Journal of Language, Literature and Culture

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Judith Wright’s Fire Sermons

Paul Sharrad

To cite this article: Paul Sharrad (2020) Judith Wright’s Fire Sermons, Journal of Language,
Literature and Culture, 67:2-3, 159-171, DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1849945

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.1849945

Published online: 17 Dec 2020.

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JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE
2020, VOL. 67, NOS. 2–3, 159–171
https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.1849945

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Judith Wright’s Fire Sermons

Paul Sharrad
English Literatures, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Australian poet Judith Wright has been read for her lyrical Judith Wright; Australian
presentation of a woman-centred perspective on love, for her poetry; fire imagery;
expression of guilt over colonial history and her solidarity with Hinduism; Sufism; Buddhism
Aboriginal writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and for her support for
environmental causes. Some critics have noted elements of
mysticism, connecting them to Western literary traditions, but
this article outlines her debts to Hindu, Buddhist and Sufi images
and thought, concluding that these are multicultural tools for her
to form a poetic that can be defended against claims that she
failed to integrate lyric immediacy and philosophical abstraction.

The critical commentary on the extensive work of Australian poet Judith Wright moves
across time from celebration of a mature voice in the national mythicising of Australian
colonisation, to appreciation of a woman’s voice extolling the physicality and emotional
drama of love and birth, to election as literary pin-up girl for expressions of white guilt
and dreams of reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples, and as a pioneering literary
spokesperson for those concerned about environmental degradation.1 Through these for-
mations of cultural desire runs a thread of attention to her philosophical ideas informed
by modernism, Yeats and Jung, by post-Holocaust (both Nazi and Nagasaki) angst, and
by her husband Jack McKinney’s thoughts on the limits of Western reason.2 One element
in this last line of interest is the (often uneasy) detection of mysticism in her verse
(modified by some as a ‘metaphysical’ quality), but with only one or two passing excep-
tions, critics trace this aspect to Western sources: Plato, Heraclitus, Traherne, Biblical
myth-making, the Spanish mystic poets.3 However if one tracks images and themes
through her extensive poetic output and consults her letters, it is clear that Wright
also builds her particular feel for the spiritual from Eastern literary sources.4
Reading Wright from this distance in time, I am struck by gloom and angst lurking
behind much of the verse, especially the early work. A lyrical tribute to a surfer ends
up sounding like Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, for example (‘The Surfer’, Wright, 12). This
darkness is something critics note, usually with disapproval, in much of the poetry of
the Slessor, FitzGerald and Wright era.5 There is no doubt that some of the tone is
owing to Wright’s direct experience of harsh rural nature: trapped dingos, dry land-
scapes, old-timers crazed with years of hard labour. The poetry of the 1940s and 1950s
also carries an extra loading of anxiety about wartime threat (manifest in ‘The
Company of Lovers’, Wright 2), and the poet herself declares that her imagery linking
fire and death arose out of dread of atomic apocalypse and the Korean War.6 It is also
© Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 2020
160 P. SHARRAD

clear from phrases like ‘We inherit a handful of dust’ (‘The Moving Image’, Wright 17)
that Wright had been reading T.S. Eliot and was responding to his vision of modern life
as a fearful wasteland of dust and fire. What I want to suggest here is that some of
Wright’s expression of the unsettled nature of white occupation of Australia, of
human unease in relations with the natural world, and of the existential vacuum of
modern sensibility goes well beyond either historical concerns or Eliot’s raiding of the
‘myth kitty’ of ‘the East’.7 I would also argue that investigation of how it does provides
a basis for better appreciation of Wright’s supposedly ‘bleak’ or ‘despairing’ view of life.
The simple claim that Wright had an interest in Eastern cultures is not particularly
original. Veronica Brady’s compendious biography notes that when Wright attended a
1967 conference on poetry in Montreal she discussed Hindu philosophy with an
Indian poet and subsequently visited India en route to Pakistan. Brady records that
Wright and her husband Jack McKinney had been interested in Hindu thought in the
1950s and Jack had in fact published an article in India in 1953.8 In 1970 Wright attended
a conference and gave talks in Delhi, Bombay and Mysore. This was during the period
when Commonwealth Literature was being developed and transnational comparisons
were being made. Wright had been corresponding with Indian academics about her per-
ceived debts to Hindu culture – Ali Athar, working on a thesis, and C.D. Narasimhaiah,
the pioneer of Commonwealth literary studies in India based in Mysore.9 It is also clear
that Wright had already met Mulk Raj Anand. At the time, she acknowledged that she
had ‘a fairish grounding in the Rg Veda and the Gita’ – two of the central texts of
Hindu thought.10
That grounding was linked to encounters with mandalas in her reading of Jung, from
reading about Oppenheimer’s quoting of the Gita to describe the first atomic explosion,
and to reading The Waste Land, with its use of the Upanishads in ‘What the Thunder
Said’ – all sufficient for the poet to assent to a student’s reading of the dancer in
‘Song’ from The Two Fires (Wright 93) as an unconscious figuring of Shiva, ‘the recon-
ciler of Opposites and the centre of the wheel, not that I was thinking of Eastern philos-
ophy at the time as far as I can remember, but I had read a good deal’.11
So, admitting that a link to Eastern philosophy has been noted, what can we add?
Firstly, in the commentaries contemporary with each of Wright’s poetry collections –
on which the collective evaluation of her work has been based – there is no mention
of Hinduism or Buddhism and the use of the ghazal form in Phantom Dwelling is
merely noted.12 Secondly, in the later retrospectives there is not a lot of discussion
about how Wright’s reading of Eastern material actually manifests in her poetry.
Thirdly, what recognition there is fails to mention one important element of Eastern
thought – Buddhism. My argument, then, is that Eastern symbolism provides Wright
with a set of poetic tools selectively deployed to both convey and control her experiences
of time and the fire and darkness of modernity. Wright moves through her non-Western
resources, modifying her poetic vision until she arrives at her own philosophical-poetic
amalgam of dualist and non-dualist, materialist and transcendental understandings of
life. My argument focuses on selected images in Wright’s work (fire, water, time), con-
necting them to the images and ideas in both the Bhagavad Gita and the compilation
of philosophical extrapolations from the Vedas that make up the Upanishads.13
A war poem like ‘The Trains’ (Wright 5–6) is centrally interested in the nature of
humans from which conflict arises. Signs of war create unrest in the heart, described
 JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE 161

