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Request to a Year - Judith Wright
About Poem:
'Request to a Year' poem taken from Judith Wright’s fourth Poem collection ‘The Two Fires’ published in 1955.
About Author:
Judith Arundell Wright (31 May 1915 – 25 June 2000) was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. Judith Wright was born in Armidale, New South Wales on 1915.
She made her debut in 1946 with ‘The
Moving Image’ (Wright's first book of poetry), in which she showed her
technical excellence free from the burden of fashionable trends. In 1966, she
published ‘The Nature of Love’, her first collection of short stories, set
mainly in Queensland. In 1973-74 she was a member of the Australia Council. In
1975 she published a collection of her addresses and speeches in ‘Because I was
Invited’.
Wright received several awards, including
the Grace Leven Prize (1950), the Australia-Britannica Award (1964), the Robert
Frost Memorial Award (1977), the Australian World Prize (1984), the Queen's
Medal for Poetry (1992). Wright's
memoir, ‘Half a Life time’ (2000), covered her life until the 1960s. Wright
died of a heart attack in Canberra on 2000 June 25, at the age of 85.
Themes in her Works:
Judith
Wright is a powerful voice which echoes to raise the issues concerning women
rights and suffragette. She gives the voice to voiceless women- ignored in a
male dominated society.
Her
focus is clearly concerned with voicing the less heard inner thoughts and feelings
of post-colonial Australian society from a 'naturally' grounded, ‘female’
perspective, uttering concern for and awe of the Australian social and natural
landscape. She gave common voice to her 'mob's dreaming', drawing on her
embedded sense of belonging to the land and its people.
Her works deals with following themes:
- Life and death
- Indigenous Australia
- The natural world/environmentalism
- Regional Australia
- The past (personal, historical).
Line by Line Critical Analysis of the
Poem:
‘Request to a
Year’ remembers the past figure in the form of the poet’s great-great
grandmother who represents the times past and whose attributes the poet wants
to own. Through this poem, the poet makes an attempt to get herself involved
with the situation where it becomes quite difficult for her to take a single
course. Instead, she side lines herself from the clutches of her conjugal
obligations in order to make an impact with her art and let the dormant side of
her artist scream with a loud cry, i.e., allowing herself to appear
self-assertive, renovative and self-creative.
Judith Wright’s poetry derives its
inspiration from the natural objects in her immediate surroundings. Not only
nature or natural landscapes find expression in her poetry, her poetry is
replete with characters from her real-life situations. Her parents, siblings,
uncles and aunts, and sometimes Judith Wright herself becomes the character in
her autobiographical poems.
The poem “Request to a Year” appears a
ballad telling a story of times past. It tells a story of a real life
character, Judith Wright’s great-great-grandmother. The title itself is very
thought provoking as it invokes a muse in the form of ‘Year’. It is a prayer, a
request that the writer implores while addressing the muse. The very opening
lines of the poem seem to be the verses written in reflection.
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
The main subject of the poem is the poets
great-great-grandmother whose character is highly extolled in the following
stanzas by recalling and summoning her past events. Here, the woman
self-assuredly posits her wish to the year that she believes is yet to take the
final decision. Great-great grandmothers’ portraiture is positively highlighted
in the above lines.
Australian body of writing has marked the
difference in the global literary canon by revisiting their past and rereading
their historical backdrop to bring to the surface what was hidden and
suppressed by grand narratives of European discourse. Writers all over the
continent emerged with their creative thoughts retelling the stories of once
colonised nation from a marginal point of view. Female writers are no
exception. Compared to their male counterparts, their identity was twice
removed from the reality. But they have been successful enough to bring into
notice their plight and have efficaciously confirmed their position in
Australian literary culture.
Similarly, great-great-grandmother is
specified as being a legendry devotee of the arts, strengthening her position
and stance in the male dominated society where her charm as an artist obscures
the male ascribed role to her within the society.
