean constancy in it, or cause for it, articulate this sense-data and give it a meaningful coherency. Plato, combining the views of Parmenides, Herakleitos and Pythagoras, wrote that this earth in time is but a changing (and thus an imperfect) replica of an eternal reality. This is a complex world-view, and Judith Wright's poems present various aspects of it.

In her first book, The Moving Image, Judith Wright is concerned more with this earth and with time than with eternity—with the moving image we experience directly and not with any reality which we may guess at or posit beyond earthly experience. Accordingly, in the poem "Northern River", she speaks of time as

the sea that encompasses
all sorrow and all delight,
and holds the memories
of every stream and river.

This is to say that all lives end in time and die, and so we must enjoy what present pleasures and what memories we have while we can; and must love, now, even while death begins to trap and end us, as in "The Company of Lovers". Some of these lives—and what, in time, they came to—are the subjects of "Remittance Man", "Bullocky", "Brother and Sisters", "The Hawthorn Hedge", "Bora Ring" and "Soldier's Farm" in this first book, and of many poems in the three later books.

Judith Wright explores memories of her childhood on the granite New England tableland around Armidale, New South Wales (where she was born in 1915), in these poems and in "South of My Days":

South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite—
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek's leaf-silenced,
willow-choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crab-apple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.

O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer
will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler roses,
thrust its hot face in here to tell another yarn—
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones.
Seventy summers are hived in him like old honey.

Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning;
sixty head left at the Mclntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at the Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand—
cruel to keep them alive—and the river was dust.
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 gave 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. Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror's cards.
True or not, it's all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log breaks into ash.
Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over.
No one is listening. South of my days' circle
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

Such poems as these and "Nigger's Leap: New England" and "For New England" attempt, as Wordsworth put it, in his preface to the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads,

to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting, by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature …

This is to explore both a mental and a geographical environment. What is shown to us, both in these shorter poems and in the longer title-poem in the first book, is what is seen and has been seen, within the limits set by one life, in one locality. Here the poet attempts simply to see and to show us what does exist within these limits—the "high lean country" and the "old stories that still go walking in my sleep"—rather than to suggest that some eternal reality, some cause imagined to exist beyond these limits, causes and explains everything, us included.

In the poem "Waiting", in The Moving Image, what ails us is that we are caught in earth and time, rather than in some eden to shelter us from the effects of time and earth: death, pain and disillusionment. Eden is linked with love more frequently and more explicitly in the second book, Woman to Man (1949), the epigraph of which is

Love was the most ancient of all the gods, and existed before everything else, except Chaos, which is held coeval therewith…. The summary or collective law of nature, or the principle of love, impressed by God upon the original particles of all things, so as to make them attack each other and come together, by the repetition and multiplication whereof all variety in the universe is produced, can scarcely find full admittance in the thoughts of man, though some faint notion may be had thereof. [Francis Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients]

This has a Lucretian ring, but there is, in this second book, little of Lucretius' scepticism of bitterness. Love is shown as creating life and as giving to an otherwise chaotic world some meaning and coherence, as in, for instance, "Woman to Child":

You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.

There moved the multitudinous stars,
and coloured birds and fishes moved.
There swam the sliding continents.
All time lay rolled in me, and sense,
and love that knew not its beloved.

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.
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.

Yet love may be mistaken, and end us, as in "Metho Drinker":

Under the death of winter's leaves he 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.

There is a duality, apparently, in all things, or in the way we see them. We desire life, consciousness, at times, and sleep or death or forgetfulness at other times, and may think eden or alcohol the only way we can resolve our conflicting desires. Or we may be sadly sure that there are no edens, or none that we can reach, while alive or after death. But it is eden, as cause of this earth and time, and our refuge, the result and goal of love, that is the coherency sought in the third book, The Gateway (1953), as its epigraph indicates:

Thou perceivest the Flowers put forth their precious Odours;
And none can tell from how small a centre comes such sweet,
Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands
Its ever-during doors …
[William Blake, Milton]

Love is less earthly here, and is our way to this central eden. In the poem "Eden", Judith Wright argues that it is only there, out of time, that we can reconcile our warring desires and make whole our divided souls. In "The Orange Tree", eden is that "single perfect world of gold / no storm can undo nor death deny", where we will not feel what she calls the "pangs of life". In "Botanical Gardens", we must endure our earthly lives while dreams of eden torment us. All these things are true enough emotionally to move us, and yet may cloy, may raise more doubts than they settle: time and pain and this earth are all real things, felt now, by us, here, and eden is, for us here, only a word, a dream, and nothing more.