as a ‘primitive piece of flesh’ and the location of affective reactions (‘old panic riot’) and a
kind of species memory of primordial hunting in which ‘blood’s red thread still binds us
fast in history’. The blood of violence in other poems binds Australians to their sup-
pressed history of racial conflict, but history is also experienced as geological and
cosmic periods of time, and blood/ heart/ passion take on the symbolic significance
that Hindu philosophy gives them: the physical and psychosomatic phenomena that
limit our perception of underlying non-personal truths, but also the vehicles through
which we live and deploy our senses and intellect to realise oneness with the cosmic
source of all. The Upanishads repeatedly refer to the lotus in the heart (Mundaka 46; Bri-
hadaranyaka 110), pointing to such ambiguity: the heart and associated senses become
the means of their own end as the mortal self is effaced in realisation of the Self
within and around it.
Similarly, in ‘For New England’ (Wright 13–14), the landscape of Wright’s family
history becomes a scene not only for discussing the Anglo-Australian’s double identity
(figured as nostalgically introduced European trees and local flora), but also for
working out intuitions of dualism and non-dualism. Wind ‘strikes to the bone/ and
whines division’ but also penetrates the self to fuel flames that consume difference.
Fire becomes a transforming device, symbolically as a ‘Gothic’ poplar is converted into
‘fuming’ flame by a flock of red-fronted galahs, then as a force that engulfs both
English and Australian trees and enlivens the ‘sapless memories’ of the speaker/ poet
to underpin a vision of unity between past and present, self and country:
… Many roads meet here

in me, the traveller and the ways I travel.

All the hills’ gathered waters feed my seas

Who am the swimmer and the mountain river;

who am the gazer and the land I stare on. (13)

One does not have to look too hard into the Upanishads to find water and ocean imagery
symbolising the co-substantiality of self and Self/ atman and Brahman (Chandogya 69;
Brihadaranyaka 88). Equally, fire imagery is pervasive. In the Katha Upanishad it takes
on philosophical significance. Nachiketa, whose religious dedication is ‘like to a flame
of fire’ prevails on the god of death to teach him ‘the fire sacrifice that leads to heaven’
(15).14 That deity admits that the sacrifice is ‘a fleeting thing, performed with fleeting
objects’; more important is realisation of the identity of the Self behind the mortal self
that is one with Brahman, the ‘ancient, effulgent being, the indwelling Spirit’ subtle,
deep-hidden in the heart of the lotus’ (17). The Self is the rider in the body’s chariot
who must learn to control the senses that pull it along the paths of desire. ‘The senses
derive from physical objects, physical objects from mind, mind from intellect, intellect
from ego, ego from the unmanifested seed, and the unmanifested seed from Brahman
– the Uncaused Cause’ (19–20). Brahman can be intuited through apprehension of
‘the First-Born’ of the cosmic mind, Agni, who ‘inhabits the lotus of the heart, living
among physical things’ and ‘lies hidden in fire sticks like a child well guarded in the
162 P. SHARRAD

