Judith Wright’s ‘Rockpool’

By Shirley Walker

Judith Wright’s ‘Rockpool’ is a meditation on the human relationship with the universe. There are elements of humour and self-deprecation in this poem, but its questions are intensely serious. Are men and women simply organisms subject to process – birth, survival, death – as are the insects, birds and animals? Or are humans part of a higher, more spiritual order, destined to physically control the environment, to destroy it at will or to possess it in transcendental or scientific ways.

‘Rockpool’ can be looked at in isolation, but it should also be seen as part of the process of meditation and acceptance involved in the sequence of twelve poems labeled ‘The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals’ which concludes Wright’s final collection Phantom Dwelling. This was published in 1985 when she was seventy years old and is, I have been assured, her final poetic statement. ‘Rockpool’ is the first in this sequence of poems.ⁱ

In the poems of ‘The Shadow of Fire’ Wright confronts many of her old obsessions: the failure of love and language, the impossibility of a meaningful connection with the natural world, and the human urge towards violence and destruction. She finally admits and accepts, but with a measure of defiance, the blame, the shame, but at the same time the energy and passion of all human endeavour: ‘We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness.’ This final acceptance leads to a surge of poetic energy. These last poems are, in many ways, Wright’s best.

The ghazal, a Persian verse form traditionally concerned with the beauty of love and the pain of its loss, is especially appropriate for Wright’s final meditations. Her choice of this form is part of a movement in her later poetry towards Eastern philosophy and its verse-forms: the Japanese haiku and the ghazals of the medieval Sufi poets Rumí and Hafiz of Shiraz. Her poem ‘To Hafiz of Shiraz’ was published in The Other Half in 1966 and in the poem ‘Brevity’ (Phantom Dwelling, 1985) she writes of her admiration for the haiku. Both the haiku and the ghazal are marked by the brevity and elegance of their images, but the ghazal, with its series of cryptic couplets, each an entity in itself, is more suitable for these special, final pronouncements.

The unique quality of the ghazel can be seen in the first couplet of ‘Rockpool’, where the social history of a whole generation — two wars, the depression between them, and the post-war prosperity — is compressed into sixteen words.

My generation is dying, after long lives
Swung from war to depression to war to fatness.

‘fatness’ refers to what Wright saw as the rampant materialism of post-war Australia, perhaps a parallel for the greed of the creatures in the rockpool. Meanwhile the bald statement — ‘My generation is dying’ — introduces one of the poem’s major themes, that of death, and the inevitability of death, as part of natural process. This process can be seen most clearly in the rockpool itself: the fight for life, the devouring and mating which are the essence of physical life. If this— the greed, the violence, the preying upon one another — is a microcosm of all human activity, then this is reduced to a Darwinian struggle for survival. Meanwhile love is reduced to a process of ‘mating’ and ‘breeding’ in a precarious world, always on the brink of disaster:

In comes the biggest wave, the irresistible
Clean wash and backswirl. ‘Where have the dead gone?’

The sea, its ‘clean wash and backswirl’ is now the great cleanser as well as obliterator and the answer to the question — ‘Where have the dead gone?’ — is obvious. Death is the common fate of all natural organisms, including humans. Meanwhile there is certainly beauty in the rockpool, in its ‘wild embroideries’, its ‘ridges of coloured tracery’, just as there is in the wider universe, despite human attempts to despoil it:

We’ve brought on our own cancers, one with the world.

But the question remains: Are humans simply the ‘bare, forked animal[s]’ of Shakespeare’s King Lear,ⁱⁱ no different to any other natural organism, part of the ‘stretching of toothed claws to food, the breeding/ On the ocean’s edge’? The answer is short and irreverent: ‘Accept it? Gad, Madam, you had better.’ⁱⁱⁱ

But there is another, more metaphysical, component to the poem ‘Rockpool’, one in which the poet questions her earlier, transcendental view of the human connection with the universe. In its central, most cryptic couplet, the fourth of seven, the observer turns from the close view of the rockpool to the distant prospect, that of the night sky. She is struck, as we all are, by the immensity of the universe and the irrelevance of the solitary observer.

At night on the beach the galaxy looks like a grin.
Entropy has unbraided Berenice’s hair.

In an earlier, more confident, period, the poet had affirmed the power of the imagination to ‘humanize’ the universe by naming and so taking possession of it. For instance, in the poem ‘Interplay’, the stars and the constellations are subject to the human will; they answer ‘the ordering image in the name’:

Look how the stars’ bright chaos eddies in
To form our constellations. Flame by flame
Answers the ordering image in the name.
World’s signed with words . .

Humanity has divided up the night sky, discerned its patterns and, in an act of hubris, named them for human myths and legends. For instance the constellation Coma Berenices, the hair of Berenice, is named for an old Egyptian story.^iv The night sky, thus ‘inscribed’, becomes the known, a human possession. But the universe, in a constant state of flux or ‘entropy’,^v cannot be contained by the human intellect or imagination. Hence the mocking smile of the galaxy — it ‘looks like a grin’ — and the fact that the hair of Berenice is now, alas, ‘unbraided’. The old myths are human constructs only, and the night sky is nothing but the ‘bright chaos’ of ‘Interplay’; spectacular, but basically unknowable. It’s little wonder that the observer turns back to the known, the rockpool, for the remaining three couplets.

‘Rockpool’, though compelling in itself, can also be read as part of a sequence; as one important component in a poetic meditation which moves towards its conclusion, that is the acceptance of conflict and dualism – the darkness as well as the light – in the individual as well as in the material world.

There is an elemental pattern in ‘The Shadow of Fire’ and the four elements, earth, water, air and fire, the basis of all physical life, appear in sequence. The rockpool contains the water from which all life originally rose and both ‘Rockface’ and ‘Summer’ are concerned with the earth, its capacity for change and regeneration. Meanwhile thunder-clouds, inter-galactic lightning, radiation and the ‘blinding glare’ of the atom bomb keep the air, the celestial region, in a continual ferment. But the momentum is with fire in all its aspects, from the tiny fire-fly, to the open fire and the warmth of red wine, to the lightning, then the glare of the atom bomb. This is a world of cosmic energy and flux, and the individual is a part of it; one of the ‘paths that energy takes on its way to exhaustion’.^vi Wright’s acceptance of this, in ‘Rockpool’ and elsewhere, comes from her belief that she is a being of fire, a part of all this intergalactic energy:

. . . who wants to be a mere onlooker? Every cell of me
has been pierced through by plunging intergalactic messages.^vii

This involves an acceptance of the duality of all aspects of the universe and of the individual: ‘we are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness’.^viii And, as she concedes in the last ghazal, ‘Patterns’, perhaps all life, physical and mental (poetic, creative, intellectual), depends upon this dualism: ‘perhaps the dark itself is the source of meaning’.

‘Accept it? Gad, madam, you had better.’

Notes

1. ‘Rockpool’ is placed second after ‘Rockface’ in Wright’s A Human Pattern: Selected Poems published five years later, in 1990.
2. King Lear, III, iv, 110.
3. Veronica Brady reminded us , in her discussion of ‘Rockpool’ on The Book Show, Radio National, on 13th May 2008, that this is, in part, a quotation from Dr Samuel Johnson. Berenice, the wife of Ptolemy III, had her beautiful tresses shorn and dedicated to Aphrodite in celebration of her husband’s victory over the Assyrians. Aphrodite accepted the tresses, which then shone brightly in the heavens next to the constellation Leo.
4. ‘Entropy’ is, in physics, a measure of the draining of energy from one system to another.
5. ‘Winter’
6. ‘Connections’
7. ‘Patterns’