Conclusion                                                       Page 59

Without any conscious decision on my part, my gaze turned to trees, flowers,

birds and animals, clouds, sea, sky, earth. I had appreciated them before but

now I was looking at them somehow more directly. There was no thought, just

looking.   No discursive contemplation or meditation, no analysis, no

conclusions, just looking. This kind of gaze does not follow straight lines to a

fixed point but draws one into a web of connections and interrelatedness

between the human and the divine, between spirit and nature. The experience

is something like standing in the night and being turned into a great tree, "every

leaf a star,/ its root eternity." ("Night" C.P. p.49), or like taking into oneself

"all living things that are....to mirror their joy and pain" ("The Maker", C.P. p.29).

In this kind of experience it seems as if darkness has as much value as light and

there is a sense in which what has been lost is revealed in the losing, in absence.

Poetry seems to be able to say such things.

In Poetry, and especially for the purpose of this study in the poetry of Judith

Wright, words are crafted from the stuff of life, attempting to utter into

existence truths that cannot otherwise be said. Here are words, moulded but

free; flowing into dark corners, open spaces and hidden recesses where sudden

light matched to darkness can be said. The language of poetry may speak

where ”religious" language fails. It may speak without saying too much, and   

without filling all the silences. In the course of this study of spirituality in the

poetry of Judith Wright, spaces and absenses have taken on a different quality

for me. Absence becomes presence, with difference but no opposition between

the two.