James Arlington Wright (13 December 1927 – 25 March 1980 / Ohio)

Lazy Reader:

Admit it. You read too quickly. You were lazy. Weak.

How pleasing to think of last year's horses, a bronze butterfly, cowbells in the ravine,

How startling, the poem's last line.

'I have wasted my life.' Is that poetry? Sounds like prose, rhetoric, a declarative sentence. Sounds like telling, not showing.

Try the poem again. But this time, don't read. Lie in the hammock.

Wonderful, I first heard this on radio bbc 7, an arresting and peaceful poem, read in a voice beautifully in tune with its meaning. In the final line, sudden even abrupt as a self judgement can be when measuring against a perfection in nature, he (as we) are confronted with the tragedy of our existence; an animal which knows it is dying can never match such a perfection. Contrast this with similiar work by Edwin Muir also.