MARCH 2007

ISSUE 9 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

Salvation Imaged in Nature's Amazing Directionality

Greg Smith

Abstract

In a previous article in this journal, I examined Judith Wright’s strange word about trees, in particular how the eucalypt “with the toughest care provides for seed and egg.”  Now I want to take that meditation further to consider her observations upon various birds. Wright’s intelligent discontent tested the nation’s growing prosperity with a deeper wisdom about the earth’s destiny born in a metaphysics of nature. Many of those insights appear in her Birds (for Meredith) anthology (1962).

I find a major theme in Judith Wright’s work is that salvation is imaged in respecting the land. To understand the land and nature on their own terms, one must have a relationship with the land and nature that repudiates any possessiveness, or pretensions to control or exploit her absolutely. Wright models humans living in nature and in essential relationship with her. Wright‘s desire to read nature and the planet and learn from her processes led her intelligent discontent about misguided commercial and industrial practices to work the land.

Our choices, decisions and consequences for the earth depend on our view of her. If we view the planet as a living organism needing nourishment, respect and time, any narrow-minded possessiveness good-for-the–few utilitarian choices will entail win-loss consequences, whereas good-for-all decisions as co-tenants of the planet bring win-win outcomes. Without being grounded in this right relationship of respect, reading poems about the land and nature would be shallow romanticism, misrepresenting or worse, silently justifying exploitation.

Right Relationships

Judith Wright taught and advocated such a respectful relationship. In her seminal essay, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), she began with this premise that such a right relationship precedes prescriptions. That is the “theorem / whose lines are lines of force / marking a limit.”[1] Her love of the land emerges as an intense subjectivity prescribing respect for nature. She writes:

Before one’s country can become an accepted background against which the poet’s and novelist’s imagination can move unhindered, it must first be observed, understood, described, and as it were absorbed. The writer must be at peace with his landscape before he can turn confidently to its human figures.[2]

In that essay, Wright recognised that the natural limits of nature set the ethical parameters for her times, lest humankind “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (Hamlet III.ii.18) as Shakespeare wrote. The wisdom of nature is that it lives within its limits; it is what it is and seeks no more than that. This principle has even greater relevance today when society debates stem cell research, organ donation, gene technology, in vitro fertilisation, cloning, and genetic manipulation of human gametes.[3]  Unlike mankind, nature does not despoil itself by excess. Wright instanced the eucalypt tree: “she commits no excesses,”[4] in other words, she does not despoil the environment. Respect implies finding and keeping within clear limits.

Respecting the modesty of nature is the mature vision Wright achieved in her Birds anthology (1962).[5] The salutary virtue she sees in the birds’ lives is simplicity: they do not pretend or intend to be more than they are or can be.  That is an insight of worth for humankind, as she shows in the prototypical poem, “Birds” (1953). The poem’s propositional declaration in line 5: “all are what bird is and do not reach beyond the bird” is echoed again in line 10: “all these are as birds are and good for birds to do.”[6] This lesson about the meaning of existence concludes with a wish, nay a prayer, for similar simplicity: “Be simple to myself as the bird is to the bird.” A Christian reading concurs that salvation comes only in living within one’s limits, having no more ambition than nature defines.  Lest it be misunderstood, the poet wishes to be heard saying that truthful simplicity and clear recognition of limits in dealings with nature are virtues.

Birds personalise her vision

Wright honoured the culture’s literary precedent in this familiar subject matter. Birds abound in our literary and religious culture. The Noah story celebrated the dove and the raven as harbingers of safety at the end of the Flood. The dove appeared at Jesus’ Baptism as a sign of God’s favour. Jesus’ parables extolled the birds for even they are important to God; birds do not gather or store in barns, and birds are not anxious because they trust God. Keats’ nightingale, Shelley's skylark and Coleridge's albatross are all powerful symbols of salvation and rescue, from loneliness, insensibility and death. Birds pose quite a challenge to the writer by their very otherness and difference from humans.[7] Yet Wright evoked a shared imaginative response to them in her own land. Like angels, her birds are emblematic of God’s local action, favour and deliverance.