womb’ and worshipped in fire sacrifice. Flame is a manifestation of ‘the immortal Self’
that is ‘the lord of time’ (21).
In the Prasna Upanishad the sage links five elements (ether, air, fire, water, earth) to
the body and the senses all infused and driven by ‘Prana, the primal energy’, manifest in
fire and also as lord of creation, moving in the womb and being reborn (37). The world
(and echoes of Wright’s imagery can be heard) ‘existed first as seed, which, as it grew and
developed took on names and forms. As a razor in its case or as fire in wood, so dwells the
Self, the Lord of the universe, in all forms’ (80). The ‘unmanifested seed’ that is also
Brahman, the divine force behind and within all creation, and the image of the blade
– also the sharp path along which one moves towards enlightenment (Katha 20) –
suggests connections to the imagery in the ‘Woman to Man’ poems.
Hindu imagery supplies the impulse and the words to contemplate the moment of
generation as ‘the selfless, shapeless seed’ held in the mother’s womb, that as it grows
becomes a multifaceted ball of cells, ‘the intricate and folded rose’ (echoing Dante,
Eliot and the Upanishads), and which, as coeval manifestation of the cosmic life-force
and material form of it, is both ‘the maker and the made’ pushing towards the light
and the blade of life’s precarious pathway (‘Woman to Man’, Wright 20). Birth is
entry into the world of death and the dance of being, the knife severing child from
mother being both blood violence instigating duality and liberation from blind darkness
to allow self-realisation (‘Woman’s Song’, Woman to Child’, Wright 20–22). Mother and
poet are ‘makers’ (makars) creating sublunary forms that promise transfiguration into
clear vision of the cosmic dance. The transforming element – love – is at once physical
and spiritual, experienced through the senses and stilling them (‘The Maker’, Wright 23).
The power of these poems lies not just in their innovatory female voice and biological
imagery, with accompanying sensual intimations of sexual love, but in the capacity of the
poems to suggest another dimension to their meaning. They are not allegories as such,
but rather set up symbolic resonances to philosophical ideas that are made possible by
the mystic imagery sourced partly from the Christian cultural context of Wright’s Aus-
tralia (the embryo builds towards its ‘resurrection’), but also from her familiarity with
Indian texts. Fire, for example, is both real and symbol, a physical manifestation and a
form of energy that is cosubstantial with cosmic power: it destroys and gives light, it
feeds on fuel but is food for water, signalling that there is a death for death (Brihadara-
nyaka 92).
Fire is also Promethean and one of the four elements in the dynamic ‘creative flux’ of
natural cycles, Jungian models and alchemy, and Wright was obviously aware of this.
However debts to Western tradition, though they might prevent critics seeing beyond,
need not limit the poet. Shirley Walker, thinking of the poem ‘Night’, which refigures
the Norse cosmic tree Yggdrasil, with its roots into both eternity and ‘the world’s
womb’ (Wright 33), suggests that Wright’s vision is so engaged with earthly materiality
that she cannot subscribe to the Hindu view of the cosmos as a tree with its roots in
the air.15 There is some validity in this rejection of transcendental abstraction, but
Wright’s access to Indian thought does not entail rejection of the world: the Katha Upa-
nishad makes it clear that the roots are Brahman from which all creation emanates and in
which it moves: ‘In fear of him fire burns, the sun shines, the rains fall, the winds blow, and
death kills’. (Katha 23) and the text goes on to warn that ‘those who devote themselves only
to meditation’ are in danger of finding only ‘a greater darkness’ (Katha 28).
 JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE 163

In her essays Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Wright declared ‘philosophies …

are not poetry’, which needs a strong lyric impulse to work best.16 Her critics generally
agree, favouring her personal ‘passionate’ evocation of family and nature, and lamenting
what they see as a fall into philosophical abstraction and ‘bardic’ polemic in the middle of
her poetic career.17 If the lyric stems mainly from the heart, but we want our poems also
to have some intellectual weight, then Hindu-Buddhist symbology allows a this-worldly
investment in perception and its associated senses and emotions that carries with it an
integrated set of ideas aimed at penetrating these veils of lyric phenomena to see some
foundational philosophical truth beneath and beyond. To find freedom from attachment
to physical existence is not to erase physical existence. ‘The space within the heart’ can be
‘the place of union in dream’ between the inhering cosmic Self and the physical self (Bri-
hadaranyaka 102). The connection between Wright and mystical perception generally
centres on love in both its mundane and transcendent aspects. Brahman resides in
and generates the senses and the forms of creation though It also exists before and
outside them. If we are instructed to ‘Set fire to the Self within by the practice of medita-
tion’, we are also told to be ‘drunk with the wine of divine love’ so as to achieve perfection
(Svetasvatara 120). ‘Brahman may be realised while yet one dwells in the ephemeral body’
(Brihadaranyaka 110) and the ‘sharp arrow of devotional worship’ added to the wisdom
of the Upanishads leads to ‘the heart melted in love’ (Mundaka 46). The enlightened self
finds a deep awareness in which ‘the sorrows of the heart are turned into joy’ (Brihadar-
anyaka 107).
If some critics find Wright swinging too far from a purely lyric path, it is not because
of any slavish following of a particular religious system. As a modern Australian poet, she
does hold to the phenomena of this world (her most influential volume of verse was titled
Five Senses), even if (as a poet) she wrestles with the problem of getting at it or seeing
beyond it through the medium of language. ‘The Moving Image’ declares ‘All that is
real is to live, to desire, to be’, the self finding not release from ‘the doomed cell’ of mor-
tality, but intuiting ‘love’s whole eternity’ from inside that cell (Wright 15). Keith Russell
supports Shirley Walker in detecting Wright’s ‘voluptuous humanistic pluralism’,
especially in her later work. In this we can find her use of, rather than subscription to
any particular religious belief,
Wright herself has said:
I’ve never strongly felt the need to posit an ‘outside’ deity when there’s so much to be dis-
covered about the ‘inside’, or an absolute when the relative’s what we live by, except of
course for the cosmos, the dance itself.

