Truth-and-Darkness                                                            Page 35

TRUTH AND DARKNESS

Much of Judith Wright's poetry involves a search for the true or the real. She

explores meaning, time, death, love, destruction, truth and darkness. The

poetry is concerned with the beginnings and endings of things, with life in seed,

birth, growth, destruction, death and decay. These life-and-death cycles are

accompanied and measured by time whose ceaseless passage is constantly

computed in the conscious mind even if 'the endless circle of time and

star/... never chime with the blood" ("The Moving Image" C.P. p.3). The

poetry of Judith Wright probes both light and darkness for the truth of the

heart, the body, the mind and the spirit. Two poems, "The Cycads" (C.P. p.39)

and "The Ancestors" (C.P. p.Ill) illustrate these preoccupations extremely

well.³⁶

The Cycads have been forgotten by time and change, having been locked into

an "old bargain life has long since broken". They don't move or change and

they don't die: "they watch the shrunken moon but never die". Around them

dance the "brilliant" and "complicated birds and flowers". One truth about life

that changes, grows and dies is that it is complicated! Addressing the complex

self, the poet says:

Take their cold seed and set it in the mind,

and its slow root will lengthen deep and deep

till, following, you cling on the last ledge

over the unthinkable, unfathomed edge

beyond which man remembers only sleep.

"Deep... deep... ledge... edge... unthinkable.. .unfathomed... sleep":   this   is

something of the truth and complexity of human existence. Vivian Smith

suggests that here "consciousness reflects on its own non-existence." ³⁷ The

idea of a non-existent something reflecting on its non-existence demonstrates

the complex nature of reflective being. The poem suggests that the "cold seed"

of the Cycads be taken and set "in the mind". This is a chilling suggestion but,

in the complex labyrinths of thought, it can be made only because the "cold

seed" is already there somewhere in the mind. The poem touches timeless

memory at "time's own root". The "slow root" lengthens "deep and deep" to

the "unfathomed edge" where nothing is known or remembered. The search

for truth involves a journey to the edge of darkness.

³⁶ See Vivian Smith, "Poetry", The Oxford History of Australian Literature, Ed- Leonie

    Kramer (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981) p.396

³⁷ Smith, "Poetry" p.396