Judith Wright’s poems on birds are probably the most important contribution she made to world literature. Her daughter has recently republished them with beautiful illustrations. I will read from this anthology exploring the theme of bird-as-bird for its ethical prescriptions. Her many birds demonstrate ethical relevance to her era, as creatures in their own right demonstrating nature’s amazing resilience and directionality. For birds do demonstrate an enviable logic in building their habitats and brooding young with an almost anthropological feeling and longing for life.

The thirty poems in Birds[8] record many and various emotions: wonder, enchantment, embarrassment, insight, and at times irony. Wright finds delight when she relates to the natural species in their natural behaviours and their simple conformity with life’s directionality, In “Peacock,” she is critical of the absent aldermen who deny dignity to the ever-beautiful peacock in its dirty cage. Despite being trapped there for the idle entertainment of human eyes, ever-resistant and Phoenix-like, nature rises above it all, as she muses: “Love clothes him still, in spite of all.”[9] Her anthropomorphism was not just idle whimsy or heavy-handed ethical mandating; her overall purpose was to whet a social conscience about the natural environment. In her passion for it, an ironic edge emerged at times.

Her imaginary conversations with the birds personalise this vision. Her address to the currawong, that “bold, cruel and melodious bird”[10] picks up the ambiguities of wonder and the attendant fear that wonder evokes. Her fear of treachery in the lore of the jungle among the forest’s “spirits of song” evokes the understandable prayer for the thornbills that,

Oh let no enemies

drink the quick wine of blood

that leaps in their pulse of praise.[11]

Wright found an enhanced awareness of self and remembered event in her addresses to the kite, egrets, and winter kestrel. Clear memories of observations fuse their locations and her identity in her enduring images.

In the birds, she found guides for serenity, ambiguity, wonder, elegance and identity. She found sheer serenity in the contemplation of perfect birds eggs and in their productivity. Nature decrees that after embryonic peace comes the noisy, demanding younglings:

and perfect as the grey nest’s round

three frail and powered eggs I found  . . .

the shapeless furies come to be

from shape’s most pure serenity.[12]

The birds’ eggs’ parabolic elegance becomes a powerful image of the recurrent transfiguration that is salvation.

More graphically, the conventionally sacred doves (who incidentally were Noah’s messengers of salvation Gen 8:11) provide an ironic revelation in the little known biological fact that doves in captivity eat flesh. This fearful paradox reveals the taboo that suburban man of conventional eye and manicured claw shares the same terrible secret of their dog-eat-dog existence if pushed to it. Cannibal like, the seemingly innocent dove cooing becomes the dinner bell to evoke her perceptive observation:

The doves play

on one repetitive note that plucks the raw

helpless nerve their soft, “I do. I do.

I could eat you.”[13]

Wright also delights in the unknown ironies of the playful wagtail’s song, which is in fact for wooing its prey.

Paradise lost

Wright’s sympathetic eye for tragedy also appears to great effect when coming upon the “wreckage” of a migrant swift in its death throes. Having braved thousands of miles without food and in the wastage of its own body weight, it had apparently fallen to the earth with a snapped wing exhausted and cut out of life just as it was within sight of its rightful Eden:

He trusted all to air  . . .

air’s creatures fed him.

once fallen, there’s no saving / . . . [In this wreckage his]

head still strove to rise

and turn towards the lost impossible spring.[14]

Wright found the migrant swift was a strong image of paradise lost, for falling short of its destiny through sheer exhaustion and misadventure.

In “Migrant Swift,” her acute nostalgia for “the lost impossible spring”[15] is a cameo of tenderness and empathy. In an era when she felt traditional values were being needlessly discarded, nature’s amazing resilience and directionality offer ready models for human happiness because it is the natural pattern.

In this call to be mindful of the land, Wright invokes the value of sympathy for the battler in the bird who has finally lost what it struggled to attain. Wright used this simple event to prophetic effect, imaging by this negative event the true spring of fulfillment, survival to reproduce that is the clear directionality of this bird’s life.

