How to Bag A Jabberwock

In September 1969 Judith Wright – by then well established as Australia’s leading poet, and soon to become equally celebrated as a resolute campaigner on behalf of its environment and indigenous peoples – gave a talk at a symposium in honour of the Nobel-Prize-winning Australian immunologist Macfarlane Burnet. Her title was ‘Science, Value and Meaning’. Beginning with C. P. Snow’s famous lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, which had been published a decade earlier, Wright remarked that Snow had ‘over-simplified the problem’. ‘The real split’, she suggested, was ‘not […] so much between scientists and literary intellectuals as between two sides of our own human nature’:

between the creative and imaginative, which is shared by scientists, inventors and the practitioners of the arts as well, and the mechanic or materialistic, the manipulative power-hungry side of us which seizes on the achievements of science and transforms them into technological machinery for uses which scientists themselves, as well as artists, often cannot help but deplore. (1975, 196)

Wright draws a clear distinction here between the act of imaginative creation, which she sees as common to science and the arts, and the instrumentalist worldview that appropriates the advances of science for its own ends. It is a distinction which not only draws parallels between the artist and the scientist, but binds the two together in a single and increasingly urgent project:

The artist should be following every step of the scientist, celebrating every new revelation and turning it from fact into imaginative knowledge, which is the bread of life; instead, it is the merchants of death – the makers of armaments, the servants of the machine –who are ahead of us everywhere. (201)

Artists, including poets, have a duty to attend to science. For Wright, the time has clearly come to fulfil Wordsworth’s prophecy in the 1802 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads – echoed in her own words – that the poet should ‘be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, […] carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself’ (1984, 606–07). If artists do not transform science into ‘imaginative knowledge’, then the control of that knowledge is lost to the ‘merchants of death’. Scientists have their own responsibility, however, to preserve their independence and integrity, lest they too become mere ‘servants of the machine’ or worse. Crucially, they need to resist the impulse to insist that ‘there is no truth but fact, no meaning but use, no value that is not relative, no power that is not physical’ (Wright, 1975, 201). As Wright succinctly put it three years later in a talk on ‘The Individual in a New Environmental Age’, ‘When we believe that the scientific-technological view of nature is the only true one, we are denying a whole region of our actual experience

of nature’ (1975, 252).

In ‘Science, Value and Meaning’, Wright chooses Goethe as her model for a poet who was also a scientist, uniting in his own work ‘the two creativities, science and the arts’ (1975, 197). ‘Goethe’s real fear’, she remarks, ‘was not of the intellect, but of its triumph at the expense of other sides of us’ (199). This is a fear that Wright herself clearly shared. But aside from Goethe’s rare eminence in both science and literature, and the similarity between his outlook and Wright’s own, there is another good reason why she should have homed in on Goethe as an exemplary figure for thinking about her own position within the ‘two cultures’ debate. Among his many claims to significance as a scientist, Goethe was a prominent morphologist, whose idealist theory of plant structure and development was influential in shaping the evolutionary and quasi-evolutionary theories of nineteenth-century anatomists such as Lorenz Oken, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Richard Owen (see Rehbock, 1990; Richards, 2002, 325–508; Gould, 2002, 281–91). The teleological evolutionism of these and other pre-Darwinian biologists – most notably Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – persisted long after Darwin published his own account of the process in On the Origin of Species (and indeed remained a significant if diminished component of Darwin’s own theory). Before the triumph of the ‘modern synthesis’ of natural selection and Mendelian genetics in the 1930s and 1940s, both neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis (alternative models of directed evolution, driven respectively by the agency of organisms themselves, through their actions or will, and by innate tendencies within them) had some support among practising biologists (see Bowler, 2003, 236–50). Aside from these professional scientists, there were a number of prominent intellectuals who championed teleological evolutionism to the reading public at large throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer and Samuel Butler, through Henri Bergson and George Bernard Shaw, to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Arthur Koestler.

