Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Study

Criticism

Emily Archer

Emily Archer, a freelance writer who has taught at colleges in the South and the Northeast, has published many articles on contemporary American writers and currently leads poetry workshops

and book discussions for reading groups in New Hampshire. In the following essay, Archer reads “A Blessing” in light of James Wright’s aesthetic of courage.

“My stuff stinks, and you know it,” James Wright wrote in a letter to poet Theodore Roethke in August of 1958, not long after the publication of Wright’s prize-winning first book, The Green Wall. Despite long years of learning the craft of poetry, Wright confessed he found it “ironically depressing” that

I work like hell chipping away perhaps one tiny pebble per day on the ten-mile-thick granite wall of formal and facile ‘technique’ which I myself erected, and which stands ominously between me and whatever poetry may be in me.

Five years later, Wright encountered another kind of boundary, the barbed wire “just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,” but this he stepped over easily into a place of kindness and blessing. Whether it was dismantling a self-made wall or crossing a barbed threshold, both required of Wright a certain kind of courage and risk. It took one kind of courage to chip away, painfully and persistently, at what others perceived as an accomplished poetic. It took another kind of courage to explore what lay “just off” the main route with its solid yellow line, the road’s edge dividing human and nature, self and other, ordinary and sublime.

Much attention has been given to Wright’s perceived “sudden” shift in style from his first two books to his third, The Branch Will Not Break. “A Blessing” is the best-known poem in The Branch Will Not Break, not only for what critic Norman Friedman calls its “nearly perfect” lyric beauty, but because it is considered by many to represent Wright’s dramatic change in poetics. In James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man, critic Kevin Stein categorizes “A Blessing” as “exemplary of Wright’s transformation from a poetry of ... or thodoxy to a poetry of attention.” In his short literary biography of Wright, Andrew Elkins represents those who find Wright’s “truly transitional volume” elsewhere in his career. For Elkins, it occurs ten years later, in Two Citizens (1973), where Wright’s “poetry of attention” extends into a sustained “sympathetic extending beyond oneself to another.” Few would dispute, however, that the seeds of that sympathy are present in “A Blessing.” There, Stein says, the poet “notices the ponies as more than objects, when he comes to see them as creatures with whom he shares both a physical and emotional landscape.” And most would agree that the departure of the poem’s disciplined free verse from the traditional forms in his earlier books was not simply a matter of changing poetic “dress.” It is a change that began, imperceptibly, in the marrow of Wright’s art years before The Branch Will Not Break was published. Nevertheless, much about “A Blessing” looks “new.”

What is not new is Wright’s “poetics of courage.” What is not “sudden” is his praise for those who, with brave intent, abandon the comfort of illusions for the sake of truth and integrity. The essays and reviews in Wright’s Collected Prose harbor language for the kind of poet he admires and wants to be — “courageous,” “risking,” “noble,” “truthful” — and whose greatest battle is against “distraction from reality.” Wright had evidently come to believe that his practice of craft was just such a distraction, and that technique had become one of those noisy “ideas” that Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset insists can “hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer.” In his essay “A Master of Silence,” Wright says Ortega “faces [distraction] most helpfully” in his description of the “sleep-walker” and the “shipwrecked.” The “sleep-walker” uses ideas, aesthetic or otherwise, as “trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.” In contrast is the “shipwrecked man” who, Ortega explains,

... looks life in the face, realizes that everything is problematic, and feels himself lost....These are the only genuine ideas: the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posture, farce.

Wright would not rest until he had looked both life and art “in the face” and found those genuine ideas. Thus shipwrecked, it took courage for Wright to change his aesthetic strategies to the degree he did, and at the time he did. Wright’s admission to Roethke of self-defeat came a scant year after his first book, The Green Wall, was selected by W. H. Auden to receive the Yale Series of

“Once Wright was done dismantling the wall between the external rules for poetry and his own inner necessity, he was ready to practice an organic free verse whose images, lines, and voice more truthfully revealed the poetry ‘in’ him.”

Younger Poets Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in American letters. Praise for The Green Wall was far-reaching, and in many minds, Wright had entered the ranks of poets deserving serious attention and respect. “Here is one of the elect,” pronounced reviewer J. E. Palmer, “a young poet of great gifts by whose labors the living body of poetry will be sustained.”