One can easily figure out from the above
lines that the author is being a little envious of her
great-great-grandmother’s attributes and her desire to owe them. This
enviousness could be taken in the positive sense because what the author is
craving for is something that can help assert her status and opinion,
therefore, marking her way into the loudest preconceived and opinionated world.
The following lines suggest the setting
of the Victorian Era:
Who having eight children
And little opportunity for painting
pictures
Sat one day on a high rock
Beside a river in Switzerland
Representing the protagonist as a typical
mother of eight children, she offers her readers the satiated mother surfeit
with a plentiful of kids, her achievement as the chief of a large family. She
is the one who devotes no or little time to her personal pleasures like art.
The submissiveness of the protagonist towards her family breaks abruptly and
the poet in a straight forward language depicts the action and the real tussle
of the protagonist with her inner contradicting desires. The great-great
grandmother is seen perching on a high cliff witnessing her family in a state
of crisis.
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,
In the above stanza, the images like
‘difficult’, ‘distance’, ‘balance’, ‘struck’, ‘rock bottom’ suggest the
horrendous and dreadful situation that the family is in. It also suggests the
chilling and frigid response of the mother towards her children. The term
‘distance’ in particular conveys the idea of how objective the mother has
become by shunning all her emotions and sentiments that she once harbored while
she nurtured her children. Because she has resolved to something, she therefore
has the power to paint in the grievous circumstances. This determination and
lack of affection becomes the foundational principle for her creative
masterstroke.
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).
These lines provide the delineation of
the protagonist’s daughter portrayed as the alter ego of the main figure. She
is the one who runs to save her brother, crossing all the impediments unlike
her mother who is watching over them calmly and silently with a complete sense
of objectiveness. The last two lines of the stanza fore spell a brief hint of a
hope. But then, this hope diminishes as we move further in the poem.
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.
The very first line of the stanza in
question derives the inference that the protagonist is as calm and quiet as
showing no sign of emotions or agitation. She appears very objective,
outstripped, Machiavellian, and rational. She has sanely apprehended the
situation of the uncontrolled dramatic scene before her eyes but the only thing
she can do is to aim at the piece of art, the painting she has desired to draw.
With her “isolating eyes”, she draws the picture which survives as a piece of
evidence that no assault of nature or time or dogmatic society can challenge to
destroy. The very term “isolating eyes” is scathing enough to portray the
protagonists’ emotionally distanced and unfeeling attitude towards her family.
At the same time, what it communicates is the subjects’ certain level of
despair on the part of an unsatisfied and empty artist.
The last two lines give readers the sense
of nostalgia:
Year, if you have no Mother’s day present
planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of
her hand.
These concluding verses propose the
central idea of the poem by going back to the muse of the first line, i.e.,
Year.
The main character in the poem can be
described as possessing the firmness of a kind in the times of crisis and it is
the same firmness that the poet has a strong longing for. The poet wants to
master the same passion and ardour which her great-great-grand mother possessed
a mid the grim and severe exigencies.
It is a poem which exploits an important
theme: pursuit verses human nature. Life offers us myriad number of
opportunities but there are certain aspects of life that we need to value more
like family, relationships, and friends. Others like success and pursuit become
secondary. Art is from Life but sometimes Art can go beyond Life.
Short Summary:
The gift that the poet proposes to ask of
the year is the attitude that the ‘poet’s great-great-grandmother possessed.’
This grandmother had eight children and she took up the hobby of painting
pictures only once they were all grown up. Once when she was painting sitting
on the banks of a riverbed, she suddenly saw that her second son was almost on
the verge of falling in to a waterfall. The boy’s sister was trying to pull her
brother out of the water and she herself was almost in trouble as her heavy
frocks acted as a barrier for the rescue. The grandmother resignedly sketched
this scene. It is a way of reflecting what her life must have felt like;
surrounded by disasters and horrors and unable to directly contain, confront or
control them. The poet asks that if it is possible for the year to think of
trying to provide her with an attitude just like her great-great-grandmother.
Detail Tamil explanation of this poem is given in this below video:
Click the image and get the video
1 comments:
Thankyou it was usefull
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