Of these writers, Bergson in particular has been identified as an influence on Wright’s poetry. According to her autobiography, Wright first read Bergson in 1943 (1999, 201). As Vincent Buckley (1957, 15–16, 163), Shirley Walker (1991, 105–27) and Jennifer Strauss (1995, 74, 77, 84) have all suggested, Wright was attracted to the idea that there might be a ‘life-force’ – Bergson’s famous élan vital – driving evolution and unifying the physical and psychic elements of nature. Walker in particular has argued that such vitalism is central to Wright’s poetry throughout her career. In this essay, I want both to corroborate and to challenge this reading. There are arguably echoes of Bergson in the title poem of Wright’s debut collection The Moving Image (1946), but it is in her powerful second collection, Woman to Man (1949), that his influence is most clearly felt. In the next section of this essay, I will show that this collection is indeed laced with Bergsonian ideas and formulations. I will go on to suggest, however, that even here it is possible to see cracks appearing in Wright’s vitalism. As these cracks widen, I argue, the biology of her poetry becomes increasingly Darwinian, moving from the pseudo-scientific philosophy of Bergson to a more precisely and rigorously scientific perspective which substitutes natural selection and ecology for the teleological drive of the élan vital. In the last section of this essay, I chart this move within Wright’s poetry by focussing in particular on a number of her poems about birds, written from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

The influence of Bergson is most clearly demonstrable in the poems Wright wrote in the mid to late 1940s and collected in Woman to Man. One of the most clearly Bergsonian poems in this collection is ‘Conch-shell’:

Virgin and clean the house is washed, and empty

the wave withdrawing leaves it to my hand.

The spiral passage turns upon itself.

The sweet enclosing curve of pearl

shuts in the room that was the cell of birth,

and is a windless shelter housing nothing.

Delicate argument and hieroglyph

of flesh that followed outward from the germ,

your line resolves the force that set its strength

against the wave’s weight and the storm;

maps on my hand the puzzle, the perfection,

the brilliant arch from darkness into darkness.

And here, half-guess, half-knowledge, I contract

into a beast’s blind orbit, stare deep down

the cliffs not I have climbed; your prodigal,

probe with my sense your senseless life –

since life, the force that leapt between your poles,

burns forward still in me against the night.

In this poem Wright reuses a pun on ‘cell’ which she had made before in ‘The Moving Image’, elegantly and aptly identifying the shell which grew from a single ‘cell of birth’ as a ‘cell’ in which the mollusc itself is imprisoned. Considering the relationship between the ‘germ’ and the finished shape of the shell, she recalls that this particular prison was grown as a protective covering against the battering waves. It is the same ‘force’ of ‘life’ which gave the conch this form, she claims, that ‘burns forward’ in herself.

The notion of ‘life’ as a ‘force’ akin to magnetism or electricity – ‘a current sent through matter’, in Bergson’s words (1911, 280) – and common to all living organisms is strongly reminiscent of the élan vital. The details of Wright’s argument confirm the impression that ‘Conch-shell’ is a Bergsonian poem. The life-force is invoked as a provisional solution (‘half-guess, half-knowledge’) to the ‘puzzle’ of the shell’s ‘perfection’. This perfection is at once aesthetic – the arch is ‘brilliant’, a beautiful shape catching, or more precisely defined by, the light – and functional, as the shell brilliantly resisted the waves and storms while the conch was alive. In Creative Evolution, Bergson explains that the ‘vital impetus, passing through matter’ invariably meets ‘obstacles’, with the result that ‘[t]he movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict’ (1911, 267–68). This conflict between the force of life and the resistance of the material world is represented by Wright in the formation of the conch’s protective shell, but also in her own ‘burn[ing] forward […] against the night’, identifying these two struggles – one physical, the other psychic – with one another. Tracing this identification in reverse, the shell’s ‘brilliant arch from darkness into darkness’ is thus not only its literal form but implicitly its symbolic significance, as a marker of life amid death, recalling Bede’s famous image of human life as a sparrow’s flight into a well lit hall through one window and out through another into the night. Following Bergson, Wright can find a wider meaning for her own life as part of a more comprehensive movement ‘forward’ in which she and the conch have both participated: the ‘uninterrupted progress’ and ‘ascen[t]’ of evolution, as Bergson has it (1911, ix), in the face of the obstacles posed by lifeless matter.

