Life-and-Destruction                                                            Page 24

The apparently limitless powers of this Maker are at the bidding of something

else. The power and ability of the mind (sense, spirit, understanding, feeling) is

limited.  "Love...bid my sense be still."  "Bid" is an archaic word for

"command". It is usually sovereigns or other powerful leaders who "bid"

subordinates to obey. The command in this case is "be still". It comes from

the highest power, love. The allusion to Psalm 46 is unmistakable: "Be still and

know that I am God". This ending is similar to that of "Gum-Trees

Stripping" (C.P. p.133):

Wisdom.. .can be quiet and not look

for reasons past the edge of reason.

Even words that create worlds come to an end and there is a silent, open space.

Judith Wright, in her identification with nature, her use of poetic imagination

as well as her acceptance of the power of the senses over the exercise of the

purely rational, would seem to be within the school of the Romantics   We

have seen that her world-view was influenced by the philosophy of her

husband. Jack KcKinney, who believed that “we are part of a unity with

'nature' ".²⁰

It would be a mistake however, to see her aesthetic, at this stage, as

wholly Romantic.  Rather, she is using the conventional trappings of

Romanticism to project a view which is more vitalistic and physically

orientated than that of Romanticism. ²¹

Vitalism as "insistence on releasing the basic powers of life" ²² is not all that

different from the direction taken by the Romantics. Being intoxicated with the

colour of life, its passion and movement, with the powers of the imagination

and the beauty as well as the tragedy of nature - all these are vital links to the

divine in everything. The spirituality of the Romantics allows for body as well

as soul, for imagination as well as mind.

At the very least, in "The Maker", as in so many other poems, Judith Wright is

expressing. and to that extent creating, the vital unity that exists between the

human person and the rest of creation. This is a different spirituality from that

which sees the divine and the world at a great distance from each other as if

there were a huge gulf to be bridged if we were ever to see what is simply there

before our eyes: things that "glow and move", things that "change and pass".

Nature and we ourselves as part of it are the light and the dark of the sacred.

²⁰ Judith Wright, letter to Shirley Walker, see Flame and Shadow p.88

²¹ Shirley Walker, Flame and Shadow p.88

²²  Vincent Buckley, “Utopianism and Vitalism”, Australian Literary Criticism, Ed. G Johnston,

    (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962) p.17