Like estranged souls abroad, an elegiac poet perceives “the wild black cockatoos, tossed on the crest / of their high trees, crying the world’s unrest.”[16] Wright found nature’s modesty eminently well demonstrated in bird life. In “Silver Terns”, only the most observant will notice that their hunting is efficient and hygienic:

you would not guess the blood unless you saw it,

that the waves washed from feather and from scale.[17]

Modelling salvation's virtues

In her meditations and imagined conversations, she mandates ethical action. She found that what is strange to man is not so for birds; for their mysterious survival systems are effective. Their modes of communication taunt our puny science for they are still beyond our ken: “stranger than wild birds.”[18] Wright suggests the evident human disconnectedness with our corporality and the natural world could be remedied if humans learned why these birds’ sacrifice themselves for the lives of their brood.[19]

To Wright, bird behaviour seemed to be more self-possessed than human behaviour. Good news is dramatised in “Pelicans,”[20] where “pelicans rock together” in such a pithy image for survival, with the anachronistic pun. This bald observation clinches something of Wright’s humour, wit and ethical observations in the “Birds” anthology. Her irony reinforces the same point; human apostles bring good news, but not the Apostle-birds.  Their “clannish”[21] behaviour elicited the wish, “we were glad when they flew away.” On the other hand, despite all their greediness, the magpies’ carolling song is most welcome: “For each is born with such a throat / as thanks his God with every note.”[22] With its strong appealing rhyme, clear imagery and strong contrasts, this poem has understandably become a fixture in children’s anthologies. Les Murray’s later Translations from the Natural World (1992) continues these transpositions.

Lastly, her best word was reserved for the emblematic lyrebirds, those ultimate mimics and most elusive of the species. To them, she admitted her own omission in not seeking out these secret bower birds who were elusively further on over the range. Wisely, even religiously letting things be, she concludes that:

Some things ought to be left secret, alone;

some things – birds like walking fables –

ought to inhabit nowhere but the reverence of the heart.[23]

Wright’s birds have great appeal especially when Australian fauna and flora was being celebrated at last in the nation’s coming of the age. I find many images of salvation in this anthology: resilience, serenity, fear, ambiguity, disconnectedness, the tragic in falling short and the call for sympathy in society. He attempts to whet the social conscience of the nation and to reaffirm mystery and reverence for nature are primary attitudes for social redemptions.

In Birds, Wright shows the appeal and the value of the simplicity to be found in Australian fauna. In her world, nature is not all David Attenborough seriousness, showing nature raw in tooth and claw. Her inquiring and open-minded amusement, wonder, delight and ironic edge found much beauty, simplicity and perpetual rejuvenation in nature to offset the foolish rush into what she portrayed as a denaturalised, dehumanising future in Australia’s emerging cities.

Connections with the Land

Wright was to continue these considerations in her later anthology, Alive (1973). I read two poems there in particular to close, the very significant “Two Dreamtimes (for Kath Walker)” and “Oriole, Oriole.” In the first, Wright pays tribute to her friend who later took the name Oodjeroo Noonuccal. Wright honours her as a friend and poet and her aboriginal people. She decries the demise of their two dreamtimes, to observe that, “We too have lost our dreaming”[24] that is to say, that the European Australians too have lost any sense of connection with the land.   Perhaps too she now feels less connected with her “dreaming blood”[25] of the hot blooded poet of earlier times. That earlier time was “the easy Eden-dreamtime then / in a country of birds and trees.”[26] Wright’s own now-faded dreamtime was like girl-like simple pleasures, free of the current complexities. She pictures herself imbibing the land’s scents and the call of the lonely plover:

I riding the cleared hills,

plucking blue leaves for their eucalyptus scent

hearing the call of the plover.[27]

I read here that the call of the plover is a symbol of her simple, joyous connection with the land just as an aboriginal tracker would “read” the land and its seasons. That bird is a symbol of its ever-present fertility, its seemingly eternal regeneration and adaptation. At that time, she felt she was in tune with its rhythms, but now sadly that land is “raped by rum . . . and progress and economics.”[28]

That same plaintive emotion emerges in drought when the familiar cry of the oriole is no longer heard. “Oriole, Oriole” sits immediately after “Two Dreamtimes” in the anthology sharing its elegiac mood:

For twenty years long I stilled and heard

in the blackbean tree that greenvoiced bird.