The Bergsonian logic that structures Wright’s thinking in ‘Conch-shell’ underlies many of the other poems in Woman to Man. Throughout this collection, life is characterised more or less explicitly as a teleological drive. In ‘Conch-shell’, it ‘burns forward’ in Wright herself. In ‘The Builders’, it ‘rises’ (l. 17) upwards to fulfil its ‘promise’ (l. 11), both in the coral that builds a reef and in those people who ‘dare to hold their love against the world’ (l. 7). In ‘Spring After War’, it ‘moves forward’ (l. 18) towards ‘its goal’ (l. 28). In ‘The Bones Speak’, it is a ‘river whose waters move toward the day’ (l. 25). In ‘The City Asleep’, it is ‘the drinking seed / that aches and swells towards its flower of love’ (ll. 23–24). This last image is recalled in another poem, ‘Dream’, where the channels running through the ‘tree of blood’ (l. 6) lead the dreamer to ‘the unsought rose’ (l. 14). The image of the tree of life as a tree of blood, realised with startling vividness in this poem as the veins in the tree become literally bloodlines, recurs in the most famous and intimate of Wright’s Bergsonian poems, ‘Woman to Man’. Here, as Walker (1991, 42) points out, the ‘blood’s wild tree’ (l. 14) stands at once for ‘the mother’s circulatory system’, ‘the family tree’ and ‘the tree of life, a symbol for the continuity of all life forms’. Here too the tree ‘grows / an intricate and folded rose’ (ll. 14–15) – the embryo, but also an emblem of the individual life which, though ephemeral, nonetheless carries life itself forward through reproduction. ‘Woman to Man’ casts the impulse to have sex and thereby children as an expression of a transcendent force compelling individuals to act, not so that they may reproduce themselves, but so that it may live on. As Bergson puts it, ‘life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism’ (1911, 28). In ‘Woman to Man’, that organism – the woman herself – becomes acutely aware of being at the mercy of the current.

Wright’s recurrent use of the image of the tree of blood in her vitalist poetry recalls Bergson’s attempt to accommodate the Darwinian tree of life within his teleological and anthropocentric model of evolution. In Creative Evolution, Bergson combines an essentially pre-Darwinian account of evolution as ‘an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends through the vertebrate series up to man’ (1911, ix), with a Darwinian acknowledgement that ‘the unforeseeable variety’ of life shows that, while life is ‘a tendency to act on inert matter’, the ‘direction of this action is not predetermined’ (102). He resolves this contradiction, more than a little uneasily, by claiming that we stand at the ‘principal’, rather than the sole, point at which ‘evolution comes to a head’ (52). Bergson justifies this claim in turn by appealing to the role of consciousness in evolution. On the one hand, life is driven by ‘an identity of impulsion’, not ‘a common aspiration’ (54). The élan vital does not have ‘any project or plan’ as such, and the course of evolution is determined very largely by ‘accidents’. Humanity cannot therefore be ‘prefigured in the evolutionary movement’, nor are we ‘the outcome of the whole of evolution’ (280). On the other hand, insofar as the actions of life on matter present ‘the character of contingency’, which inevitably they must, this implies for Bergson ‘at least a rudiment of choice’ (102). From the inevitability of such choice, Bergson extrapolates that ‘consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness’ must be ‘at the origin of life’, its defining feature (275). The élan vital is thus a drive to regenerate this postulated pre-existent mind. It is an ‘aspiration’ after all, as well as an ‘impulsion’. The unconscious élan vital is consciousness itself, moving towards its own realisation. And because ‘[e]verywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand’, it is humanity alone that ‘continues the vital movement indefinitely’ (280).