Of the conference she attended in Delhi, she reported: ‘Discussion on any subject in India
leaves the ground constantly for levels of metaphysics that leave the Western mind quite
unable to take off successfully’.18 This places her outside of any devotional loyalties, but
what Russell sees as the ‘superficial’ use of Eastern material underpins what he also ident-
ifies as a view of identity as ‘the difficulty of knowing which one of us we are’. If life is ‘a
phantom dwelling’, then that accords with Hindu-Buddhist views of the world as maya,
and the ‘heroic indifference to the questions of finality’ that Russell finds in Phantom
Dwelling surely owes something to the ideals of ego-less detachment found in Hindu-
Buddhist thought that may seem to be a ‘philosophy of despair’ but can also comprehend
a ‘love of all human beings’. If Wright does come to a Zen-like position in relation to her
164 P. SHARRAD

Australian reality, it must be a kind of humanistic modified non-dualism akin to the

poetic religion of Rabindranath Tagore.19
Scholars have regularly identified Wright’s use of The Waste Land and, thanks to her
husband’s enthusiasm for the Four Quartets, of the fire and time imagery of ‘Little
Gidding’.20 What they nearly all neglect to mention, though, is that Eliot matches his
citing of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in ‘What the Thunder Said’ with a section
framed by reference to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Like Heraclitus, the Buddha said
‘Everything is burning’, but ascribed this not to the cosmos, but to our inner drives as
fuelled by the six senses (five plus the mind). Preaching to fire-worshipping ascetics,
he said, ‘As long as the fire finds flammable things upon which it can feed, so long
will it burn and there will be birth, death, decay, grief, suffering, despair and sorrow’.
If we divest ourselves of desire and passion as the effects of the senses, and train ourselves
to consider the senses and the brute flesh that houses them as illusory veils of an illusory
self, we will attain enlightenment.21
This is a more radical renunciation than the Upanishads point to. In the Hindu model,
the self realises Self as one with a divine force beyond creation that nonetheless inheres in
all created life. We have to learn to penetrate the outer manifestations (in humans, the
‘sheaths’ and gunas of sattva, rajas and tamas – roughly understood as temperaments of
purity, choler, melancholy) rather than trying to free oneself of them altogether (Svetasva-
tara Upanishad 118). The ‘puritan’ nature of Buddhism seems to provide a framework for
Wright’s darker apprehensions of worldly horrors. Its appropriation of the Hindu symbol
of the cosmic wheel as a model of right conduct leaves room for ethical behaviour in this
life, but in its core philosophical mode fundamentally aims much more completely than
Hinduism at dispensing altogether with this world as a place of suffering.22
Having survived the Second World War, Wright found herself plunged into an age of
atomic bombs and international conflict. This seemed more radically threatening to
humanity, and even though a nuclear blast had been compared to the ‘brighter than a
thousand suns’ moment in the culminating battle of the Bhagavad Gita, the prospect
of annihilation of all earthly life was a greater existential threat than the battle of Kuruk-
shetra, and one that required some other set of ideas to convey its effects on human
observers. We can see this in ‘Two songs for the World’s End’ (Wright 62–63), which
begins ‘Bombs ripen on the leafless tree’. Although this poem refuses to teach despair,
Nirvana, with its underlying images of emptiness and of snuffing out the candle of the
self, appears to offer a more apposite figure, and the idea of worldly renunciation, the
extinction of desire, seems to provide both a means of avoiding drives to conflict and
some positive consolation attaching to the annihilation of self and world. This Buddhist
outlook is suggested in ‘Metho Drinker’, where the man with a death wish ‘cried to
Nothing and the terrible night/ to be his home and bread’. He lies ‘safe in the house
of Nothing’ but is still tormented by ‘the acid of her desire’, meaning his addiction to
the corrosive methylated spirits. It is also adumbrated in ‘Fire at Murdering Hut’ and
‘The Cedars’, the first closing with stone pleading: ‘Fire, do not open my heart. I do
not wish to wake/ to the cruel day of love’. The wintry cedars exhort Spring to let
them alone: ‘Hold back your fires that would sear us into flower again’ because ‘it is
anguish to be reborn and reborn’ (Wright 46–47).
There is not a strict linear chronology of moving from one philosophical system to
another. The three pregnancy poems in Woman to Man already contain the paradox
 JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE 165

consistent with a Buddhist outlook that giving birth is also pushing another being into
the world of pain and dying. As she orders her material in the selected poems, though,
there does appear to be a steady turn of attitude and imagery that suggests greater atten-
tion to Buddhist thought than before. Taking the flame tree as the object of her contem-
plation, the poet discovers a lesson in patience, quietness and the promise ‘in the loss of
myself, to find’ (‘The Flame-tree’, Wright 57). She goes on to write her own fire sermon in
‘To a Child’, which is a mix of Mosaic revelation, Blakean epiphany and wisdom echoing
both Hindu and Buddhist traditions: ‘All is consumed with love;/ all is renewed with
desire’ (Wright 61). By ‘The Gateway’, the poetic persona arrives at a timeless state of
surrender and peace: ‘in the depths of nothing/ I found my home’ (Wright 67).
The Two Fires (1955), says Wright, were written during the Korean War and nuclear
threat (Walker 211). The fire of Hindu creative energies is ‘set free by the climate of man’s
hate’ so that even the ‘ghosts of summer days’ are consumed, and ‘love dies: the final
pyre/ of the beloved, the bridegroom and the bride’. Even the seed becomes a flame
setting rock and time ablaze: ‘The world’s denied’ (‘The Two Fires’, Wright 70–71).
This vision of cosmic annihilation is followed by a more specifically human account of
a woman committing suicide with her children (‘The Precipice’, Wright 71) and the
poetic persona is presented as living in a dualist world where ‘action scars perfection
like a pin’ because it is still driven by desire (‘sick for love’) and the demands of ‘flesh
and blood’ (‘Return’, Wright 72) and it is stuck in ‘betraying/ the core of light, the
depth of darkness’ with its clumsy speech (‘For Precision’, Wright 73). There is a
retreat into meditative reflections on specific elements of nature: a nameless flower,
breath, the bark of a scribbly gum, with occasional and somewhat forced Wordsworthian
intimations of transcendent significance, as in the lotus at the end of ‘Canefields
Country’:
And in that water the great lily

sets her perfect dusk-blue petals

in their inherited order of prayer

around that blazing throne, her centre.

