Judith Wright Jordan Hilton
(May 13th 1915 Armidale – June 25th 2000 Canberra)
Judith Wright is an Australian poet, born and raised in New England, NSW. Here she was raised by her father, Phillip Wright and her mother, Ethel, who passed away in 1927. After Phillip was remarried in 1929, Judith stayed with her Aunt and then boarded at New England’s Girls’ School, where she decided to become a poet. She started in Sydney University in 1934. Here she studied philosophy, history, psychology and English without a degree. She became progressively deaf in her twenties and travelled Britain and Europe from 1937 – 1938.
In 1944 Judith became a statistician at the University of Queensland. During World War two she stayed with her father to help on the farms due to the lack of a labour force at the time. At the age of thirty, she met a philosopher by the name of Jack P. McKinney who was 23 years older than her at the time and would become her husband in 1946. They first lived together in a cottage on mount Tambourine and moved later on into a house that was nearby. They were together for many years until Jack died in 1966.
Judith First started to write poems during the late 1930s in some literary books. Her debut poem was called The Moving Image and was published in 1946. Many of her poems at the time were written about wars as they were written during World War 2. One poem, known as ‘The Trains,’ was about the threat of the war that was currently taking place in the pacific. She also wrote many love poems for her husband before and after his death in 1966. A lot of her poetry was also based on the places of which she lived in. New England, Queensland, NSW and the Tambourine Mountains all inspired a lot of her poetry.
This love of the land is what caused Judith to form the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. This society had many campaigns to help preserve many of Australia’s Natural landmarks. They prevented oil drilling around the Great Barrier Reef as it opposed a threat to the ecology of it. Another popular campaign they did was of the prevention of sand drilling on Fraser Island. She sent similar messages through her poems as well. They were about the beauty of nature and how it is critical to ensure that it is maintained.
Judith was quite well known and was highly regarded as a great poet during her career. She edited and assisted many poets. One of them was no other than the aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonnuccal. Because of how regarded and talented she was, Judith even won some awards for the poems that she wrote. Some of these awards include the; Graven Leven Prize in 1950, The Robert Frost Memorial Award in 1965 and many more.
Poem Analysis – ‘Trapped Dingo’ By Judith Wright
So here, twisted in steel, and spoiled with red A
your sunlight hide, smelling of death and fear, B
they crushed out your throat the terrible song C
you sang in the dark ranges. With what crying D
you mourned him! – The drinker of blood, the swift death-bringer E
who ran with you so many a night; and the night was long. C
I heard you, desperate poet, did you hear B
my silent voice take up the cry? – replying: D
Achilles is overcome, and Hector dead, A
and clay stops many a warrior’s mouth, wild singer. E
Voice from the hills and the river drunken with rain, A
for your lament the long night was too brief. B
Hurling your woes at the moon, that old cleaned bone, C
till the white shorn mobs of stars on the hill of the sky D
huddled and trembled, you tolled him, the rebel one. E
Insane Andromache, pacing your towers alone, C
death ends the verse you chanted; here you lie. D
The lover, the maker of elegies is slain, A
and veiled with blood her body’s stealthy sun. E
Subject Matter
The poem is about the slow death of a wild dingo by the hands of hunter, specifically through some sort of trap. The poem emphasises that it was slow and very painful for the dingo as it was going into the cry of the dingo and the long nights of avoiding the hunter. But it eventually got caught and now lies in the trap, covered in its own blood, tangled in the steel jaw of the trap. It appears that the poet also had a relationship of some sort, as if they were companions’ maybe.
Purpose/Theme
The purpose of the poem is to express the depression of the dead dingo that comes from the land. That not only the dingo feel lifeless but the land also feels like a part of it has died. That everything can hear it’s mourning and feel its pain. The poet is expressing that through the death of one creature the rest of the land is affected and dies a bit as well. To also express that the poet themself is mourning over the death of the dingo. As if it had been a waste to kill it.
Emotion/Mood
To me, the whole poem felt very monotone and emotionless. But it does show some expression of emotions. It shows a lot of pity for the dead dingo and a lot of depressing tones with the dingo’s moans and the reactions of the land. Beside those moments the whole poems feels very monotone to me.
Poetic Technique
The second verse in the poem uses a large amount of personification on many different inanimate objects. It personifies the river that it is drunk from the rain. The rain is personification of the clouds crying and to express depression. The whole poem has an awkward and inconsistent rhyming pattern to it. By this I mean that you can’t really call it a pattern. Not all of the lines even rhyme in the poem and the rest are all over the place. There is somewhat of a pattern, barely. Those were about the only poem techniques that I could find in the poem.
Summary
Overall the poem, ‘Trapped Dingo’ was a poem written by the poet that I have currently researched. I did a basic poem analysis and concluded to a few things. Firstly, I have concluded that the poem is about a dingo that has been hunted down, trapped and now lies dead. The purpose of the poem is to make the reader feel the pain for the dingo and mourn with the poet and the surrounding outback. The poem used some personification on the surrounding outback to emphasise the feeling of grief and had an unusual rhyming pattern. All and all, I found the poet enjoyable and insightful.
