James Wright's "A Blessing"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

James Arlington Wright was born on December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943, Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. While there, he also befriended future fellow poet Robert Mezey. Wright graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952. Wright traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, he studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City’s Hunter College.

The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his political and social concerns. He modeled his work after that of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, whose engagement with profound human issues and emotions he admired. The subjects of Wright’s earlier books, The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from society and they invite the reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation. Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving easily from stage to stage. His earlier work adheres to conventional systems of meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open, looser forms, as with The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963).

Wright was elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1971, and, the following year, his Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Wright died in New York City on March 25, 1980.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, September 25th, 2004. Today's poem is by James Wright. The comparatively short-lived American poet who's born 1927, died 1980. But during his lifetime, he was lauded by critics and working poets alike
0:25.3	as one of the great contemporary American poets. He garnered for his work, the Pulitzer Prize,
0:32.6	among other honors. Wright had a kind of Midwestern, aesthetic. He reminds me a little of a of a sad
0:43.1	Wallace Stegner. And during his poetic career, his style and poetic voice fluctuated pretty
0:49.8	dramatically. But in today's poem entitled A Blessing, he's really found the sweet spot.
0:59.2	Although he had abandoned a lot of the traditional formalism that characterized his early writing,
1:06.6	here he had not yet veered into the sort of overly talky and conversational style of his later years.
1:15.5	This is really the perfect, sort of light touch, easy, effortless conversational verse that he was turning out at the height of his powers.
1:26.5	Here is a blessing. Just off the highway
1:31.7	to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth on the grass, and the eyes of those two
1:38.5	Indian ponies darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows to welcome my friend and me. We step over the
1:46.6	barbed wire into the pasture where they have been grazing all day alone. They ripple tensely. They can
1:52.9	hardly contain their happiness that we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
2:00.0	There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more,
2:04.6	they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slender one in my arms,
2:11.6	for she has walked over to me and nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white. Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
2:19.8	and the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear, that is delicate as the skin over a girl's
2:25.3	wrist. Suddenly, I realized that if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom.
2:35.5	This poem develops so well toward the sublime that almost catches you off guard at the end of the poem,
2:45.5	and yet it feels like a completely natural development.
2:49.9	There are the oh so subtle suggestions of isolation and separation.
2:57.8	Man and nature are divided by road, by barbed wire. These two ponies starved for attention.
	...

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