The disjunction between Wright’s perception of his own work, prior to The Branch Will Not Break, and that of most readers is painfully clear. But here was no “imposter syndrome” or false humility. Wright’s confession to Roethke is full of an authentic sense of self-betrayal. It implies that in the very effort to master the tools of his trade, the poet has acquired a shop full, only to have locked himself out, somehow, and thrown away the key. Little wonder that the second volume, where that “facile ‘technique’” is even more masterfully at work, he called Saint Judas (1959). Not only do many of its poems daringly empathize with the social outcasts in Wright’s Ohio and Minnesota, but with Judas Iscariot himself, the very incarnation of betrayal. Yet, says Andrew Elkins, Wright’s murderers and prostitutes,

... whatever else they may be, they are innocent of self-betrayal.... They have at least listened to their instincts, the dark murmurings of the heart that bring news of their real identity to exist somehow beyond, below, above, or behind society’s prescriptions for good behavior.

Perhaps his dark heroes are not guilty of self-betrayal, but Wright certainly believes he is. He had learned his craft well by 1958, but had not yet practiced an art that “flowers, from within, of self-blessing,” in the words of Galway Kinnell’s poem “St. Francis and the Sow.” Wright needed a particular kind of courage to listen to his own instincts and risk their imperatives for change, for he was convinced that “you cannot bear this vision by staying as you are.” He took to heart poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s dictum, “Du musst dein Leben ändern” (“You must change your life”).

In his prose “Meditations on René Char” (1956), Wright acknowledges that this art is hard-won, for, in the first place, “a poet is a man to whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people” even though “that difficulty is blessed.” In many ways, Wright comprehends the poet’s task in the language of “bravery” and “trial,” and his poet emerges as a kind of hero whose work is marked by difficulty, suffering, and, often, despair. When Wright admires the work of other poets in his essays and reviews, it is often for their courage. Walt Whitman, Cesar Vallejo, and Denise Levertov are among those whom Wright praises for their brave attention to the things of the world and for their ability to walk the narrow paths between aesthetic extremes and competing dogmas. Vallejo refused the partisanships of a “century-old formalism on the one hand and a vandalism of antipoetry on the other,” says Wright, by living “neither in formalism nor in violence, but in imagination. He had the courage and stamina to bring his poetic imagination to bear on many different kinds of reality.” Whitman’s revolutionary genius was rooted, Wright believes, in form, in a “principle of growth” that is also a “principle of imagination: the proliferating of images out of one unifying vision” spurred by an “enormously courageous willingness to leap from one image into the unknown.” Wright’s contemporary, Denise Levertov, “suggests Whitman in several ways,” he says in another essay, not least in her “spiritual courage” and a “willingness to discover the new forms of her imagination.”

But it was Austrian poet Georg Trakl, that “supreme example of patience and bravery,” whose work planted the seeds of an aesthetic that would ultimately flower into Wright’s own “courage of the imagination.” Once Wright was done dismantling the wall between the external rules for poetry and his own inner necessity, he was ready to practice an organic free verse whose images, lines, and voice more truthfully revealed the poetry “in” him. As Elkins reminds us, Wright’s reformation was neither sudden nor entirely distinct from earlier work, but was, instead, “part of an evolution” that began when Wright stumbled, by fortunate accident, into a reading by Trakl in the early 1950s at the University of Vienna. Wright’s “Note on Trakl” describes the day he was ushered into a new world where

... the poet, at a sign from the evening bells, followed the wings of birds that became a train of pious pilgrims who were continually vanishing into the clear autumn of distances; beyond the distances there were black horses leaping in red maple trees, in a world where seeing and hearing are one.

Wright found in Trakl a courage different from muscular heroics or self-denying asceticism. Though no less difficult, Trakl’s courage suggested tasks much more inward, accepting, and quiet. Its demands are not only on the poet, Wright notes, but also on the reader, who becomes vulnerable in the act of listening:

A single red maple leaf in a poem by Trakl is an in-exhaustibly rich and wonderful thing, simply because he has had the patience to look at it and the bravery to resist all distraction from it. It is so with all of his small animals, his trees, his human names. Each one contains an interior universe of shapes and sounds that have never been touched or heard before, and before a reader can explore these universes he must do as this courageous and happy poet did: he must learn to open his eyes, to listen, to be silent, and to wait patiently for the inward bodies of things to emerge, for the inward voices to whisper. I cannot imagine any more difficult tasks than these, either for a poet or for a reader of poetry. They are, ultimately, attempts to enter and to recognize one’s very self.