there time shall meet eternity

and their worship find its answer. (Wright 80)

This is one poem where others have noted a Buddhist influence. The image of the
‘lotus in the heart’ continues to play a part, perhaps, but the following set of meditations
on the hand, the body and the face (‘Flesh’, Wright 86–89) definitely indicate a medita-
tional practice more Buddhist than Hindu. Even the humanist appeal for mind and body
to accept each other (‘Come, let us live together’, Wright 88) can be seen as part of a Bud-
dhist middle path refusal to allow absolutes: the world and the flesh are to be seen clearly
in order to be dismissed, but asserting an absolute truth about their untruth threatens to
establish a binary that will do violence to any opposing position.23
In her poetry Wright remains more attuned to symbol than to philosophy, and this
tends to swing her allusions more towards Hinduism. (‘Song’ appears later than the med-
itations on the flesh, and invokes the figure of Lord Shiva dancing the cosmos in and out
166 P. SHARRAD

of being.) However, she continues to draw on Buddhist material throughout her work.
Near the end of the selection from Phantom Dwelling, she specifically mentions
Buddha’s third sermon. In ‘Caddis Fly’ the poet outdoors at night rescues an insect
from her wineglass only to see it plunge into the campfire:
Why should I mourn, little buddha?

Small drunkard of the flame?

I finish my wine and dream

On your fire sermon. (Wright 234)

Influenced by her university study of Asian history and her daughter’s studies in
Japan, Wright anticipates her turn to Sufi verse by moving away from orthodox
Hindu-Buddhism, telling her old friend Len Webb that she thought Zen better than
Hinayana or Indian philosophy. Zen koan are in fact suggested in the early poem, ‘Eli,
Eli’, which has Christ on the cross seeing humanity ‘drowning in the river’ though he
knows ‘there was no river’ (Wright 31). Strict Buddhism she found too world-rejecting:
it suggests all is maya but ‘our karma is to keep bashing our heads against the future’.
Interest in Zen also allowed brief engagement with Taoist ideas (‘Eight-panel Screen’,
Wright 147–9). Nonetheless, twenty years later, she writes to Webb: ‘Be a Buddhist, it
gives perspective’. One aspect of Buddhism that would have resonated with the poet as
she increasingly engaged with anti-war, Aboriginal rights and environmental movements
is the idea of the bodhisattva: the enlightened being who foregoes the release of nirvana to
stay ‘on the wheel’ in order to bring others to realisation of the Truth.24
The main point to be made here is that Wright’s poetic system is more complicated
than any singular allegiance to a particular philosophy, and modulates around her
central musical keys as her life and work progress through time. Some of these shifts
are more a matter of poetical experiment than philosophical attraction. This is evident
in Wright’s turn to Japanese haiku:
I used to love Keats, Blake;

Now I try haiku

For its honed brevities,

Its inclusive silences. (‘Notes at Edge’, Wright 231)

In similar spirit, she turns to the epigrammatic form of the middle-eastern ghazal,
which she adapts to suit a modern Australian literary context. There is evidence that
the poet found Sufism attractive for its this-worldly and often irreverent Zen-like mysti-
cism. There is some evidence of recognition of women that may have attracted Wright:
The core of the feminine

comes directly as a ray of the sun. Not the earthy

figure you hear about in

love songs; there’s more to her mystery than that. You

 JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE 167

might say she’s not from

the manifest world at all, but the creator of it. (‘She is the creator’, Wright 132)

The Sufi figure of the ecstatic and often inebriated lover-sage corresponds with one aspect
of Wright’s early verse, which seems to imply that one can only address life authentically
(sing), as an Australian and as a human in modern nuclear times, in a state of delirium (as
a prophet, mad Tom, coloured fringe-dweller, drunk, or wanderer under a tree) and as a
latter-day viewer of a distanced past of settlement/invasion and massacre, whether of
indigenous peoples or of nature. However, Hafiz and Rumi direct their attention, includ-
ing their social critique, more narrowly within a mainly religious framework.25
The sufi ghazal provides Wright with a form that is suited to making epigrammatic
statements while preserving a set of material images that mediate spiritual meaning. It
is more open to the heart than Buddhist renunciation:
How will you know the difficulties

Of being human, if you’re always

Flying off to blue perfection? (Rumi 32)

Hold on to your particular pain.

That too can take you to God. (Rumi 174)

It also resonates with Wright’s favoured symbols:

We’re not afraid of God’s blade,

… We’re burning up quickly, tasting

a little hellfire as we go. (‘The Pattern Improves’, Rumi 31)

But Sufism too had limits to its appeal outside of a lighter poetic voice and celebration of
mystic joyfulness. Difference can be seen in the contrasting treatment of water and star
imagery. Rumi’s ‘The Creek and the Stars’ asserts:
… . Creation is

a clear, flat, fast-moving creek, where qualities reflect.