In her poem "Unknown Water", Judith Wright would apparently agree, when she says that truth is a kind of life, or an answer made more by actions than by words to those questions life thrusts at us. Words fail; reasons fail; whatever we believe is tested against our senses, against the Herakleitean flux of our earthly experience in time (which seems to change all things), as perhaps she recognizes in her choice of an epigraph for her fourth book, The Two Fires (1955):

This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of its kindling, and measures going out. [Herakleitos, fragment 20, Early Greek Philosophy]

And this nominalist view is expressed in "Gum-Trees Stripping" in the fourth book:

Say the need's born within the tree,
and waits a trigger set for light;
say sap is tidal like the sea,
and rises with the solstice-heat—
but wisdom shells the words away
to watch this fountain slowed in air
where sun joins earth—to watch the place
at which these silent rituals are.

Words are not meanings for a tree.
So it is truer not to say,
"These rags look like humility,
or this year's wreck of last year's love,
or wounds ripped by the summer's claw."
If it is possible to be wise
here, wisdom lies outside the word
in the earlier answer of the eyes.

Wisdom can see the red, the rose,
the stained and sculptured curve of grey,
the charcoal scars of fire, and see
around that living tower of tree
the hermit tatters of old bark
split down and strip to end the season;
and can be quiet and not look
for reasons past the edge of reason.

These two quite different views—one, to ignore this world, to seek some eden, and the other, to take this changing earth as our only reality, if no refuge—these two views expressed in these poems reflect the essential duality of any Platonic world-view. Philosophers generally try to explain all eventualities by, and to resolve them within, some single self-coherent plan, and so Plato tried to combine within his one world-view both Herakleitean concrete particulars (such as gum-trees) and some central abstract Parmenidean reality as cause and explanation of everything. Poets generally try to articulate not whole world-orders, but, instead, to crystallize moments of emotional perception, and to make them clear and significant to every man. Judith Wright expresses her concern with saying precisely what it is she senses, and for relating that sense-data to some central general meaning, in her poem "For Precision", in which she says she wants to

She writes almost as if any intense, exact perception is a way towards the centre, explaining all things, is an act of love, and a way to stop or to put off time. Her poems attempt to articulate such perception, and in doing so to present some part of the complex Platonic world-view. In this fourth book, the poems "Storm", "Gum-Trees Stripping" and "West Wind" concern the Herakleitean flux of earthly things, and "Landscapes" and "Wildflower Plain" note how cyclic death brings on rebirth. This is one halfworld, and she asks after the other in such poems as "Silence" and "Song" in The Two Fires:

O where does the dancer dance—
the invisible centre spin—
whose bright periphery holds
the world we wander in?

For it is he we seek—
the source and death of desire;
we blind as blundering moths
around that heart of fire.

Caught between birth and death
we stand alone in the dark
to watch the blazing wheel
on which the earth is a spark,

crying, Where does the dancer dance—
the terrible centre spin,
whose flower will open at last
to let the wanderer in?

Judith Wright attempts to express each half-world in terms of the other. She states the duality of her Platonic worldview in such phrases as

Not till life halved, and parted
one from the other,
did time begin, and knowledge

(from "In Praise of Marriages") and as (in "Return")

… unity becomes duality,
and action scars perfection like a pin.

The mind in contemplation sought its peace—
that round and calm horizon's purity—
which, known one instant, must subsist always.
But life breaks in again, time does not cease;
that calm lies quiet under storms of days.

These poems attempt to catch, to crystallize, what we feel and what we see, and to say why, and what it means. Where her poems fail, it is generally either because the end-emotion in them is only stated, and not a result of the poem, or because what is shown to us is not at once concrete or lastingly meaningful. Then, the direct statement fails to convince, the metaphor falls apart or is not formed, and neither metaphor nor statement is related to what we feel and sense and know, and so they do not involve us emotionally.

Judith Wright has moved from exploring her childhood environment and memories to attempts to articulate and explain her world in terms of love and of eden. This is to present, first, what she has known of Herakleitean earth and time, and then to seek the Parmenidean explanation, the eternal reality, of which earth and time are but moving images. These are the two halves of the one world-view her poems present, all of which was always implicit in the epigraph of the first book. This world-view may not be entirely convincing, and there are no final answers in it, or in any other world-view, but Judith Wright has put some statements most cogently and coherently where we can expect no answers but life and death themselves.