James Wright’s Poem
James Wright’s poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota is an example of how a collision in a piece of writing can attract reader’s attention and make him or her think about the poem for a long time. First a reader is lulled by a peaceful picture of rural life but then stunned by an unexpected pessimistic conclusion. This contradiction evokes philosophical reflections about the sense of life, and the author sees the sense of life in abandoning the pomps and vanities of the world.
The author looks at the bronze butterfly – and sees in it the beauty (epithet “bronze”) and the fragility (“blowing like a leaf”) of life. In a similar way human life is beautiful and fragile and is exposed to all winds. From the butterfly, the author’s eye moves to the ravine and empty house, and this emptiness symbolizes loneliness. The cows with their bells also bring melancholy since they walk away “into the distances of the afternoon” just like the days of our life pass without a trace. The image of horses’ droppings on a “field of sunlight” is a complex symbol that may mean a combination of light and vulgar things in our life. But even such an ordinary thing as the droppings gets here a poetic meaning and acquire unexpected beauty when “blaze up into golden stones”. The author “leans back” and watches how the “evening darkness” comes on. A chicken hawk looks for home, as the author thinks, and it seems that in this case the poet draws an analogy between his longing for home (not in a literal meaning, of course, but in the meaning of finding a shelter for his soul) and the hawk’s soaring. And finally, we come to the conclusion – “I have wasted my life” (Wright 10).
Of course, after the first reading one may not see any symbol of melancholy in the beauty of rural area, and the readers are surprised to see such a conclusion. However, if a reader spends some time on thinking over the poem, he or she understands the hidden sense more and more deeply. The poet depicts the beauty and peace of life in nature’s lap, and this picture gets him to the understanding that the life is wasted if too much time is spent on fuss of everyday life. Every being starting from a butterfly and to the cows and horses have their own place and sense in life, and do what the nature calls them to do. Only human beings waste their lives on unnatural things insulating themselves from the voice of their souls.
This is the collision contained in the poem that makes readers think and reflect on the sense of their life. This seeming contradiction in the poem is a kind of hook that attracts readers’ attention and does not allow to forget the poem few minutes after having read it.
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