Called “the conscience of the nation” for her

early, ongoing and passionate commitment to

Australia’s environment and its indigenous
people, Judith Wright is best remembered for her
poetry, which has helped shape Australia’s
perception of itself. This collection of her
poems, gathered from 40 years of published
works, is accompanied by guiding questions to
assist a thorough study of her poetry.
IB Diploma
Year 11

JUDITH WRIGHT
(1915 – 2000)
Books of poetry by Judith Wright

The Moving Image (1946)

Woman to Man (1949)
The Gateway (1953)
The Two Fires (1955)
Birds: Poems (1962)
The Other Half (1966)
Collected Poems 1941 – 76 (1971)
Alive, Poems 1971 – 72 (1973)
Fourth Quarter and Other Poems (1976)
The Double Tree: Selected Poems (1978)
Phantom Dwelling (1985) Commented [SW1]: Alliteration of the “th” sound.
Emphasises on the word “through” to imply piercing power.
Commented [SW2]: Simile of auditory imagery. Provides
a sense of loud and, to some extent, fearful sound.
The Trains – The Moving Image
Commented [SW3]: Shaking and waking, Alliteration of
the “aking” sound. Again emphasises on the powerfulness of
Tunnelling through the night, the trains pass the sound.
in a splendour of power, with a sound like thunder
Commented [SW4]: Stanza break to separate and
shaking the orchards, waking emphasises the impact on humans from the war
Commented [SW5]: Strong use of diction, implying the
the young from a dream, scattering like glass dream is “scattered” and cannot be fixed, foreshadowing?
the old men’s sleep, laying
Commented [SW6]: Simile. Implying the dream is
a black trail over the still bloom of the orchards; delicate and vincible to the train.
the trains go north with guns.
Commented [SW7]: Alliteration of the “ing” sound, again
emphasises the powerfulness of the sound.
Strange primitive piece of flesh, the heart laid quiet
Commented [SW8]: Foreshadowing the damage caused
hearing their cry pierce through its thin-walled cave by the war, the damage is especially emphasised through the
recalls the forgotten tiger, use of “black trail”.
and leaps awake in its old panic riot; Commented [SW9]: Personification, foreshadowing that
and how shall mind be sober, the train is a symbol of war, which also explains the impact
since blood’s red thread still binds us fast in history? the train has on people.
Tiger, you walk through all our past and future, Commented [SW10]: Diction, implying the war is
troubling the children’s sleep; laying barbaric and uncivilised.
a reeking trail across our dream of orchards. Commented [SW11]: Auditory imagery
Commented [SW12]: Diction, implying the pain inflicted
Racing on iron errands, the trains go by,
Commented [SW13]: Contrast of diction, thin-wall
and over the white acres of our orchards implies vulunerability
hurl their wild summoning cry, their animal cry…
Commented [SW14]: Explain the setting through the
the trains go north with guns. symbol “tiger”. “forgotten” implies there is not a war for a
long time. This also supports the idea that the war will cause
damage to human beings regardless of the time
1. Given that this poem is set in Australia during WWII, why do you think the trains ‘go north with guns’?
Commented [SW15]: Rhetoric question with sarcastic
Transporting the weapons for war. effect. Blood’s red thread implies death caused by war. “fast
in history” suggests that humans are constant in war. “sober”
2. Which words demonstrate the train’s power? contrasts the nature of war, and implies that war is
unreasonable and senseless.
splendour
Commented [SW16]: Change to second person “you”,
implying everyone, including the readers, will be involved in
3. Find a simile that communicates the frightening effect of these trains? the war. “past and future” suggests the same idea as “fast in
history”
Sound like thunder Commented [SW17]: Symbol of peace, which contrasts
the war
4. Find a simile that communicates the same frightening effect of these trains?
Scattering like glass Commented [SW18]: Visual imagery of the trains go over
the orchards for war.
Commented [SW19]: Re-emphasises that the war is about
to beginning. Putting this at the end of the poem also
suggests that the war could not be stopped even though
people know it is going to cause blood-shed.
 5. What is the narrator’s feeling about these trains and the war in general?
The narrator feels the war is barbaric, through her use of diction, such as “primitive”, “wild”,
“animal”. She also suggests that the trains and war is frightening, through the use of simile, diction and
imagery.
6. Which line shows that neither the narrator nor people in general can escape the effects of the war?
Tiger, you walk through all our past and future

7. What do you think the tiger is a symbol for?

The war

8. Where is repetition used in this poem? What is its effect?

Both “old man’s sleep” and “children’s sleep”. The effect is to emphasise that the war will cause
damage to all people who will all suffer.

The Company of Lovers –The Moving Image

We meet and part now over all the world;

we, the lost company,
take hands together in the night, forget
the night in our brief happiness, silently.
We, who sought many things, throw all away
for this one thing, one only,
remembering that in the narrow grave
we shall be lonely.

Death marshals up his armies round us now.

