Request To A Year- Judith Wright

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,

I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,

who having eight children

and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland

and from a difficult distance viewed

her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,

while her second daughter, impeded,

no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;

And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.

Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,

Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.
Summary

‘Request To A Year’ by Judith Wright is a poem about a speaker’s desire to take

on her great-great-grandmother’s attitude towards life.
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In the first part of the poem, the speaker suggests that maybe the “year” would
like to give her a gift. Her preference would be an attitude like her great-great-
grandmother’s. The speaker expands on what she means in the
following stanzas by referring to an event in her ancestor’s life. This involves
the near-death of her great-great-grandmother’s second son and how he was
saved from plummeting to his death by a walking stick. All the while, her great-
great-grandmother sketched the scene as it played out.

Themes

In ‘Request To A Year,’ the poet engages with themes like admiration, memory,
and art. Throughout this piece, the speaker expresses her wish to develop an
attitude similar to her great-great-grandmother’s. She wants it so much, she
feels as though it would be a gift if the “year” chose to bestow it upon her. Her
admiration for her grandmother is depicted through a memory. It’s central to her
understanding of how her ancestors dealt with tough situations. Although the
memory is not her own, she’s inherited it through the art piece her great-great-
grandmother created around it.

Structure and Form

‘Request To A Year’ by Judith Wright is a six-stanza poem that is separated into

five stanzas of four lines, known as quatrains, and one final stanza of two lines,
known as a couplet. The lines do not follow a specific rhyme scheme or
metrical pattern. The lines range in length from around thirteen syllables down
to around six. Although there is no single pattern of meter, the majority of the
lines are around the same length.

Literary Devices

Wright makes use of several literary devices in ‘Request To A Year.’ These

include but are not limited to enjambment, alliteration, and an apostrophe. The
latter is an interesting literary device that occurs when the speaker addresses
something or someone that’s incapable of hearing their words or responding to
them. In this case, the speaker addresses “Year.” This occurs most obviously in
the final two lines where the speaker asks the year for a specific kind of present.

Detailed Analysis

Stanzas One and Two

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,

I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,

who having eight children

and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland

In the first stanza of Request To A Year,’ the speaker begins by suggesting that
maybe the “year” might be meditating on a gift for her. This is a surprising and
engaging way to begin a poem, one that includes an example
of personification and metaphor. She speaks about the year as something that is
capable of considering what “gift” the speaker might want and then giving it.

If she gets one, the speaker adds, she wants it to be her “great-great-
grandmother’s” attitude. The first thing the reader finds out about the
grandmother, aside from the fact that she has an admirable attitude, is that she
was a “legendary devotee of the arts.” It’s not entirely clear what the speaker
means by this statement at first, but the following stanzas clear it up.

The second stanza brings in more detail about who this woman was and what it
is about her that the speaker admires so much. She had “eight children” and,
therefore, “little opportunity for painting pictures.” This sets up a very specific
event that made her artwork all the more impactful in the speaker’s eyes.

Stanza Three

and from a difficult distance viewed

her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,

After explaining the setting at the end of the second stanza, “beside a river in
Switzerland,” the speaker adds more details. She describes how her great-great-
grandmother’s second son walks and balances on a small ice flow in the river.
This creates what’s known as foreshadowing. The pause at the end of the
second line of the third stanza allows the reader to pause and consider what
might happen next. Unfortunately for this son, the ice “struck rock bottom
eighty feet below” the bottom of a waterfall.

Stanza Four

while her second daughter, impeded,

no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

In the fourth stanza, the speaker explains how the second daughter tried to help
but was “impeded” by her petticoats. They were so large and cumbersome that
she couldn’t move. But, luckily, she did “stretch…out a last-hope alpenstock.”
The word “alpenstock,” which is uncommon in everyday speech as well as in
poetry, refers to a metal-tipped walking stick. In parentheses, the speaker adds,
as if it’s an afterthought, that the son was saved by the walking stick. This is an
interesting choice, one that confirms for the reader that the speaker and the
great-great-grandmother were more interested in the climax of the event before
the son’s safety was confirmed.

Stanzas Five and Six

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;

And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.

Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,

Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

In the final quatrain, the speaker describes how from the grandmother’s
perceptive, there was “nothing” that could be done. So, she sat there, “with the
artist’s isolating eye,” and sketched the scene hastily. She did it as quickly as
she could so as to capture the moment before it was lost. It’s through the sketch
that the story lives one. The speaker admires this. She reiterates her desire to
take on her great-great-grandmother’s attitude toward life.

The woman did the best she could of the situation. She knew she couldn’t help
her son, so she memorialized the incident for generations to come. She had a
“firmness of her hand” and a strong sense of what she should do when.

Essay- How does Judith Wrigth make the poem thoughtful for the readers?