Thus, Wright’s most difficult task in the late 1950s and early 1960s was in learning to exercise this “courage of the imagination,” and his transformations have everything to do with facing the distractions to that challenge with patience and attention.

“A Blessing” poetically enacts this sort of courage. The poem begins grounded in attention to a particular, ordinary time and place: “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,” at dusk on a spring day. It ends in epiphany and luminous possibility. Between the first lines and the last, Wright tells a story whose images seamlessly prepare us for the penultimate vision of breaking “into blossom.” Every line commingles some observation of concrete reality with a seeing-into its inward nature. It is twilight, for instance; that is a narrative fact. But this twilight “bounds softly forth on the grass,” and the personification animates the image with something that is both “other” than light and, yet, inextricably part of it. There are two ponies, specifically, Indian ponies. That detail adds both fact and connotations to the emerging scene. These animals are hardy and obviously gentle, but that “fact,” too, is expanded into their unspoken connection with an ancient lineage and land in which they are “at home.” The color of their eyes could well be dark brown, but Wright’s facility for yoking ordinary with extraordinary offers us, instead, eyes that “darken with kindness.”

It takes the courage of the imagination to go beyond the external, “provable” givens into the “inward body” of the world, without abandoning the actual in the process. The ponies are eating new grass; the fact is both grounded and grounding. But the language that offers that fact also offers more, in an imaginative leap that sees all of spring, not just tender grass, in those “young tufts” at dusk. The simple, confident, observations at the poem’s middle also offer intuitions that can’t be rationally proved, but which the imagination honors: the ponies’ love for each other is not distinct from their profound loneliness. Lest we try to puzzle out this odd juxtaposition of love and loneliness with psychology or reasoning of any sort, the poem protects the paradox by declaring, “There is no loneliness like theirs.” Nothing in your experience or understanding, it implies, can penetrate this mystery. The closest one may come, perhaps, is the relationship of solitude to love that Rainer Maria Rilke expressed in Letters to a Young Poet: “this more human love ... consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”

This paradox of love and loneliness occupies both the graphic middle and imaginal heart of the poem. Having found itself, as it were, “at home once more,” its energy then radiates back out into the poem’s emotional textures and images, preparing for the possibility of transcendence. In the immediacy of present-tense verbs and short, declarative diction, we learn that the slender pony “is black and white.” But not so simple is the way “Her mane falls wild on her forehead,” keeping alive the sense that in this pastoral world anything can happen. From the first line on, the poem rebels quietly against the illusion of order — against all of those containments that prevent the imagination from exercising its courage. It prepares us all along for the near-breaking of boundaries that creates the final ecstatic tension. There is little distance, for instance, between the reader and the quiet eroticism of these lines:

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.

The speaker of the poem is, in turn, moved “to caress her long ear / That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” The metaphor is grounded in the sensory realities of the animal’s body. But it is a metaphor, after all, and in making the comparison between the soft ear and a girl’s wrist, it also transcends sensory realities and dramatically closes the distance between human and nature.

Vulnerability to one experience of numinous desire leads to another and to the ecstatic revelation at the poem’s end. Wright has already described the rewards of transgressing certain literal boundaries — the straight path down the highway, the barbed wire — as well as the metaphorical boundaries between human and nature. Those trespasses, both physical and imaginative, lead the poet to the brink of the ultimate one: “stepping out” of the body itself, into a mystical flowering of divine union. But Wright’s greatest “courage of the imagination” in this poem is, ultimately, in leaving such union in the realm of the penultimate: “if I stepped out of my body,” the poem reads. The poet doesn’t, finally, “break / Into blossom.” But Wright does believe “It is possible,” according to the note he scrawled just to the right of these lines in his revised version of the poem.

It takes courage to walk off the main route and its worn surfaces of half-awake encounters between self and other. It takes courage to “step over the barbed wire” and greet two animals with human sympathy. It takes courage to open oneself to the possibilities created by metaphors of desire. And it takes courage to remain in the body while filled with longing for utter transformation. Like the beatitudes of the Gospel according to Matthew, the “blessing” of this poem is full of paradox. It overturns the expectations that would have been met by staying squarely on the highway to Rochester. However dark and self-defeated Wright would otherwise remain until his death in 1980, he had at least looked life in the face for a few moments on a spring evening in Minnesota. And there, just off the highway, he had discovered for all of us the exquisite truth of being shipwrecked in human limitations and possibilities.

