Please excuse my poor English, as I am a Chinese in Hong Kong, who has just started to love poetry.

Any insights or thoughts on a poem by the Australian poet, Judith Wright?

Woman to Child

You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.

There moved the multitudinous stars,
and coloured birds and fishes moved.
There swam the sliding continents.
All time lay rolled in me, and sense,
and love that knew not its beloved.

O node and focus of the world;
I hold you deep within that well
you shall escape and not escape --
that mirrors still your sleeping shape;
that nurtures still your crescent cell.

I wither and you break from me;
yet though you dance in living light
I am the earth, I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit,
the link that joins you to the night.

***

I think it talks about the nature, mother earth. But why are there so many repeated words? Stanza three is particularly confusing for me, escape? crescent cell?

Thanks!
Frank : )

Frank,

This poem is one from an anthology of poems published in 1949, which were specifically about women's sexuality - quite passionate and earthy poems about sexual union, pregnancy, birth etc. It is often studied in schools - i found a sample student's essay which may help to explain it at:

[personal.ecu.edu]

Judith Wright was a wonderful poet - passionate and eloquent about political issues, her love of her country, her identity as a woman etc - i hope you enjoy reading her poems!

------------------------
Another poem from the same anthology -


"Woman to Man"

by Judith Wright

The eyeless labourer in the night,
the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day --
silent and swift and deep from sight
foresees the unimagined light.

This is no child with a child's face;
this has no name to name it by:
yet you and I have known it well.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.

This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.
This is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.

This is the maker and the made;
this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting at the dark,
the blaze of light upon the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.

Frank, nice of you to join us...

To Judith Wright, birth and motherhood relates to everything else in nature.

O node and focus of the world;
...... node is used as non-plant equivalent of "bud", like rosebud-
...... which is of world importance
I hold you deep within that well
...... by "well", like a water well, she means womb
you shall escape and not escape --
...... birth may be an "excape" so to speak, but no one excapes from life
that mirrors still your sleeping shape;
...... birth, waking, sleeping, are essentially all the same
that nurtures still your crescent cell.
...... but, nevertheless, it nurtures you - the fetus has somewhat of a crecent shape....

Elliot

I don't know much about Chinese poetry, and whether it really differs from
Western poetry, but I suppose it does. I think you'd be able to enjoy it a lot
more if you'd read a poetry book for beginners. (it worked for me)
Repetition is an often used poetic device, meant to stress a certain word.

It's wonderful! This is my first time posing question on poetry on the Internet, and it is so rewarding! I have not dreamt of there will be reply the next day and even more than one!

Thanks for all three of you, especially for the sample essay Rikki recommends. The representation of the four different stages or child-mother relationship is very revealing!

I do read a lot of poetry introductory books, but every single poem is such a new challenge for me! (On this point, I strongly recommend a new book I am reading: The art of poetry: how to read a poem / Shira Wolosky (OUP))

I also know the main purpose of repetitions in a poem, but I want to ask do you find Wright's repetitions of words here masterly or not. Is it a kind of 'mirrorings' between the mother and child?

And also any comment on the diction and sound?

Frank : )

The overall sound and rhythm of the poem is soft, slow and dreamy-- perhaps much like floating in water. The unborn child is floating and (perhaps)dreaming as well.

pam

This Poem is an extended metaphor, related to nature and the world around us.

It says that every mother is like Mother Earth, that every child is every life that comes from the earth. It ties in with the myths of death and rebirth, of Demeter and Prosperine the image of the tree and the fruit. It'd would be interesting [someone probably has] to compare Wright with the Australian male poet A. D. Hope whoi has written similar poems

i too am having a little truble understanding this poem i initaly thought it to be about birth and also how the mother when "Withers" the child will leave or "Break away" from the mother. i am unsure if some one could help me, i have no idear on what the ending is saposed to say? she is the link to the night or something? Please help sarz4321@hotmail.com . 2/7/2021

Sarah - it's just about the continuity of the generations, as the mother ages, the child comes into his/her prime, in the same way as a plant dies as its fruit/seed gets to maturity and is shed. It's not the child leaving that causes the mother to age.

Sarah---

to make the paper writing job easier, sometimes what works is to
analyze the poem line by line (or stanza by stanza)
on the literal level---

with this one you can---it can be taken literally---
then the metaphorical level becomes obvious.

For instance . . . in the first stanza---

"You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood."

on a literal level would be the mother talking to her unborn child.
The seed and egg created a baby in the darkness of her womb.
Then . . . the mother sees "the world" in other words
all possiblities within her unborn child as mothers tend to do
and soon the child will see the world after it is born.
This life hangs so-to-speak in suspension
while the mother sleeps (and is awake too . . . but "dreaming blooding" is more poetic, I guess).

Ok so that's kind of how you can go about it---talk in your own type of speech in writing the paper. The purpose of the paper is for you to learn how to analyze poetry so that you can then become a better writer yourself.
It's kind of like how artists copy paintings---if they can understand the fundamentals of how an accomplished artist did things then they to can do that in their own way.

Anyhow, just go for it!! in your own voice.

Lisa



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/02/2022 10:49AM by LRye.

To help anyone that needs it, i think this poem has somewhat of a feminist viewpoint attached to it. Judith Wright was known as a feminist poet and it can be seen that the speaker/poet is stating that she wants to take full credit for this child. From the womb she holds the child in, to the world the child is born into; the woman was responsible for everything. We could refer to the woman as a mother or as Mother earth/nature I also agree though that there is a direct relationship between motherhood and nature which is shown in the second stanza. To any of those further analyzing the poem, look for connotations, shifts and further analyze the meaning of the title (the title plays an important role in the theme of the poem).

-Lauren

i am having difficulty understanding stanza 2. is there anyone who can help?

There moved the multitudinous stars,
and coloured birds and fishes moved.
There swam the sliding continents.
All time lay rolled in me, and sense,
and love that knew not its beloved.


To me, and I stress this is just my take, the first three lines show the continuous movement/progression of a universe unaware of the mother and her child. The precession of the equinoxes, other life forms living their own lives, tectonic plates forming and reforming the continents. Meanwhile, the mother grows a new life in her womb, a life not even yet aware of itself or its mother.

To look at the second stanza, you also need the first-

You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.

She is creating a world- a new life- and in the second stanza describes the completeness of that world.

pam

Lauren, I must agree with you that Wright's viewpoint is very feministic. I find this especially in the first and third stanzas. However, some women at pregnancy are in a state of awe, maybe this is the spirit in which she wrote the poem..? Also, if symbolically she is writing about mother earth, it seems far more humble. About the line, "I wither and you break from me", I think it could be as simple as the fact that when a woman is pregnant she appears full and ample, and when the child is born she does appear, physically, to wither.

Has anyone analyzed why,if there is a reason, that Woman to Child is in such tight, closed form? How may this add something to the essay? It caught me because it seems unfitting amongst the free-flowing imagery and tone.

Tiffany

I had another question for Frankie Cheung, as far as poetry goes, how hard/easy is rhyming in Chinese as opposed to English? I've heard it's alot harder to rhyme in English than in any other language. T/F?


Tiffany

>... why,if there is a reason, that Woman to Child is in such tight, closed form?

Prolly just writing a cinquain (abccb)?