Generations rush by, while

The stars stay still without a splash. (Rumi 72)

This carries the same idea as Wright’s ‘The Pool and the Star’ (Wright 55): sublunary
flux and illusion brought into question by exposure to the eternal, but her poetic world is
reversed: the lake is still and the star is the active agent, the encounter between the two
being agonistic rapture both painful and longed for.
In both Rumi and Hafiz, fire symbolism is much less frequent and less expressive of
tormented purification or destruction. At least in the forms that reach Western
readers, Rumi’s poems feature domestic and social conviviality and do not address the
168 P. SHARRAD

troubles of the world or convey a social conscience. Only the union of lover and beloved
and the confession of the limits of language in expressing spiritual vision provide consist-
ent links with Wright’s overall output. Her collection of ghazals is titled ‘The Shadow of
Fire’, reprising the image that burns through all her verse, but she is less inclined to use it
to push perception beyond what is: ‘I’ve no wish to chisel things into new shapes./ The
remnant of a mountain has its own meaning’ (‘Rockface’, Wright 235). Amid the flowers
and animals of this life, she admits, ‘There’s altogether too much I know nothing about’,
adding ‘but what I do see I can fix meanings to./ There are connections, things leave
tracks of causation’ (‘Fox’, Wright 236). Her battle with words becomes one of relating
to the non-human life around her rather than the mystic sublime, given that the
cosmos is now known by astrophysics to penetrate every material body (‘Connections’,
Wright 237). We are not onlookers, but neither do we need to erase our senses and trans-
cend our bodies to be one with the universe on a transcendental spiritual plane. Like
Hafiz, she says, ‘I can’t believe that wine’s warm solaces/ don’t help the searcher: the
poet on the wineshop floor’ (Wright 238), but they don’t help her to any symbolic
union of mortal lover and divine beloved. It is in contemplation of a small frog that
the lesson of another poet (Manzan) is quoted: ‘Small damp peaceful sage with a
loony grin, / (‘one minute of sitting, one inch of Buddha’) (‘Oppositions’, Wright
238), and our bodies, wood, wine, poems all end up ‘like the wood on the fire’, consumed
by and infused with ‘The sum of it all … Energy’ (‘Winter’, Wright 241). And so at the
end of her poetic journey, casting off old poems as she casts on new ones, as she casts
off skin, still growing new cells (‘Skins’, Wright 239), Wright carries over traces of her
older work and interests, combining them into new insights that still leave her in this
world but seeking the reality beyond and throughout it. The last poem in the selected
edition, ‘Patterns’, begins by quoting the Bhagavad Gita and ends by rejecting a prayer
to Agni. It quotes Heraclitus, whose view of creation’s driving energy as fire is a this-
worldly version of Buddha’s fire sermon. Buddhist renunciation is suggested in
context of global destruction (‘Perhaps the dark itself is the source of meaning’), but
in a form overtly sourced to a Sufi poet. In the end, Wright is content to let ‘pure
light’ sit beyond perception and sit by the light of her fire, saying: ‘Impossible to
choose between absolutes, ultimates’ (Wright 242).
If we take her own title, The Moving Image and think about it in relation to what
she does in the poems of that collection, we can see not only that Wright is attempting
to convey emotional states through the management of images (to write an imagism
that will move the reader), but that she is moving images around in order to create
a form that will sustain an intellectual vision freed of rational prose, just as W.B.
Yeats constructed his ‘system’ as a poetic model of philosophical outlook. Some of
those images draw upon Hindu and Buddhist concepts, though their use fluctuates
across the poet’s career in keeping with her vision of the cosmos as a dynamic
force. For her, fire and stone, water and sun, seed and tree supply an explanatory
mechanism for the struggles of life and violence of local history and global politics
as well as an experimental bulwark against submission to the world’s darkness and
the radical otherness of nature. Collectively they also enact and point to a quest for
some standpoint, both poetical and personal, informed by a sense of connection
with transcendent Truth experienced as love and comprehending all philosophical
systems, Christian or ‘Eastern’.
 JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE 169

