LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Student Student Poetry Presentation, summer 2002

Alvaro Rodriguez
Literature 5535
American Romanticism
Poetry presentation
July 2002 

James Wright (1927-1980): “A Blessing”

            James Wright’s poem, “A Blessing,” published in his 1963 collection, The Branch Will Not Break, evokes an image of the pastoral, and ties into notions of the Romantic both by its setting and its journey toward transcendence.

            In the poem, the narrator removes himself from what Joseph Campbell would call the ordinary world, “the highway in Rochester, Minnesota,” to a field where “[t]wilight bounds softly forth on the grass” and “two Indian ponies darken with kindness.” The narrator and his friend (anecdotally, the poet Robert Bly) commune with the animals in this natural, pastoral setting. The narrator experiences the Romantic quest in transgressing boundaries: “We step over the barbed wire into the pasture.” There, in the pure space of Nature, the narrator—the individual in nature—enjoys a communion with the animals which leads to a transcendent truth: “Suddenly I realize/That if I stepped out of my body I would break/Into blossom.”

            Wright’s poem is infused with what I see as “rural melancholy,” a sort of bittersweet nostalgia that connects (in the notion of the sublime) the pleasure of this communion with a certain sadness. Wright couples, for example, the image of swans bowing shyly (“They love each other.”) with the statement that “There is no loneliness like theirs.”

            Finally, the narrator and the friend in the poem commune with Nature here in a way that they become a part of it, don’t remain outside of it nor tower above it. In that sense, it is a Romantic poem in that the narrator has returned, however fleetingly, to a state of purity correspondent to the Garden.