Source: Emily Archer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Sharon Kraus

Sharon Kraus is a poet who teaches creative writing, literature, and poetry at Queens College, CUNY. In the following essay, Kraus characterizes

“‘A Blessing’ is an apparently simple poem about transformation, yet it is complicated by the speaker’s plainspoken presence and turns out to be more about that speaker — and his wish for transformation — than about any actual change.”

“A Blessing” as a complex portrait of a speaker who longs for transformation.

Imagine a young girl alone in the woods. A powerful man is chasing after her, because he has spotted her in the distance and finds her beautiful; in fact, he has fallen in love with her. He wants to embrace her, perhaps convince her to marry him, perhaps force her to share his bed. She wants only to escape him, however, and to never have intimacy with a man, let alone marry; she prefers to live on her own. She runs as fast as she can, tripping over branches in her path, and is so breathless that she cannot cry, even through she is afraid.

He begins to catch up to her — he is, after all, the god Apollo — and Daphne sees that she won’t be able to outrun him or fight him off. In her fear, she beings to pray, desperately, that someone will rescue her. Behind her, Apollo’s footsteps thud heavily in the weeds. Then the impossible happens: her limbs grow cumbersome and too weighty to move; a fine brown bark begins to gird her body; her hair changes to leaves, her arms to boughs, and her head becomes a treetop; her feet are fixed to the earth with tenacious roots. Her wish to be saved is granted. One of the Roman gods has transformed Daphne into the laurel tree, and she is forever protected from human contact. In her flight, she has crossed over from the human to the natural world.

The myth of Daphne and Apollo is powerful enough to have survived two millennia; the Classical poet Ovid recorded it in his famous collection The Metamorphoses sometime before his death in 17 A.D. Daphne’s story is resonant because it reveals how intense a person’s wish to escape danger and unhappiness can be. The desire to be changed (The American Heritage Dictionary defines “metamorphosis” as “change of form”), to be saved even from oneself, is a potent desire. Poet James Wright understood that wish, and, more important, his poem “A Blessing” acknowledges how terrifying it is to be changed, even when transformation is what you pray for.

“A Blessing” is an apparently simple poem about transformation, yet it is complicated by the speaker’s plainspoken presence and turns out to be more about that speaker — and his wish for transformation — than about any actual change. The poem has a longing for magic in it, and the speaker’s sudden insight, at the close of the poem, into what he can allow himself to hope for, is what makes the poem emotionally affecting.

It is important to notice that the poem contains specific, prosaic details alongside rather mystical ones: the poem’s setting is “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,” and in this mundane locale, enchantment can take place (“Twilight bounds softly forth”). In fact, the magical inspiriting of an anthropomorphized twilight could only occur in such an ordinary, precisely situated place. The poem’s first two lines thus prepare us for the ponies, who do change (from loneliness [line 12] to happiness). The speaker seems to assert that it is he and his friend who have effected the ponies’ emotional change (“[the ponies] can hardly contain their happiness / that we have come” [lines 9-10]), yet, unlike the Roman god in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, they have caused change not by performing any action but merely by being present. Really, the speaker and his friend are in the presence of love.

The most distinct action in the poem is the encounter, narrated in the central lines, between the ponies and the humans. The ponies’ expression of love seems to precipitate the speaker’s stepping over a boundary (the barbed wire fence) — quite literally and physically a transition — and moving from a human society that implicitly lacks such lovingness, toward the natural world on the fence’s other side. The natural world is perceived by the speaker to be an innocent one, full of emotions not hidden by a veneer of (human) “civilization.” The poem’s language is deliberately simple; our speaker wants to speak plainly and without artifice as he recounts his story. Nevertheless, “A Blessing” does use startling and appealingly sensuous details, such as “they ripple tensely” (line 9), “They bow shyly as wet swans” (line 11), and “They being munching the young tufts of spring” (line 14), to convey the joyousness of this other world.

Clearly, the speaker would like to be a part of this world of pleasure and affection. Why? We are allowed to infer that the speaker longs for just these qualities and that he finds them lacking in the human world outside the fence. The suggestion is that the speaker suffers from deep unhappiness in his “real” life. As he interacts with the female pony, giving and receiving affection and care, he realizes that release from his unhappiness might, in fact, be possible. Significantly, we readers can understand that, throughout this encounter, the speaker has become increasingly conscious of his ever-present grief. Although we do not hear him pray as Daphne prayed for rescue, he suddenly recognizes that, like her, he longs desperately for the magical, divine intervention that, in Wright’s intellectual universe, could be granted only by the physical, factual world. He wants to be saved, not from a threatening pursuer but from his own emotional bereavement and dissastisfaction.

