Spring Images

A few months ago, I mentioned I’m reading through James Wright’s Collected Poems. Peter Stitt (as quoted in The Poetry Foundation’s overview of Wright’s life) says Wright’s Collected Poems parallels the development of poetry in history: both trace the movement from rhyme, meter, and higher literary style to less structured, more conventional language.

When I last posted about Wright, I was still in earlier sections of Collected Poems. When I began the section of poems drawn from Wright’s book The Branch Will Not Break, it was like stepping into another poetic world. I almost couldn’t believe it was the same author.

Leading up to Branch, Wright’s poems give hints of what will come, like crocus shoots peeking through the snow. But in Branch, Wright surrenders completely to the more dreamlike elements in earlier poems, and keeps very little tether to the waking world. His earlier tendencies toward impressionism also dominate. Altogether, the reader feels as if Wright is presenting a blotchy, vague painting of a dream that was surreal to begin with. I find his poems are often hard to follow with my head but inexplicably resonate in my heart.

“Spring Images” is one such poem. It is sparse—just eight lines—but conveys an essence of spring and vitality in a few brief images. There is immense beauty packed into less than 15 seconds of reading. I hope you’ll take a read!