As ‘Woman to Man’ reflects Bergson’s fusion of Darwinian and non-Darwinian models of evolution, so another poem from the same collection, ‘Pain’, recalls his emphasis on contingency, consciousness and choice. In ‘Pain’, Wright introduces the character of ‘Manjack home from the wars’ (l. 1). In the first half of the poem, she describes in starkly negative terms and images the pain he and the rest of humanity feel. In the second half of the poem, however, she suggests that pain, no matter how stark, has its constructive side:

Pain, what is it? That which keeps alive

amoebae doubling from the acid; pain

that forces flesh to wisdom: hedge of swords

beside the road from protoplasm to man.

Pain the fierce darkness thrusting at all life

that drives it up to light; pain the black No

that knifes us in blind alleys; pain that can only say

You have chosen wrong; this is no way to go.

Manjack home from the wars walked down the street,

and in his flesh a fire that ate him lean.

Vision of famine, death with blazing eyes,

what shall we do to save ourselves from Pain?

(ll. 13–24)

At first the emphasis is on the individual – amoebae seemingly driven to divide by an acidic environment, ‘flesh’ forced to ‘wisdom’ as it learns from painful experience. But it becomes clear that these individual lives are part of an evolutionary process. As in ‘Conch-shell’, life is seen in Bergsonian terms of impetus and resistance, with the resistance, here marked by the experience of pain, again figured as ‘darkness’.

But here, more explicitly than in ‘Conch-shell’, this resistance is itself a shaping force. As Bergson explains, ‘the obstacles encountered in a given place and at a given moment’ in effect ‘create divergent lines of evolution’:

Contingent the arrests and set-backs; contingent, in large measure, the adaptations. Two things only are necessary: (1) a gradual accumulation of energy; (2) an elastic canalization of this energy in variable and indeterminable directions, at the end of which are free acts. (1911, 269)

One of these directions – the ‘principal’ one for Bergson, and for Wright too in this poem – is the line ‘from protoplasm to man’, a movement ‘up’, they both suggest, towards ‘light’. Like Bergson, Wright emphasises not only the canalising function of resistance or pain, but also the role of choice or free will in responding to it. Pain, she suggests, warns us that we ‘have chosen wrong’, that ‘this is no way to go’. Yet in the last line of the poem, she hints that we can ‘save ourselves from Pain’. In human beings, individually and as an aggregate, the future direction of evolution can become genuinely rather than merely contingently conscious, a deliberate rather than a purely reactive choice. Following Bergson, Wright suggests that we alone have the capacity to make our choices in advance, persisting in our evolutionary path with no further need for the tutelage of suffering.

III

Bergson’s vitalism provides Wright with an evolutionary hope which she articulates again and again in the poems of Woman to Man. Yet the recurrent affirmation of this hope cannot hide how tentative and uneasy it is. Repeatedly Wright worries away at the problem of how to sustain such optimism in a life shot through with evil, suffering and death. As she puts it in ‘Spring After War’:

How reconcile the treacherous earth,

the gaping flesh how reconcile –

and still move forward to some birth,

as the lamb moves within the ewe?

(ll. 17–20)

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin seeks to ameliorate his vision of nature by claiming that ‘natural selection can act only through and for the good of each being’ (2003, 146). Similarly, in Creative Evolution, Bergson claims that the benignity of the élan vital is not compromised by the violence of life itself:

we must remember, above all, that each species behaves as if the general movement of life stopped at it instead of passing through it. It thinks only of itself, it lives only for itself. Hence the numberless struggles that we behold in nature. Hence a discord, striking and terrible, but for which the original principle of life must not be held responsible. (1911, 268)

Wright too appeals to the teleological drive of the élan vital to exonerate life at large from the charge of viciousness and brutality. At the end of ‘Spring After War’, ‘the seeking flesh has found its goal’ (l. 28) in the birth of a lamb and the sheathing of a knife. In the closing lines of ‘The Builders’, Wright affirms that ‘Alive, alive, intent, / love rises on the crumbling shells it shed’ (ll. 16–17) and that ‘life takes over’ (l. 20) in spite of death. ‘Flame-Tree in a Quarry’ too ends with an affirmation that ‘Out of the very wound / springs up this scarlet breath – / this fountain of hot joy’ (ll. 13–15).