Like Daphne’s transformation, the speaker imagines, his would be frightening as well as comforting. The poem’s penultimate line carefully ends at a syntactically unusual place: the emphasis on “break” underscores the violence of any metamorphosis, even a welcomed one. The natural world is, the image reminds us, full of these startling changes of form, and we should accept this inherent violence because it is not malevolent. Rather, it brings generation of new life.

Wright’s line break instructs us to pay attention to this distinction. It is a terrifying thought to “step out of [one’s] body — as though spiritually naked and vulnerable — and more terrifying to “break.” The last line, however, transforms the speaker’s terror, in the only actually credible way, into joy: he will be joined profoundly to this place of natural beauty and innocence in the way that a crocus breaks open into a burst of vibrant red at the first manifestations of another spring. The joyousness of the imagined transformation is complicated and deepened by its melancholy underpinnings. In fact, the closing image, the only one to depict the speaker’s feelings (rather than the ponies’), requires that we understand the speaker to be grieving before we can fully grasp the image’s ecstatic quality. The poem tells us much more about the speaker’s consciousness than it does about the poet’s philosophical concerns regarding death, grief, and life.

“A Blessing” seems to focus on the imagined or perceived emotions of the ponies, and we are only allowed to infer the speaker’s emotions. In other words, the speaker never says to us, “I felt loved, and, for once, happy — just like the pony.” Instead, as poet William Matthews has observed in his essay “The Continuity of James Wright’s Poems,” Wright does something far more remarkable: he uses an image (in the last three lines) “to refer directly to intense emotions, indeed to create those emotions in the reader, rather than refer the reader to those emotions [by naming instead of showing them].”

In the speaker’s description of the ponies, however, he certainly reveals himself to us, in divulging what he has chosen to see. Poet Robert Bly, who, coincidentally, is the “friend” of line 6, has remarked in his essay “James Wright and the Slender Woman,” “The two ponies are just ponies, and probably would have bit one of us if we had stayed much longer without giving them sugar.... [O]ne of the ponies is declared to be female, even though there was no evidence of that in the dusk [and ‘darkness,’ in line 14]. The feminine nature is insisted on.” For Wright, the feminine nature is the element that might transform the speaker’s grief into joy; it has the power to make him long for a death — perhaps physical, perhaps spiritual — so that he might leave his present life and be reborn. Moreover, this speaker wills himself to see the ponies as benign and kind. One criticism of the speaker is that he may be choosing to idealize the natural world on the fence’s far side; he glosses over the creatures’ other equally legitimate, if still innocent, reactions.

The speaker’s lapses and flaws may further open up the poem to our understanding, though. The poem is moving because it connects the representation of emotions with the authentically imperfect human speaker who has those emotions. Emotions seldom come in disembodied form outside of literature, and this poem, largely rejecting literature’s conventions, presents a speaker struggling to make a discovery and managing only to let himself feel hopefulness. Although the speaker finds himself suddenly capable of imagining that an Ovidian transformation could overtake him, in “fact” none does. Nothing supernatural (literally, “beyond nature”) actually happens, as the poet is careful to say in the penultimate line’s “if.” The transcendence is “only” imaginary, therefore, as critic John Martone has noted. The poem’s emphasis is not on the transformation to the speaker’s body, after all; it is on the speaker’s emotional situation, as he is moved to imagine that ecstasy is possible. The metamorphosis in “A Blessing” “combin[es] the fantastic and the prosaic,” observes Martone. Perhaps even more significantly, it finds the magical within the prosaic.

Source: Sharon Kraus, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer deems “A Blessing” “the embodiment of the Oriental poetic ideal that Wright sought to emulate.”

James Wright’s 1963 poem “A Blessing” is one of the most deceptive poems written by one of the most deceptive poets. Throughout Wright’s poetry, in verses such as “Having Lost My Sons I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas 1960,” he has the habit of paring down and simplifying his images and perceptions to the point that they leave the reader, on first reading, with either a feeling of complete inconsequentiality or with a disturbing sense that something important has been missed — like an image that suddenly flies by in the corner of the eye when one is driving. The latter is the case. Wright is a poet of insight. His images are packed with emotion. He uses his word pictures with such economy and such precision that they only reveal their full impact when they are slowed down, considered, and read deeply. Reading Wright’s poetry is like revisiting a dream, considering every flashing image in depth and with great concern. His images are not iconographic or symbolic as much as they are archetypal in a very deep, mysterious, and almost inexplicable sense.

