Love-and-Death                                                            Page 15

Much later in life, confronted with the "Rockface" (C.P. p.420), "...like a

gravestone", "something massive, motionless", the wandering speaker feels her

connection with people who have disappeared long ago. people who "knew the

ancestral power of stone" She looks, as if at her own gravestone, and her

response is one of peaceful acceptance:

I've no wish to chisel things into new shapes.

The remnant of a mountain has its own meaning.

It would seem that here the poem moves beyond the rational, planning mind

that must control or shape what is beyond understanding. The truth of love

and the truth of death do not submit entirely to the rational. Judith Wright's

views on  the rational and the analytic were greatly influenced by the

understanding of her philosopher husband Jack McKinney:

In particular, his view that Western thought, from its main source in

Greek thought, had now reached its limits in the development of the

intellectual analysis of our world-picture, and that the next development

logically ought to be a swing towards the feeling-intuitive or emotional

view of the world struck me as important, particularly for art.,..the

separation between man and world enforced by the intellectual

analysis... seemed to me something that had to be healed before any

progress could be made towards the "feeling-side".¹⁵

¹⁵ Judith Wright, letter to Shirley Walker, 10 August 1975, in Shirley Walker. Flame and

   Shadow, (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. 1991) Appendix, p 211