Yet the ambiguities within her poems suggest that she was uneasy with the casuistry of Bergson’s argument. The ending of ‘The City Asleep’ may reclaim life as the ‘seed’ of love, but in reusing the word ‘seed’ from earlier in the poem (and indeed at the same point in the line), Wright reminds us that it is the same ‘seed / whence city and engine spring’ (ll. 7–8), the ultimate source of the mechanistic worldview that disregards life. Even the very last line, which lingers on the word ‘love’, is undermined by the half-rhyme with the first line of the same stanza, where Wright imagines herself, her readers and the sleeping city as ‘the white grave-worms of the grave’ (l. 21). The same ambivalence is revealed in the fear at the end of ‘Woman to Man’ – ‘Oh hold me, for I am afraid’ (l. 20) – and in the closing image of ‘The Bones Speak’, where the ‘flowering wreath’ into which the river transforms ‘the long winter of the dead’ (ll. 32–33) is both a literal instance of new growth and a symbolic reminder of death and mourning.

On closer inspection, the end of ‘Pain’ is similarly ambivalent. It closes not on a statement – we can save ourselves from pain – but rather on a rhetorical question. While the poem’s Bergsonian logic leads us to see this question as answerable in principle, the imagery and the figure of Manjack call this very much into doubt. He re-enters the poem at the beginning of the last stanza, after the suggestion that pain is a sign that we have made the wrong choices. And he for one is very clearly still in pain. He has, or perhaps is, a ‘Vision of famine, death with blazing eyes’, encapsulating the horrors of war and its aftermath. This vision immediately precedes the closing question, where ‘Pain’ is strikingly capitalised for the first time. This new ‘Pain’ seems more like an existential condition in itself, not predicated on ill-judged choices or evolutionary manoeuvres, but inevitable, integral, appallingly inescapable. Read in this way, the closing question is purely rhetorical: it has no answer.

Wright discovered Bergson in the middle of the Second World War, when he seemed to offer a source of hope in otherwise hopeless times. Yet the war itself gave the lie to Bergson’s vision. Bergson saw in evolution a process by which ‘a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself’ (1911, 281). The restoration of the supra-consciousness in the superman was a beguiling prospect, but to be at once plausible and inspiring it needed the pattern of human history to be one of progress, in moral as well as technological terms. When Creative Evolution was first published in 1907, this would have been to many not only a convincing thesis but close to self-evident. Even after the First World War, the myth of Western intellectual and moral superiority remained potent, underpinning for example the mandate system whereby the ex-colonies of the Ottoman and German empires were held in trust by the British and French until they were deemed to be ready for independence. But the full horrors of the Second World War and its consequences – the Nazi death camps, the drawing of the Iron Curtain, the abuses of the Japanese occupation, the atom bomb – made the myth of progress barely tenable at all. As Wright herself wrote many years later, ‘All that had been done in Europe, Russia, Asia, the Americas, it seemed to me, was implicated together in one great refutation of the human race’ (1999, 197). For Wright, the war refuted not only our moral and political philosophies. It refuted our very claim, intrinsic within our language, to humanity, to the distinctive humane-ness of human beings. In exposing, more graphically and grotesquely than ever before, man’s proverbial inhumanity to man, the war made a mockery of any claim that might be made for humankind as a telos of evolution.

