Love-and-Death                                                            Page 8

The lovers of "Night" (C.P. p.49) want to "forget awhile / that we create the

night":

Standing here in the night

we are turned to a great tree,

every leaf a star,

its root eternity.

So deeply goes its root

into the world's womb,

so high rises its stem

it leaves for death no room.

But the lovers know that although the great tree is "hung with heavy fruit", it is

also "torn by the winds of time/ and the worm at the root". The only way for

them, confronted with death in the midst of their love, is to

Come back to the kind flesh,

to love and simple sight.

Let us forget awhile

that we create the night.⁸

Making an inseparable unity of love and death is not to introduce a note of

doom into the joy of love. Rather, seeing the two always together is an attempt

to embrace more fully life's complex and corresponding realities. The words

Judith Wright uses for the beginning of life in "Woman to Man" could equally

well describe the condition of death: "eyeless", "selfless", "shapeless, "silent",

"deep from sight". At the moment the cord of life between mother and child is

cut, we see "the blaze of light along the blade" ("Woman to Child" C.P. p28)

⁸ “Night” will be treated more fully as the themes of this section are developed.