Notes
1. Poems cited in this article are taken from A Human Pattern: Judith Wright, Selected Poems
(Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990). Judith Wright’s most celebrated volumes of poetry are
The Moving Image (1946), Woman to Man (1949), The Gateway (1953), The Two Fires
(1955), Birds (1962), The Other Half (1966), Alive (1973), Fourth Quarter (1976) and
Phantom Dwelling (1985). Her most widely known collection was for many years Five
Senses: Selected Poems (1963). Representative exponents of the themes listed are respectively,
H.M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied (Sydney: Angus & Robert-
son, 1961), 936–43; Jennifer Strauss, ‘The Poetry of Dobson, Harwood and Wright: “Within
the Bonds of Feminine Sensibility?”’ Meanjin 38.3 (1979): 334–49; Bridget Vincent, ‘“Sorry
Above All That I Can Make Nothing Right”: Public Apology in Judith Wright,’ Australian
Humanities Review 61 (2017): 160–72; Bruce Bennett, ‘An Ecological Vision: Judith Wright,’
in An Australian Compass: Essays on Place and Direction in Australian Literature (Freman-
tle: Fremantle Press, 1991), 158–75.
2. See respectively, Shirley Walker, Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith Wright’s Poetry (St
Lucia: U Queensland P, 1991); Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith
Wright (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998); J.P. McKinney, ‘Discussion: The Nature of
Knowledge,’ Indian Journal of Philosophy 2.5 (1960): 154–7.
3. Examples are, David Brooks, ‘A Land without Lendings: Judith Wright, Kenosis and Aus-
tralian Vision,’ Southerly 60.2 (2000): 51–64; and Nella Bureu, ‘The Mysticism of Judith
Wright,’ BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 2 (1989): 65–71. Bill
Ashcroft, Lyn McCredden, and Frances Devlin-Glass, ed, Intimate Horizons: The Post-colo-
nial Sacred in Australia (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2009) is a wide-ranging study that includes
mention of Wright but without apparent mention of Hinduism or Buddhism. G.A.
Wilkes reads Wright’s mystical aspect as falling short of any transcendental unity, left wres-
tling with unresolvable dualities: ‘The Later Poetry of Judith Wright,’ Southerly 25.3 (1965):
167–8. Other reviewers who note a ‘vague’ mystical element include Vincent Buckley, ‘The
Poetry of Judith Wright,’ in Critical Essays on Judith Wright, ed. A.K. Thompson (Brisbane:
Jacaranda, 1978), 59–74; R.D. FitzGerald, ‘Form and Matter in Poetry,’ Meanjin 15.2 (1956):
196–204; Elyne Mitchell, ‘The Vision and the Way,’ Southerly 27.4 (1955): 119–20, and J.T.,
‘Judith Wright and Nancy Keesing,’ Southerly 17.2 (1956): 99–100. More positive identifiers
of the ‘metaphysical’ are Tom Inglis-Moore, ‘The Quest of Judith Wright,’ in Critical Essays
on Judith Wright, ed. A.K. Thompson (Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1978), 75–87; R.F. Brissenden,
‘The Poetry of Judith Wright,’ Meanjin 12.3 (1953): 255–67; and Ken Goodwin, ‘Woman for
all Seasons,’ Makar 9.2 (1973): 38–40.
4. Shirley Walker’s Flame and Shadow (80) mentions the Upanishads, but only to differentiate
Wright’s view as more world-centred than transcendentalist. Toby Davidson in his excellent
tracking of debts to Christian mystics, Christian Mysticism in Australian Poetry (New York:
Cambria Press, 2013), 154, mentions in passing Wright’s increasing interest in Hinduism,
Sufism and Taoism and cites Wright’s daughter attesting to her mother’s reading of the Upa-
nishads and Sufism (161). See also Brady, South of My Days, 176; and Patricia Clarke and
Meredith McKinney, ed., With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright (Canberra:
National Library, 2006), 368. For brevity, the last source is cited in text as Letters.
5. Rodney Hall, ‘Themes in Judith Wright’s Poetry,’ in The Literature of Australia, ed. Geoffrey
Dutton (Ringwood: Penguin, 1964), 388–89; Chris Wallace-Crabbe, ‘Kenneth Slessor and
the Power of Language,’ in The Literature of Australia, 382; Thomas Shapcott, ‘Australian
Poetry since 1920,’ in The Literature of Australia, ed. Geoffrey Dutton (Ringwood:
Penguin, 1964), 106, 110.
6. Brady, South of My Days, 173.
7. For Eliot, see his Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974). The ‘myth
kitty’ phrase is from Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982
(London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 79.
170 P. SHARRAD