By the mid-1950s, once the Korean War had confirmed the volatility of the new world order and the terrifying intensity of modern warfare, Wright had lost her trust in vitalism altogether. The title poem of her fourth collection, The Two Fires (1955) – Wright’s fullest and most direct response to the threat of nuclear war in her poetry – reads on the one hand as a grotesque reductio ad absurdum of vitalist principles, as ‘the single spark, the divine truth’ (l. 15) at the origin of life leads ultimately to ‘the man-created fire’ (l. 22) in which ‘the whole world burns’ (l. 39). At the same time, the ‘cycle from the first to the last fire’ (l. 24) that Wright prophesies in this poem is recast from a mythic, not an evolutionary, model of time. It is elemental too, not biological, in contrast with the images of trees, flowers, corals, shells, blood and bones through which Wright seeks to realise her vitalist vision in Woman to Man. The image of life as a spark, a fire, is caught between two more literal fires: that of the earth’s origin, cast off from the sun, and that of its ending in a nuclear holocaust. The relationship between the metaphorical fire of life and these literal fires is profoundly ironic. They are not akin, but fatally opposed. In ‘Conch-shell’, light represented life, darkness death, and the ‘brilliant arch’ of a single life contributed to a perpetual ‘burn[ing] forward […] against the night’. In ‘The Two Fires’, life is a flame circumscribed by two fires, with no hope of any existence beyond them.

By her own account, even as early as the late 1930s, Wright was blaming ‘the masculine order of things’ for the war she saw fast approaching (1999, 148–49). War was a consequence not of biology but of political structures. To avert future wars, these structures needed rebuilding. This is clear from the end of her early poem ‘Dust’, first published in January 1945 and republished in The Moving Image:

[…] Our dream was the wrong dream,

our strength was the wrong strength.

Weary as we are, we must make a new choice,

a choice more difficult than resignation,

more urgent than our desire of rest at the end of the day.

We must prepare the land for a difficult sowing,

a long and hazardous growth of a strange bread,

that our son’s sons may harvest and be fed.

(ll. 30–37)

Australia suffered protracted droughts and dust storms throughout the war. Wright writes that witnessing these ‘reawakened my conscience over the treatment of the land’, and that she sought ‘to express that sense of our greed and lack of knowledge of the land we lived in’ in her poem (1999, 163). At the same time, ‘Dust’ is a poem about the war itself. The dust itself is both an analogy for ‘war’s eroding gale’ which ‘scatters our sons’ (l. 27) and another consequence of the same misguided masculine order characterised by mechanisation, materialism and instrumentalism. Both locally and globally this order has made – has been, indeed – the wrong choice.

The language of ‘choice’ in ‘Dust’ anticipates the later poem ‘Pain’. Here again the wrong choice confronts us with a new obstacle, a new pain, which in turn alerts us to the need for a new choice. ‘Dust’ reminds us, however, that even the right choice may be painful. It can be ‘difficult’, even ‘hazardous’. It may, indeed it must, lead us to ‘strange’ new states and conditions. More crucially, however, it needs political will on a grand scale. Bergson implicitly exhorts his readers to exercise this will, but his call for us to realise the ‘superman’ sounds very firmly grounded in ‘the masculine order of things’. It is possible to read Woman to Man – particularly the title poem and its two sequels, ‘Woman’s Song’ and ‘Woman to Child’ – as positing a vitalism in the female line as a counterweight to the masculine order. But the problem with vitalism is that it provides no a priori grounds on which to weigh one such view against another, no basis for determining where the right choice lies, nor what the relation is between the choices we as individuals or polities make and the supposed direction of the élan vital.

Wright herself exposes this failing within vitalist thinking in a lecture she gave in 1954 on the early twentieth-century Australian poet William Baylebridge. She identifies a fundamental weakness in Baylebridge’s attempt to ground his reactionary politics in a vitalism derived from Bergson and Nietzsche:

if the development of thought, urged on by the impulse of the ‘life-force’, has in fact brought man to a stage where […] his former values no longer operate, was it, or was it not, the purpose of that development to have precisely that result? And should mankind, if he is indeed to have faith in himself and his development, not accept his fate for what it is and continue to trust the life-force no matter where it leads him? (1975, 124–25)

