James Wright and Robert Hass

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Wright employs vivid visual imagery, such as the "bronze butterfly" and the "field of sunlight between two pines." These visceral descriptions allow the reader to wander off from their waking life and become immediately transfixed into a dreamy, absent-minded daze similar to Wright's. The way he mixes metaphors — fire, excrement, and stones in "The drop pins of last year's horses blaze up into golden stones" — allows the reader to register awe in lieu of such trivial and banal matters as the subject being discussed. The place is primarily introduced to the reader through the emotions that such descriptions evoke — namely as having a serendipitous, serene atmosphere. The shift of the poem registers before the final line, a declaration that he has "wasted [his] life" by laying listlessly in this hammock, watching wonderful mundanities occur all around him instead of actively engaging with them. I sense that there is no tinge of regret here, though, and because of this, the word "wasted['s]" atypically negative connotation is spun around, in this instance hinting more so towards the idea of passively savoring the bliss of being, instead of feeling obliged to be bothered with the trouble of doing.

Meditation at Lagunitas
This poem centers around the idea of deriving meaning from the outside world — Hass employs images of a "clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of [a] black birch" to illustrate what visual image prompted his declaration that "all the new thinking is about loss" and "that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea." These images make tangible the setting, and allow the reader to be transported to the same setting as Hass, as if to allow them to derive these same conclusions from the world they would be surrounded by. Here, he is talking about how words never quite do justice to the actual thing of it — how when one assigns a definitive word for what a "bramble of blackberry corresponds to," one is actually writing an elegy for it. He claims that things dissolve when described – things like "justice, pine, hair, woman, you, and I" become less than they actually are, or rather diluted. However, the reader is forced to disagree when he immediately contradicts this assessment by his vivid depiction of "a woman [he] made love to" and how he "remembered... holding her small shoulders in [his] hands sometimes" and feeling "a violent wonder at her presence." This suggests that when words do not evoke tangible, colorful images, then they take away from what is being discussed, because through his poetry and his utilization of rich textile imagery and emotional depth, the reader is allowed the opportunity to identify an experience with Hass, if only for a small moment. He does imply, however, that what is evoked by these words— his saying them, his writing them, his seeking to explain them — is reduced to mere wishfulness and longing for the return of those tender "afternoons and evenings." He is left repeating "blackberrry, blackberry, blackberry" as if calling out for what has gone by, and hoping all the while that the reconstruction of these memories does not pale in comparison to the begone manifestation of them. He thirsts for their reincarnation and writes with the purpose to shorten these "endless distances" that longing imposes.