James Wright

May Morning

More on the lyric essay.

“Deep into Spring, winter is hanging on. Bitter and skillful in his
hopelessness, he stays alive in very shady place, starving along the
Mediterranean: angry to see the glittering sea-pale boulder alive with
lizards green as Judas leaves. Winter is hanging on. He still
believes. He tries to catch a lizard by the shoulder. One olive tree
below Grottaglie welcomes the winter into noontime shade, and talks as
softly as Pythagoras. Be still, be patient, I can here him say,
cradling in his arms the wounded head, letting the sunlight touch the
savage face.”  -James Wright

This essay is so joyfully short. It’s funny, after years of academics,
when I stumble upon a piece of writing, an essay to be exact, not
labeled as poetry or other, my first reactions is, ‘my oh my. How
awkward, this person is surely not going to get the grade they’re
looking for. Even after seven+ years at Evergreen, I still use the
expression grade. But here it is, the planets equivalent of Pluto
maybe. A tidbit. And if you read over it a couple different times, you
really ask yourself, what separates this from poetry, other than the
fact that the editor has eschewed what we thought we figured to be an
essay? The Editor speaks, refers to Wright’s essay as a technically
perfect sonnet, making it’s case perfectly in the Italian Petrarchan
tradition: “the first quatrain states a thesis or supposition; the
second elaborates upon that theme; the succeeding tercet offers a
piece of evidence for example; and the final three lines provide a
spin on the exposition.” D’Agata continues by explaining “in other
words” that the essay is a poetic argument presented with the same
perfection that is admired in the essay’s traditional “five-paragraph
form. For the record a quatrain is a stanza of four lines, especially
on having alternate rhythms. A tercet is a set or group  of three
lines of verse rhyming together or connected by rhyme with an adjacent
tercet. Poetry, then always has a way of surprising those of us who
pass it up, in favor of more concrete prose. But, as D’Agata points
out this is poetry with a purpose, achieving all the prerequisites for
the traditional essay form, just spoken more poetically. D’Agata
concludes his observations on Wright, by reflecting on a memory: “…As
I began to to enter high school and am trained for a lifetime of
five-paragraph essay an accidental encounter with James Wright’s
sonnet leaves me with the suspicion that there are essays somewhere to
love.”