Request To A Year

Analysis and Poetic Devices

Judith Wright

1. Analysis and Poetic Devices
   1. What is the poem Request to a Year about?
   2. What is the theme of the poem Request to a Year?
   3. What is the structure of the poem Request to a Year?
   4. Line-by-Line Analysis and Literary Devices

What is the poem Request to a Year about?

The poetry of Judith Wright, an Australian poet, and conservationist, is infused with the past(her personal memories and pastoral family history), her love of nature, and her representation of motherhood. Judith Wright had to cope with her mother’s death at an early age. This may explain why her poetry explores maternal identity and validates the complexities and experiences of being a mother within the four walls.

Request To A Year is about creating a maternal image far from the stereotypes by using a family story from a personal text. The poem refers to Wright’s great-great-grandmother and her efforts at creating a dialogical space where the personal (legendary devotee of the arts) and the social (who having eight children/ and little opportunity for painting pictures,) converge. By voicing the lived experience of her great-great-grandmother, Wright is moving beyond the individual voice toward a conglomeration of voices to empower women.

Later my mother left me an exercise-book of great-grandmother’s, containing
stories and reminiscences of her childhood in Switzerland, including a tale
I later used as the source of a poem (Request to a Year).

“Wright Papers”,NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 702.

What is the theme of the poem Request to a Year?

Feminism

Judith Wright exposes gender bias through her tongue-in-cheek humor.

Women have been excluded from the art realms for decades. It was impossible for a woman to focus on anything other than her domestic duty (“who having eight children/ and little opportunity for painting pictures,”).

Society dictates how a woman should dress. Hence, the modest clothing that she is made to wear curbs her movement as well as her freedom (while her second daughter, impeded, /no doubt, by the petticoats of the day, ).

Detachment from art.

The poem is about the necessity of the artist to observe society with a detached attitude. The artist should maintain “a difficult distance” from the subject but also possess an observing “isolating eye”. The artist must learn to balance subjectivity and objectivity while creating art.

What is the structure of the poem Request to a Year?

The poem is a lyric i.e. it expresses personal feelings in a musical verse.

It is written in an easy conversational tone that engages the attention of the readers.

The poem has five quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a clinching couplet at the end. The poem has a rather unusual rhyme scheme. Stanzas 3,4, and 5 use end rhymes schemes in the third and fourth lines.

Line-by-Line Analysis and Literary Devices

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great-grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,

• If the year is meditating a suitable gift – personification [the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something non-human (OL). Here the poet is expecting a gift from the year as if it were a person).

The poem is autobiographical as Wright stated that she used the stories in the diary of her great-grandmother as the source of her poem. Therefore, the speaker might well be the poet herself as she introduces the protagonist of her story not by a proper name but by her relationship with the person. The poet here acts as the frame narrator and the first stanza and the clinching couplet are the frame narrative within which an incident in the life of her great-great-grandmother is recounted.

The poet addresses the year as if it were a person pondering over a meaningful present for the poet. She. therefore, suggests explicitly that she would prefer to get the attitude of her great-great-grandmother. This means she will like to inculcate within herself the perspective of her great-great-grandmother and put her art ahead of everything. Her grandmother is a “legendary devotee of art” i.e. an art enthusiast whose love for it has continued to inspire future generations of her family.

who having eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland

• painting pictures – alliteration

Wright notes that her great-great-grandmother had eight children and implied that her involvement in childcare and family obligations impeded her desire to paint pictures.

The setting of the incident is a picturesque Swiss landscape. The great-great-grandmother was sitting on a high rock beside a charming river.

and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice flow, 
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below, 

• difficult distance, second son, drift down – alliteration
• drift down the current toward a waterfall/ that struck rock bottom eighty feet below, – imagery
• and from a difficult distance viewed/ her second son, balanced on a small ice flow, – enjambment
• ice flow – sheet of floating ice

Catastrophe struck when her second son floating on an ice floe was dragged by a strong current down the river “toward a waterfall”.

while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day, 
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

• alpenstock – an iron-tipped stick used by hillwalkers and formerly by mountaineers. (OL)

The second daughter, whose impractical layers of modest clothing no doubt hindered her movements, managed to extend an alpenstock. The iron spike might have helped him to anchor himself and get rescued. Thus, the quick-thinking sister saved the brother from imminent death.

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.

Most of the criticisms on the internet focus on the humor of the improbability of a mother calmly sketching the imminent death of her son. The understanding is shallow as it fails to take into account the fact that her great-great-grandmother is also a devotee of art therefore her manner of thinking is different from the commoners.

When it was evident to her great-great-grandmother that she can do nothing to help her son, she did not indulge herself with pity and helplessness. She was not hysterical as a mother is expected to be. Instead she “hastily sketched” her son gravitating towards impending death. This sketch might be her attempt to counteract death as art gives him life. Her great-great-grandmother recreates her son and he is never really lost even in death. The sketch might be her way of expressing her grief.

Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

• Year, if you have no Mother’s day present planned, – Personification and apostrophe

The poem ends with the poet addressing the Year and restating her desire to receive a gift. She does not want any of the generic gifts but rather the steadiness of her great-great-grandmother’s (artist’s) hand. She wants her great-great-grandmother’s strength to balance pleasure and pain and create art employing both subjectivity and objectivity.