8. Brady, South of My Days, 177, 228, 246, 270. J.P. McKinney, ‘Discussion: The Nature of
Knowledge,’ Indian Journal of Philosophy 2.5 (1960): 154–7. See also his essay, ‘Can East
Meet West?’ Philosophy East and West 33 (1953): 257–67.
9. Brady, South of my Days, 270–72; Clarke and McKinney, Letters 203–7, 354. One example of
early Commonwealth literature-era engagement with Wright’s work in India is Alur Jana-
kiram’s ‘Judith Wright on Creativity and the Poetic Task,’ Rajasthan University Studies in
English 15 (1982–83): 69–82. Since the inception of Commonwealth Literature teaching
in departments of English in late 1960s India, the three Australian writers most commonly
represented have been A.D. Hope, Patrick White and Judith Wright. Scholarship has been
most interested in validating their work with reference to British writing or showing specific
Australian language and themes and elucidating the different nature of settler colonial con-
cerns from those of decolonising writers in India. Examples are Radharani Chakravarti,
‘Time and Change in Judith Wright,’ in Australian and Indian Literature, ed. David Kerr
and R.K. Dhawan (Delhi: Prestige Publications, 1991), 96–112; Debnarayan Bandyopad-
hyay, ‘Land and Identity: A Reconsideration of Judith Wright,’ in Australian Studies, ed.
Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay, Santosh Chakrabarti, Amitava Roy (Calcutta: Australian Lit-
erature Study Centre, Burdwan University, 2001), 17–23; Jaya Ghosh, ‘Tradition and Exper-
iment in the Poetry of Judith Wright,’ in Australian Studies: Reading History, Culture and
Identity, ed. David Dunstan, Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay, Shibnath Banerjee (Delhi:
Worldview Publications, 2010), 121–34. Indian scholars have frequently been keen to estab-
lish Indian-Australia connections (in White’s mandalas, some A.D. Hope poems, and Les
Murray’s ‘Walking to the Cattle Place’ (e.g. Malati Mathur, ‘India and Australia: Cross Cul-
tural Connections,’ Southerly 70.3 [2010]: 37–45; Lyn Jacobs, ‘Proximity and Distance: Aus-
tralian Literary Responses to Asia,’ in Reading Down Under, ed. Amit and Reema Sarwal
(New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2009), 513–25, but I have been unable to find an equivalent
connection detected in Wright’s work (though I have not sighted the thesis mentioned and I
suspect someone has made the link in one of the many college journals that don’t travel
beyond their immediate region). The one substantial Indian essay on Wright and Asia
comes from Anisur Rahman, who concentrates entirely on her use of the ghazal: ‘The Aus-
tralian Ghazal: Reading Judith Wright,’ in Cultural Interfaces, ed. S.K. Sareen, Sheel Nuna
and Malati Mathur (New Delhi: Indialog, 2004), 84–92.
10. Clarke and McKinney, Letters, 204.
11. Walker, Flame and Shadow 64, 83, 212; Brady, South of My Days 51, 55; Clarke and McKin-
ney, Letters 132.
12. Philip Mead actually quotes a line from Phantom Dwelling that mentions Hindu fire god
Agni, but makes no comment on the Indian connection (‘Ten of the Best: Some Recent Aus-
tralian Poetry,’ Island Magazine 29 [1986–87]: 35). On the last point, see Anisur Rahman
and Anne Collett, ‘Ghazal as a Transnational Space; Ghazal as Endgame: Judith Wright’s
“Shadow of Fire”,’ in Transnational Spaces: India and Australia, ed. Debnarayan Bandyo-
padhyay and Paul Sharrad (New Delhi: Routledge, forthcoming) and Darius Sepehri,
‘Judith Wright’s “The Shadow of Fire” and Making the Ghazal Appropriate for Australia,’
Southerly 76.3 (2017): 184–210.
13. I have, for the sake of brevity, homogenised two bodies of religious thought, both of which
encompass many different systems and practices. Buddhism, of course, divides principally
into Hinayana and Mahayana ‘schools’, both of which have their own doctrinal and regional
variations, and Hinduism, in its classical vedantic traditions alone, produces systems of non-
dualism, modified non-dualism and dualism. There is more to be said, perhaps, about
Wright and Buddhism, but given its origins as a reform of Hindu thought, I have concen-
trated on the more familiar Hindu texts and ones that Wright herself mentions. The Bha-
gavad Gita is the philosophical core of the epic Mahabharata, compiled roughly across
400BC to 400AD, and the Upanishads are teaching stories gleaned or spun off from the
ancient Vedas and organised with commentaries by generations of sages, notably the
seventh-century Shankara.
 JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE 171

14. All references to the Upanishads are taken from Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Man-
chester, ed. and trans., The Upanishads: Breath of the Eternal (New York: Mentor/ New
American Library, 1957). Parenthetic citations refer to specific books within the
compendium.
15. Walker, Flame and Shadow 70, 71, 76, 80.
16. Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1965), 176.
17. H.P. Heseltine, ‘Wrestling with the Angel,’ Southerly 38.2 (1978): 163–7; James McAuley,
‘Some Poems of Judith Wright,’ Australian Literary Studies 3.3 (1968): 201–3; Leonie
Kramer, ‘Judith Wright, Hope, McAuley,’ in The Flowering of Australian Literature, ed.
C.D. Narasimhaiah and C.N. Srinath (The Literary Criterion 15.3–4 [1980]: 90–91);
Arthur Pollard, ‘Wright Collection,’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 10.1 (1975): 71–
77; J.T., ‘Judith Wright and Nancy Keesing,’ Southerly 17.2 (1956): 99–100.
18. Keith Russell, ‘Elders and Betters?’ Quadrant 30.7–8 (1986): 107; Walker, Flame and
Shadow, 213; Clarke and McKinney, Letters, 204.
19. Laurence Collinson, ‘Under Two Fires,’ Overland 8 (1956): 36. Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its
Essence and Development (London: Faber, 1963): 21–22. Tagore’s philosophy is sketched by
William Radice in the Preface to his collection, Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems, trans.
William Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
20. Davidson, Christian Mysticism, 167. Despite my arguments here, it is quite possible to read
Wright’s verse as an Australianisation of Eliot: most of her key symbols (winter versus
spring, tree, rose, fire, time, dance, flood and drout, mystic union of opposites) can be
found in ‘Little Gidding’. However, her tone at least is not the same, and certainly her
move into Japanese and Sufi traditions take her away from being dependent on Four
Quartets.
21. David Dale Holmes, ‘The Fire Sermon: The Third Sermon of Buddha,’ 2018 <www.
buddhistdoor.net> [accessed 9 March 2020].
22. I have relied on the overview provided by Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Devel-
opment (London: Faber, 1963). Thomas Shapcott, ‘Australian Poetry since 1920,’ in The Lit-
erature of Australia, ed. Geoffrey Dutton (Ringwood: Penguin, 1964), 115–16, intuits
Wright’s move from wartime existential angst to Buddhist-like philosophic reflection
when he comments that the poet’s ‘invocation of Nothingness’ reaches a realisation that
‘Nothing is only flux itself’.
23. Walker, Flame and Shadow, 83; Conze, Buddhism, 64, 97.
24. Clarke and McKinney, Letters 327, 432, 526. Conze, Buddhism, 125–28.
25. Hafiz, The Selected Poems of Hafiz, trans. Ali Salami (Tehran: Mehrandish Books, 2016);
Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).