“A Blessing” is deceptive in that it appears to be a rather commonplace surface observation of two people stopping on “the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,” to examine “two Indian ponies” in a field. The creatures saunter up to their observers, “gladly out of the willows” to welcome “my friend and me.” This observation is followed by a short description of the horses as the two people enter the pasture. What ensues is a moment of connection between the horses and the humans, a moment so powerful that only a metaphor, “if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom,” can express the persona’s feeling of joy.

Wright, quite consciously, patterned the poem on Oriental poetry. The language is very spare and direct. It is devoid of complicated figures of speech, almost as if it is an extended haiku. The natural setting, the connection between an observer/persona and nature, his juxtaposing of two very distinct worlds, all suggest a poem that is much akin to Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” But what separates this poem from imagistic verse and saves it from being just a prolonged imagist lyric is the sense of the miraculous that floods the poem in the final two lines. After creating a very Oriental structure, Wright uses metaphor, out-of-body experience, and imaginative miracle to suddenly relocate the poem in the Western mentality. It is this sudden shift that takes the reader by surprise, because it carries the message that the observer is not just watching nature but is a part of it. The miracle of nature is, ultimately, the miracle of empathy. The final lines transform the poem from mere image into feeling.

In a 1970 interview with William Heyen and Jerome Mazzaro, Wright was asked to read a poem from his collection The Branch Will Not Break. He chose “A Blessing,” explaining that, “This poem does not have any particular moral to it as far as I can tell. It’s just a description.” The absence of a moral message, of a statement that would conclude by offering some sort of purposeful and lasting truth, is a preoccupation of Western poetry and one that Wright is trying consciously to avoid in “A Blessing.” Wright’s comments on “A Blessing” are misleading, however; the poem is more than just “description.” It is a detailed examination of the minute movement from observation to epiphany — a process that goes beyond the rather reserved boundaries of Eastern poetry.

In the interview with Wright, Heyen revealed that he had typed out the entire poem because “I wanted to get the sense of its movement.” Heyen realized that “A Blessing” is more process than picture. The question, then, is how does that process work? The dynamics of the poem suggest that the subject, the ponies, is approached gradually. Contact and relationship are established as a beachhead for feeling. The “light breeze moves” the persona to “caress” the pony’s “long ear / That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” In this moment of sensuality, the poem suddenly departs from detachment and picture and becomes both a physical and emotional experience. The sudden realization on the persona’s part is that artifice alone cannot sustain one’s existence, even as an observer; the result of any process of examination is a “eureka!” no matter how hard one may strive to maintain that detachment.

Heyen comments to Wright that the poem “is an example of what Eliot meant when he said that no verse is ever really free. It’s a very tight poem. I think that it is a perfect example of how the discipline you subjected yourself to in your early works became almost second nature to you. Because of that discipline you could deal with a form like that of ‘A Blessing.’” Heyen is slightly off the mark in calling “A Blessing” a formal poem. It displays none of the prosody essential to the definition of a formal poem. But what Heyen may be acknowledging is the poem’s meter. The opening three lines of the poem are almost regular in the usage of iambic pentameter (the first line, oddly enough, has an extra light stress to accommodate “Minnesota” on the heels of “Rochester”). This underlying attempt at sonic regularity gives the poem an initial organizing principle that works, if not metrically, at least cadentially, to form a consistent yet gentle music. These three lines are followed with the “falling” line “Darken with kindness,” before the five-foot pattern returns in line 5, a line that opens with an anapest foot that sounds, cadentially, very like an extra iamb in the music of the line. Throughout the remainder of the poem, the voice literally rises and falls with groups of two or three long lines followed by shorter, more abrupt lines. The effect of this series of sonic variations is a haltingness, almost as if the voice is approaching its subject gradually, or tentatively, and easing itself into a relationship. What Heyen seems to have spotted, though not articulated, is that the poem is organized around its subject matter in that it strives for a unity of form and content. Wright responded to Heyen’s comments about “A Blessing” by noting that “Writing so-called free verse is tremendously difficult because it is so easy for the language to fall apart, into banalities. It can also easily fall into bad prose.”

