Truth-and-Darkness                                                            Page 36

"The Ancestors" are found in "silent sleep" but it is not a sleep of death. They

are found:

gathered round the spring

that feeds the living, thousand-lighted stream

up which we toiled into this timeless dream.

The dark in which "man remembers only sleep" contrasts with the "living

thousand-lighted stream". Yet, even after toiling up this glittering stream

woman and man seem still to be in a "timeless dream".  Judith Wright

repeatedly explores the dynamic polarities of consciousness and the

unconscious. She seeks to bring them into unity in poems like "The Killer" and

"Shadow". In journey poems like 'The Traveller And The Angel" ( C.P. p.I13)

and "The Gateway" (C.P. p.l15), there is a movement from conscious

certitude to weakness, fear and the loss of self. "The Traveller And The

Angel" arrives at a point where, after early strength and confidence is lost, the

pilgrim is told:

"the way is open

and you must rise and find it -

the way to the next ford

where waits the second angel."

But weak with loss and fear

I lie still by the ford.

Now that the angel is gone

I am a man and weary.

Return, angel, return.

I fear the journey.

The second journey is taken only after every truth has been elicited, weariness

has set in, illusions are gone and instead of "delight on delight in me", there is

fear.

In "The Gateway" the traveller steps through into the underworld of the

unconscious, imagining herself to be self-possessed:

I kept my pride,

Stepping between those awful pillars

I knew that I myself

had imagined, acted,

and foreseen everything as it was here.

I knew myself

the sole reality.