Love-and-Death                                                            Page 7

LOVE-AND-DEATH

Judith Wright's poetry constantly explores the themes of life, love, truth and

death. She believes that "life is the basis of truth, and for life love is the

dynamic principle."⁷ This "dynamic principle" is, for her, inextricably linked to

the inevitability of death. Her famous love poem, “Woman to Man" (C.P.

P.27) ends with the words, "0 hold me for I am afraid". To her unborn child

she sings, there's a death and a maiden/ who wait for you alone." These few

lines indicate an awareness that love, while it begets life also begets death.

Love is the force that is said to be stronger than death but it is also the force

that begins the process of death.

In "Woman to Man", the child, the new life, is "our hunter and our chase, the

third who lay in our embrace." The three, woman, man and child, together

symbolise the endless cycle of love, birth, flowering, decay and death. This is

the large context of "the hunter and the chase" - the pursuit of life and love

involves decay and death and each is part of the other. Nor can one be

favoured over the other. Love and death are found together in "The Half-Cast

Girl" (C.P. p. 19) who:

in her beads like blood

dressed delicately for love

moves her long hands among the strings of the wind,

singing the songs of women,

the songs of love and dying.

⁷ Letter to T. Inglis Moore. The Quest for Judith Wright, in Critical Essays on Judith Wright,