Oriole is his singing name.[29]

However, in drought and in pathetic fallacy with her own deep-seated concern for the apparent selling off of the nation’s assets to foreign interests, Wright laments with irony in pastoral metre:

Oriole, oriole,

I whistle you up, I wait to hear.

No orioles sing to me this year.[30]

In that absence of the normal, in her dashed expectations, Wright perceives not her just desserts but the grim realities of life. The good and the bad, the presence and the loss are all part of life’s growing into eternity. The calls of the plover and the oriole were familiar beacons of hope, sirens in good times past. Now they are alas mere memories of past happiness. The dream of Eden will not be recaptured it seems until we reconnect with nature’s ways. Being alive give clear insight; in grey survival we merely go blindly on.

In a similar synecdoche, the cry of the dingo and the last sip of the silent willy wagtail had appeared in “Drought Year” (1952) to betoken drought, loss and imminent death:

That time of drought the embered air /. . .

The dingoes’ cry was strange to hear. /. . .

I saw the wagtail take his fill

Perching in the seething skull.[31]

Now the silent bird seeks life wherever it will, sucking up the last moisture even from a carcass. Such discourses on polarities in life are found throughout Wright’s poetry because they are cues for salvation. Elsewhere she writes of “the silence between word and word / in which the truth waits to be heard.”[32] Such stark contrasts suggest the contesting of good and evil that winning salvation entails. It all happens in the real world and can be seen and felt.

Conclusions

To summarise, a bird’s being true to its nature in the landscape is a pertinent primary image of salvation’s neat fit with our human nature. Simply being within the natural limits of its species and environment is its proper existence. Further, Wright’s bird poems suggest nature needs no interference with cross-hybridisation or gene technology. In the life of birds, nature’s directionality continues to re-enact the great drama of life in its seasonal transformations naturally, and quite unaided. Her discursive shift towards the affirmative in these images argues valuable insights about human salvation, for we spoil by excess, lose self-respect, lose wonder and mystery, and destroy the web of life by our narrow-minded human species self-interest.

Wright found in nature’s mysteries and tragedies and its miracle of self-repair some close-at-hand natural templates for society. She offered them as warnings so Australians would attend with care to the emerging consumer society’s excesses. The nation should learn from its own birds’ humility, simplicity and acceptance of limits in joyful obedience to the laws of their nature. Her bird poems suggest that our continuity and survival as a culture and even as a human species depend on living simply, constraining greed and respecting nature. Those saving messages are even more pertinent and pressing today.

Coda

To make one intertextual detour, Kevin Hart’s “Those White, Ancient Birds” echoes some of the same admiration and envy of the birds’ natural directionality:

I do not think they know much about longing,

Those white, ancient birds,

                                         they know just where to go

And fly there, at their appointed time,

Without a weighing up of gains and losses,

But I have no idea where to go, /. . . /

Not knowing what I am waiting for

Yet aching for it just the same.[33]

Clearly, Wright’s distinctive insight is that any human progress (that I have identified as winning salvation) is best achieved when it is modelled upon nature’s true simplicity of being itself and no more. Nature’s sufficiently abundant variety (or biodiversity as we would say today) images the many different paths and processes possible for achieving fulfillment. People grow into salvation; humans craft their own eternities (“these lives build eternity.”)[34] Her lesson was that it will not appear finished at a time of our behest, but when the time is ripe. It is wiser to model nature’s patient simplicity. We will continue to enjoy the earth’s unique beauties and fertility growing out of her potentialities lying in “the sleeping soil”[35] if only we act in accordance with her directionality. I trust these few observations sample the many images of hope and transcendence in Judith Wright’s work.

 

REFERENCES

ABC Radio National, Features [on-line] www.abc.net.au/religion/features/birds.htm [2003 April 7].
Judith Wright Collected Poems 1942-1985 Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 2002.