Wright is alluding to the distinction between prose and vers libre and the issue of what makes a poem a poem. Wright seems to be conscious of the fact that a poem must have heightened, or at least engaging, language. The reality, however, is that Wright’s diction is profoundly direct, unadorned, and seemingly unpoetic. Herein lies one of the levels of deception that Wright practices so well. Granted, his diction is precise and common. What give the poem its heightened sense of language, though, is its power of narrative. “A Blessing” tells a little story. Like Frost, who practiced the discourse of common experience on both the external and internal levels of narration, Wright has chosen to intersperse his narration of the event with small,

“The absence of a moral message, of a statement that would conclude by offering some sort of purposeful and lasting truth, is a preoccupation of Western poetry and one that Wright is trying consciously to avoid in ‘A Blessing.’”

elegantly crafted details, such as “Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass,” “They bow shyly as swans,” and “delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” These figure of speech, mostly similes, add to the narration and work on the reader’s mind on a level quite apart from either that of the narration or the common diction. The Oriental quality of the poem may come from the tableaux, the almost static action of the poem’s story; but the Western attractiveness of the poem, the appeal and the seduction of its language, comes from these figures of speech. And, true to the poem’s very subtle formal leanings, they occur at regular intervals throughout the verse, usually every five lines.

This begs the question as to what are the elements that make a poem. Language is certainly one. The frequency of repeated patterns is surely another element. The sudden revelation or transformation of seeing through a guided process is yet another recognizable element. Wright’s comments that no poem is totally composed of free verse suggest that one of the constituent principles a poem must abide by is structure — be it structure in language, thought, or sound. But where the poem exceeds the idea of being merely a formal construct is in Wright’s use of feeling.

In his essay “Some Notes on Chinese Poetry,” Wright admitted that his deep admiration for Oriental verse came from its ability to articulate feelings and emotions in subtle yet pictorially poetic ways: “the deeper appeal of the Chinese poets rests on something more general and more particular. I would call it the capacity to feel — to experience human emotion, whether the occasion of that emotion be a great public event, a disaster, or the most intimate private event or scene. Living as we do in a time when our imaginations have been threatened with numbness and our moral beings nearly shattered by the moral ghastliness of public events and private corruptions, we turn naturally — and necessarily, I believe — to a tradition of poetry like the Chinese. However they differ in time and place, they share an abiding radiance, a tenderness for places and persons and other living creatures.” “A Blessing” is, in many ways, the embodiment of the Oriental poetic ideal that Wright sought to emulate. Unlike the pursuit of Western “innocence,” a return to a lost state of moral grace and naivete, the mentality offered up by the Chinese poem allows for an easing of the soul into that “tenderness” of harmony with nature rather than simply a retreat from the nature of a fallen world that is so much a part of Blakean or Rousseaunian innocence. In this light, the blessing of the poem’s title is that of an awakening of perception — the realization that Man, as Wright so often viewed him in his early poetry, is not “apart.” It is a realization that beneath the suffering of the world there is still a connection with something meaningful in nature that offers solace, peace of mind, and the opportunity to “break / Into blossom” with a joy that the world would otherwise deny.

Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Of all of Wright’s contemporaries, fellow poet and friend Robert Bly arguably had the most effect on Wright’s stylistic development, largely through the work the two did together translating the poems of foreign writers into English. Several of these translations are included in Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, edited by Bly.
• A key influence on the early poetic style of Wright was poet John Crowe Ransom, Wright’s mentor at Kenyon College in the late 1940s. For an informative, engaging foray into the kind of formal poetry Wright first loved but later decided to abandon in favor of a free-verse approach, Ransom’s poetry is widely available and anthologized.
• Another key influence on Wright was Theodore Roethke, a highly regarded and versatile poet whom Wright had as a teacher at the University of Washington in Seattle. Like Ransom’s poetry, Roethke’s is also widely available and anthologized. A good place to start might be The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.
• Yet another crucial influence on Wright was Austrian poet Georg Trakl, whose poetry, in look and style, very much approximates what Wright was doing around the time “A Blessing” was published. Wright included several of his translations of Trakl’s poetry in his Collected Poems. Other valuable Trakl translations, by Michael Hamburger, are included in German Poetry 1910-1975.
• In the mid 1970s, Wright began corresponding regularly with Native-American poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. Many of their letters have been collected in The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, edited by Anne Wright.