In Walker’s reading, Wright condemns Baylebridge for his ‘lack of faith in the purposive direction of the life-force’ (1991, 120). For Strauss too, Wright approves of Baylebridge’s debt to Bergson even as she rejects his use of Nietzsche (1995, 77). The problem Wright identifies may appear particularly acute for conservative vitalists such as Baylebridge, as the trajectory of human history and therefore, in vitalist terms, of evolution (to a best approximation) can be taken to imply that the values they espouse are in the process of being superseded. Yet the same logic ensnares those like Wright herself who would invoke the ‘life-force’ to underwrite a progressive politics. As she remarks, ‘we are ourselves involved in Baylebridge’s failure; we feel this because the problem is still with us’ (1975, 126).

Walker (1991, 40) and Strauss (1995, 74) both identify the life-force in Wright’s poetry as love. Like consciousness for Bergson, love is for Wright both the impulse and the end of evolution. This is explicit in ‘The City Asleep’ and ‘The Builders’, for example, and can be read as implicit in ‘Woman to Man’, ‘Woman’s Song’ and ‘Woman to Child’. But the history of the first half of the twentieth century bore witness to the rejection of love and the collapse of progressive values on a massive scale in Germany and Japan, and to the betrayal of these same values to differing degrees in Russia, America and the older European imperial powers, including among their territories Australia. Walker argues that Wright’s vitalism takes account of evil as ‘a misuse of the power of the life-force by man’ (1991, 120). But to believe that love was the motive force and aim of evolving life at all by the mid-1950s would have been to make a leap of faith against a great deal of evidence to the contrary. Speaking in 1954, the year ‘The Two Fires’ was first published, Wright is all too well aware that the logic of vitalism does not allow for this kind of special pleading, and that the élan vital appears paradoxically to be driving towards apocalypse. The need to make ‘a new choice, / a choice more difficult than resignation’, as she put it a decade earlier in ‘Dust’, is more urgent than ever. Yet vitalism can offer no guidance in making such a choice, and no choice, once made, has the right to lay claim to the authority of the élan vital. Worse still, the logic of Bergson’s arguments can appear to lead beyond moral relativism to political quietism, as we passively submit to choices seemingly made by the élan vital operating within us, at a time when the imperative for political activism is greater than ever.

Wright’s disillusionment with vitalism owes more to politics than to science. But as her politics become increasingly activist, so her understanding of biology becomes more rigorously scientific. In essence, it becomes more Darwinian, for all that she rarely mentions Darwin himself (and on one occasion at least (1965, 18) brackets him together with Bergson, alongside Nietzsche and the Indian mystics). In the 1950s, the fear of global apocalypse focussed Wright’s mind on the characteristically Darwinian problem of survival, rather than the Bergsonian preoccupation with future evolution. From the 1960s, the growing evidence of environmental destruction led her to formulate this problem in ecological terms themselves derived from Darwin.

This turn away from Bergsonian vitalism towards Darwinian ecology can be traced in Wright’s poetry. It is particularly apparent in some of the many poems she wrote on birds from the 1950s to the 1970s. Her third collection, The Gateway (1953), contains a short poem entitled ‘Birds’ which reads as, among other things, a meditation on Bergson. This poem opens by declaring ‘Whatever the bird is, is perfect in the bird’ (l. 1). The first two stanzas take three representative birds – kestrel, thrush and parrot – with one line from each stanza assigned to each bird. The point of these examples is that ‘all are what bird is and do not reach beyond bird’ (l. 5). This integrity to the essence of their being is contrasted in the second half of the poem with Wright’s own sense of being ‘torn and beleaguered by my own people’ (l. 11). Like Shelley in ‘To a Skylark’, Wright takes the birds as a model for an imagined escape from human conflict and from the conflicted human self:

If I could leave their battleground for the forest of a bird

I could melt the past, the present and the future in one

and find the words that lie behind all these languages.

