Love-and-Death Page 12
This is not to say that there are no distinctions, but it is to say that there is a variety of ways
of looking at things:
Is there, perhaps, a way of doing theology that would not lead
immediately into dogmatic controversy, would not require theologians
to say definitively that one understanding is true and the others are
false? ...symbols have a richer significance than any explications of their
meaning can express, a point literary critics have long insisted on.10
Poets, together with other artists, can enable religious imagination to open out.
Turning things around, looking from new angles, discovering new possibilities
is not possible when imagination is bound and locked into one dominant,
dogmatic mode. Poetry need not be so restrained. When in "Night", the
vision is directed upward to leaves like stars and downward to eternity in the
earth, there is something of a clash in the imagination that has an effect like the
removal of chains. This freeing and widening of vision does not reduce the
tension that exists among the correspondences of love-death, life-destruction,
truth-darkness. The tension is what activates the imagination.
This tension is maintained in "Night". The tree seems strong and sure, like love
itself. The roots plunge so deeply into the "world's womb" and "so high rises
its stem" that death would seem impossible: "it leaves for death no room". But
in the central stanza of the poem the tree is "torn by the winds of time/ and the
worm at the root." The root of eternity is deep in the "world's womb", where
life would seem to reside, but the "worm" is there too.
The poem does not attempt to resolve the love-death tension. It acknowledges
it as a reality and stays with it in "flesh",.. .love and simple sight". These form
the fabric of the spirituality found in the poetry of Judith Wright.
10 Carol P. Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite, Reflections on a Journev to the Goddess (San
Francisco: Harper and Row,1987) p. 123
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