Title: Wright's 'A Blessing,'

Author(s): David Pink

Publication Details: in The Explicator 54.1 (Fall 1995): p44-45.
Source: Poetry Criticism. Ed. Elisabeth Gellert. Vol. 36. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. From
Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

[(essay date 1995) In the following essay, Pink discusses "A Blessing," focusing on the
significance of boundaries in the poem, and on the instances of transgressing them.]

"A Blessing" is perhaps James Wright's best known poem. It certainly embodies his greatest
strength: the poet evoking nature as an inroad to the metaphysical or numinous. Wright is, in
general and in this poem in particular, a poet of epiphany in the grand Yeatsian tradition. "A
Blessing" culminates with the poet's wish to step out of his body and "break into blossom."
There can be no doubt, given the poet's spoken wish for natural communication with an Indian
pony, "I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms," that he is seeking transcendence
through nature into a new connection with nature.

Although the speaker of the poem is wistfully serious, the poem is touched by situational irony.
The metaphysical or religious communion between human and horse occurs "just off the
highway," a manmade avenue of highspeed commerce. The encounter between the poet and
nature must take place "just off" that highway, to amplify the gulf between man and nature.
Furthermore, the horses are enclosed in "barbed wire"; the poet and his friend must transgress an
unnatural boundary to enter into the natural setting. The artificial boundary of the fence, but
more important, the limits of being--of otherness--between the horses, "they can hardly contain
their happiness," and the poet who wants to transcend himself almost dissolve. It is a credit to
Wright's poetic sensibility that they do not.

The persona of "A Blessing" is an interloper. By crossing the boundary of the fence, desiring to
cross the boundaries of being, and also by calling the ponies "Indian," he seeks to cross the
boundaries of difference, ownership, authorship, and time. Many of these definitions are relative
to the history of relations between Whites and Indians. The poet is a white man crossing the
ultimate symbol of usurpation of Indian lands and crucifactory emblem of ownership, the barbed
wire fence, hoping to re-encounter, (regain?) the imagined/supposed/hoped-for bond that the
Indian peoples had with nature.

It is difficult for the reader not to hear the wheels spinning on the highway as background for the
poet's desire to shut out the world even as he soulfully embraces it, by becoming something
usually regarded as beautiful yet mindless--a blossom. What the poet desires is beauty untainted
by consciousness.

Such a desire for reincarnation is in a sense (especially considering Richard Hugo's

reminiscences about Wright's alcoholism) painful. It is fabulous to think of Indian ponies as
being "hardly [able to] contain their happiness / That we have come" and even more so to equate
or metaphorize the "slenderer one" as a girl: "Her mane falls wild on her forehead ... her long ear
... delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist." But Wright's poem is about the will to love--to love
most of all himself, waging the same battle that we all must wage.

Much of Wright's work, with this poem as a particular example, figures importantly as poetry of
place. He will be forever linked with Martin's Ferry, Ohio; but as a professor of English at the
University of Minnesota and as a traveller, he moved about. Many of his poems name a place. In
this one he names Rochester, Minnesota, [an] incongruous mixture of a small-town, Sinclair
Lewisian main street, the Mayo clinic, and a few whorehouses. Rochester is a family town, and
its primary industry revolves around cures for the incurable.

More boundaries.

Outside of the poem, the lights from operating rooms and the dining room lights of marriage are
a distant, unspoken tableau for boundaries and history--light defining the limits of intercourse
and the wish for transcendence: "There is no loneliness like theirs."

Work Cited

Wright, James. "A Blessing." Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Richard Ellmann and
Robert O'Clair. New York: Norton, 1988. 1284.

Source Citation
Pink, David. "Wright's 'A Blessing,'." in The Explicator 54.1 (Fall 1995): 44-45. Rpt. in Poetry
Criticism. Ed. Elisabeth Gellert. Vol. 36. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. Literature Resource Center.
Web. 6 May 2010.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420039568&v=2.1&u=phoe84216&it=r&p=
LitRC&sw=w

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420039568