Their footsteps crowd too near.
Lock your warm hand above the chilling heart
and for a time I live without my fear.
Grope in the night to find me and embrace,
for the dark preludes of the drums begin, preludes:
and round us, round the company of lovers,
death draws his cordons in. cordons:

1. What does this poem celebrate? List the positive words.

2. How is the poem negative? List some of the negative words.

3. Does the poem end optimistically or pessimistically?

4. How would you describe the tone of the poem?

5. What is personified in this poem?

6. Can you identify a pattern in the rhyme and rhythm (metre) of this poem?

7. How does Wright universalise or generalise her experience of love and death?

8. According to Wright, why is it important to love?

9. How does Wright suggest that love is more important than anything else?

10. How does the second stanza expand on the ideas presented in the first stanza?

11. Draw up a table that compares and contrasts Judith Wright’s poems The Trains and The Company of
Lovers.
Woman to Man –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.

1. In this poem, the child growing in the woman’s womb is described in a number of ways that show it to
be part of the couple. What are they? How does Wright convey this?
Selfless, shapeless seed, the third who lay in our embrace, blood’s wild tree that grows, the intricate
and folded rose. Metaphor.

2. Similes or metaphors are used to describe the child in this poem? Why do you think the poet has made
this choice?

3. How does the alliteration in the first stanza affect the poems total meaning?

4. Explain how the rhyme scheme of the first stanza defines the poems structure.

5. What does ‘the blaze of light along the blade’ suggest?

6. Some feminist writer’s have criticised the final line for showing female dependence. Discuss.

7. Compare Woman to Man to Woman to Child (below). To what extent are they similar or different?

8. Is Woman to Man similar to the first two Judith Wright poems you have read?

Woman to Child – Woman to Man and love that knew not its beloved.

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,
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.
Bora Ring – The Moving Image

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.

Only the grass stands up

to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree, corroboree: Aboriginal dance ceremony
murmur a broken chant.

The hunter is gone; the spear

is splintered underground, the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still. Nomad: Traveller.

Only the rider’s heart

halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.

1. Given that this poem is set in Australia, what do you think the ‘tribal story’ is and how do you think it has
been ‘lost in alien tale’?

2. What text is there an allusion to in this poem? What happened in this other story? How does this
allusion work? How is it effective?

3. In this poem, the trees are described as miming a ‘past corroboree’. How is this image more effective
than describing the trees in some other way?

4. Do you feel this poem is didactic (keen to instruct, or impress its opinion on you) or is it subtle? Would
you describe it as more or less didactic than Nigger’s Leap: New England?

Nigger’s Leap: New England –The Moving Image

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.

Night runs an obscure tide round cape and bay
and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea
against this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.

Here is the symbol, and the climbing dark

a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning
over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells
sound for her mariners. Now must we measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See, in these gulfs, how small the light of home.
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 they lie that were ourselves writ small.

Never from earth again the coolamon,

or 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.

Counting in Sevens –Fourth Quarter

Seven ones are seven.

I can’t remember that year
or what presents I was given.

Seven twos are fourteen.

That year I found my mind,
swore not to be what I had been.

Seven threes are twenty-one.

I was sailing my own sea,
first in love, the knots undone.

Seven fours are twenty-eight;

three false starts had come and gone;
my true love came, and not too late.

Seven fives are thirty-five.

In her cot my daughter lay,
real, miraculous, alive.

Seven sixes are forty-two.

I packed her sandwiches for school,
I loved my love and time came true.

Seven sevens are forty-nine.

Fruit loaded down my apple-tree,
near fifty years of life were mine.

Seven eights are fifty-six.

My lips still cold from a last kiss,
my fire was ash and charcoal-sticks.

Seven nines are sixty-three; seven tens are seventy. Commented [WS20]: Increase the speed of time.
Who would that old woman be?
She will remember being me,
but what she is I cannot see. Commented [WS21]: progression

Yet with every added seven,

some strange present I was given.
Counting in Sevens

1. What does this poem celebrate?

2. What word in the final couplet shows each seven years to be a positive?

3. Quote two examples of rhyme from the poem.

4. How does Wright make use of repetition in this poem? Is it effective?

5. Quote an example of half-rhyme (also called para-rhyme) from the poem.

6. How is this poem similar and how is it different to Judith Wright’s other poems?

Legend – The Gateway

The blacksmith’s boy went out with a rifle

and a black dog running behind.
Cobwebs snatched at his feet,
rivers hindered him,
thorn-branches caught at his eyes to make him blind
and the sky turned into an unlucky opal,
but he didn’t mind.
I can break branches, I can swim rivers, I can stare out any
spider I meet,
said he to his dog and his rifle.

The blacksmith’s boy went over the paddocks

with his old black hat on his head.
Mountains jumped in his way,
rocks rolled down on him,
and the old crow cried, You’ll soon be dead;
and the rain came down like mattocks.
But he only said
I can climb mountains, I can dodge rocks, I can shoot an old
crow any day.
And he went on over the paddocks.

When he came to the end of the day the sun began falling,
Up came the night ready to swallow him,
like the barrel of a gun,
like an old black hat,
like a black dog hungry to follow him.
Then the pigeon, the magpie and the dove began wailing,
and the grass lay down to pillow him.
His rifle broke, his hat blew away and his dog was gone,
and the sun was falling.