Hart, K. Flame Tree Selected Poems St. Leonards, NSW: Paper Bark Press, 2002.

Hart, K. Wicked Heat St. Leonards, NSW: Paper Bark Press, 1999.

Kuhse, H. “Embryos of a new world” The Age Features, 19 June 1984, 11.

Wright, J. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Poems quoted with page numbers from Collected Poems 1942-1985 ( Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 2002)

“Peacock” 161, “Eggs and Nestlings” 162-3, “Currawong” 164, “Thornbills” 165, “Dove-Love” 167, “Migrant Swift” 167-8, “Black Cockatoos” 173, “Silver Terns” 172, “Apostle-Birds”168, “Magpies”169, “Lyrebirds” 176, “Two Dreamtimes” 215, “Oriole, Oriole” 318.

FOOTNOTES

[1] “Alive” lines 22-24 Collected Poems 1942-1985 ( Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 2002), 321.

[2] Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965), xi.

[3] See among many other sources, Helga Kuhse, “Embryos of a new world” in the ‘Destiny of Creation’ series in The Age Features, 19 June 1984, 11.

[4] “The Eucalypt and the National Character (for Sir Otto Frankel)” line 17, C.P., 362.

[5] C.P., 86.

[6] “Birds” lines 5, 10 C.P., 86, from The Gateway (1953).

[7] ABC Radio National, Features [on-line] available: www.abc.net.au/religion/features/birds.htm [2003 April 7].

[8] Collected Poems 1942-1985, 161-181.

[9] “Peacock” line 12, C.P. 161.

[10] “Currawong” line 19, C.P., 164.

[11] “Thornbills” lines 1-13, C.P., 165.

[12] “Eggs and Nestlings” lines 7-8, 15-16, C.P. 162-3. The reader might well read Wright’s own account of the misunderstood phrase, the “folly of spring,” in her discussion of and admiration for John Shaw Neilson’s poetry in her own Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965), Ch viii, especially p. 123.

[13] “Dove-Love” lines 15-18, C.P.167.

[14] “Migrant Swift” lines 6, 7, 12, 13, C.P.,167-8.

[15]  “Migrant Swift” line 13, C.P., 168.

[16] “Black Cockatoos” lines 12-13, C.P., 173.

[17] “Silver Terns” lines 13-14, C.P., 172.

[18] “Night Herons” line 16, C.P., 175.

[19] I edit this article in the hours following the execution of drug trafficker Van Nguyen in Singapore that raised so much publicity about capital punishment.

[20] C.P., 171.

[21] “Apostle-Birds” lines 16-17, C.P., 168.

[22] “Magpies” lines 13-14, C.P., 169.

[23] “Lyrebirds” lines 19-21, C.P., 176.

[24] “Two Dreamtimes (for Kath Walker)” line 30, C.P., 316.

[25] “Woman to Child” line 5, C.P., 28, Woman to Man anthology (1949).

[26] “Two Dreamtimes” lines 47-48, C.P., 317.

[27] “Two Dreamtimes” lines 40-42, C.P., 316.

[28] “Two Dreamtimes” lines 61-2, C.P., 316.

[29] “Oriole Oriole” lines 3-5, C.P., 318.

[30] “Oriole, Oriole” lines 7-9.

[31] “Drought Year” lines, 1, 5, 8-9, C.P., 82.

[32] “Silence” lines 6-7, C.P., 121.

[33] Kevin Hart, “Those White, Ancient Birds” lines 10-18, Wicked Heat, 44, Flame Tree, 152.

[34] “Waiting” lines 31-32 C.P., 10.

[35] “Old House” line 9, C.P. 81.

Greg Smith is a doctoral student at ACU Banyo, and as a teacher of literature, has a special interest in contextual theology. He reads the poetry of Judith Wright, Les A. Murray and David Malouf finding many references to transcendence and salvation through ethical attitudes and actions. He finds that poetic tropes and metaphors can ignite faith by imaging humanity's perennial longing for regeneration, rejuvenation, transfiguration and salvation.

Email: greg.hub@pacific.net.au

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This article has been peer reviewed, and is deemed to meet the criteria for original research as set out by the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training.