But in front of the night the rainbow stood on the mountain

just as his heart foretold.
He ran like a hare,
he climbed like a fox,
he caught it in his hands, the colours and the cold ---
like a bar of ice, like the column of a fountain,
like a ring of gold.
The pigeon, the magpie and the dove flew up to stare,
and the grass stood up again on the mountain.

The blacksmith’s boy hung the rainbow on his shoulder,

instead of his broken gun.
Lizards ran out to see,
snakes made way for him,
and the rainbow shone as brightly as the sun.
All the world said, Nobody is braver, nobody is bolder,
nobody else has done
anything to equal it. He went home as easy as could be
with the swinging rainbow on his shoulder.

1. Discuss the Australian quality of this poem. Consider tone, language and details of content.

2. Explain how the line pattern fits in with the development of the main idea in the second stanza.

3. What tone is established in the first line of stanza three? How does Wright convey this?

4. How does stanza three build to a dramatic climax?

5. What is the symbolism of the birds?

6. What are the connotations behind Wright’s description of the rainbow?

7. What is the symbolism of the rifle, the dog and the hat? Does it change during the poem?

8. Is there a moral to this poem?

Remittance Man – The Moving Image

The spendthrift, disinherited and graceless,

accepted his pittance with an easy air,
only surprise he could escape so simply
from the pheasant-shooting and the aunts in the close;
took to the life, dropped easily out of knowledge,
and tramping the backtracks in the summer haze
let everything but life slip through his fingers.

Blue blowing smoke of twigs from the noon fire,

red blowing dust of roads where the teams go slow,
sparse swinging shadow of trees no longer foreign
silted the memory of a greener climate.
The crazy tales, the hatters’ crazy secrets,
the blind-drunk sprees indifferently forgiven,
and past them all, the track to escape and nowhere
suited his book, the freak who could never settle.
The pale stalk of a wench at the country ball
sank back forgotten in black Mary’s eyes,
and past the sallow circle of the plains’ horizon
faded the rainy elms seen through the nursery window.

That harsh biblical country of the scapegoat

closed its magnificence finally round his bones
polished by diligent ants. The squire his brother,
presuming death, sighed over the documents,
and lifting his eyes across the inherited garden
let a vague pity blur the formal roses.

1. What is a remittance man?

2. In what way is the first line an example of Wright’s economical use of language? Find another example
and discuss the ideas associated with these words.

3. Choose an example of alliteration and explain how the repeated sound relates to the meaning of the
image and to the poem as a whole

4. Find examples of figurative language and explain their use.

5. Comment on the line break after ‘the track to escape and nowhere’.

6. What are the feelings of the poet to the remittance man?

7. Is the poem a collage of elements that were part of the lives of the remittance men or a portrait of one
particular person?

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.
Eve to her Daughters

"It was not I who began it. Commented [WS22]: Defensive tone, certainty
Turned out into draughty caves,
hungry so often, having to work for our bread,
hearing the children whining, Commented [WS23]: Implying complaints
I was nevertheless not unhappy. Commented [WS24]: diction
Where Adam went I was fairly contented to go.
I adapted myself to the punishment: it was my life. Commented [WS25]: Stanza division

But Adam, you know...! Commented [WS26]: Colloquial tone

He kept on brooding over the insults,
over the trick They had played on us, over the scolding. Commented [WS27]: Capitalising, serpent is not
He had discovered a flaw in himself separated from god.
and he had to make up for it. Commented [WS28]: diction
Outside Eden the earth was imperfect, Commented [WS29]: allowing himself to be deceived
the seasons changed, the game was fleet-footed,
he had to work for our living, and he didn't like it.
He even complained of my cooking
(it was hard to compete with Heaven).

So he set to work.
The earth must be made a new Eden
with central heating, domesticated animals,
mechanical harvesters, combustion engines,
escalators, refrigerators,
and modern means of communication
and multiplied opportunities for safe

investment
and higher education for Abel and Cain
and the rest of the family
You can see how pride had been hurt.

In the process he had to unravel everything,

because he believed that mechanism
was the whole secret-he was always mechanical-minded.
He got to the very inside of the whole machine
exclaiming as he went So this is how it works!
And now that I know how it works, why, I must have invented it.
As for God and the Other, they cannot be demonstrated,
and what cannot be demonstrated
doesn't exist.
You see, he had always been jealous.

Yes, he got to the centre

where nothing at all can be demonstrated.
And clearly he doesn't exist; but he refuses
to accept the conclusion.
You see, he was always an egotist.

It was warmer than this in the cave;

there was none of this fall-out.
I would suggest, for the sake of the children,
that it's time you took over.
But you are my daughters, you inherit my own faults of character;
you are submissive, following Adam
even beyond existence.

Faults of character have their own logic

and it always works out.
I observed this with Abel and Cain.

Perhaps the whole elaborate fable

right from the beginning
is meant to demonstrate this: perhaps it's the whole secret.
Perhaps nothing exists but our faults?
At least they can be demonstrated.

But it's useless to make

such a suggestion to Adam.
He has turned himself into God,
who is faultless, and doesn't exist."