Then I could fuse my passions into one clear stone

and be simple to myself as the bird is to the bird.

(ll. 16–20)

The birds themselves stand as perfect examples of the élan vital working itself out in a particular lineage to a point of perfection. In this closing stanza, Wright aspires to the same integrity herself. The objective to transcend time and the differentiation of language suggests a desire to return to the essence of the élan vital. Yet Wright is aware that, even if she feels the newfound self-consciousness of the life-force in humanity to be a curse, it is nonetheless the essence of what it is to be human. For all the continuity running through ‘the past, the present and the future’, the élan vital has been irreversibly divided into its own different ‘languages’ by the history of contingencies. For Wright to be as ‘simple’ to herself as ‘the bird is to the bird’ would be for her to transform herself, not into something closer to the essence of life, but into a lifeless ‘stone’. The abandonment of one’s own self to the essence of the élan vital which Wright implicitly warns us against in her lecture on Baylebridge is here shown to be a false aspiration, a tempting delusion, even by the logic of vitalism itself.

Wright used the title Birds again for her fifth collection of poems, published in 1962. Turning from ‘Birds’ to Birds, a number of contrasts are immediately apparent. ‘Birds’ takes its three named birds as examples. The birds themselves are not accorded either definite or indefinite articles. They are ‘kestrel’, ‘thrush’, ‘parrot’, not ‘the kestrel’, ‘a thrush’, ‘this parrot’. They are not individuals but types, and types that collectively represent another type, ‘bird’ (l. 5), again without a prefatory article. Each bird in Birds, by contrast, is a particular individual to whom the poet responds as an individual herself. They inhabit a world defined not by abstract qualities – ‘what bird is’, being ‘simple to myself’, the élan vital – but by individual lives encountering one another in particular circumstances and habitats. A peacock caged by aldermen (‘Peacock’), the butcher-bird looking on with murderous intent as a pair of blue wrens build their nest (‘The Blue Wrens and the Butcher-Bird’), the pheasant scuttling away from a cat (‘The Swamp Pheasant’), the fallen swift with a broken wing (‘Migrant Swift’), a flock of parrots relishing a treeful of loquats in winter (‘Parrots’), another flock, this time of terns, diving into the ocean to prey on small fish, and themselves falling prey to the larger, leaping bonitos (‘Silver Terns’) – each is shown to be a distinct creature living its own life in its own distinctive manner. The overall impression is not of continuity but of proliferation, of the immense and inexhaustibly engaging variety of life.

Aside from giving an overall impression of biology as ecology – epitomised in Darwin’s famous image of nature as an ‘entangled bank’ (2003, 397) – Birds depicts a natural world governed by the same needs and preoccupations as those described by Darwin. ‘Love’ makes the peacock’s feathers grow (l. 12), but while the ‘joy’ (l. 15) of this ‘hidden spring’ (l. 13) may suggest Wright’s version of Bergson’s life-force, it holds too as a celebration of the non-utilitarian beauty produced, according to Darwin, by sexual selection. As early as ‘Woman to Man’, Wright is alert to the roles played by natural and sexual selection in evolution. The seed seeking its own rebirth through the lovers is characterised as ‘the strength that your arm knows, / the arc of flesh that is my breast, / the precise crystals of our eyes’ (ll. 11–13) – details that capture the lovers’ attractiveness to one another at the same time as their aptitude for survival. In Birds, any alternative conception of love as a life-force running through nature is given the lie as early as the second poem, ‘The Blue Wrens and the Butcher-Bird’, where the butcher-bird plans to kill the wrens and their brood even before they have completed their nest. This poem again stages sexual selection in the male wren’s song to his mate, while the results of sexual selection are apparent in the third poem, ‘Eggs and Nestlings’, in which the instinctive demands of the baby birds neither indicate nor inspire love.

The word ‘force’ itself occurs only once in Birds, in ‘Black-Shouldered Kite’, where Wright remarks ‘Hunger and force his beauty made / and turned a bird to a knife-blade’ (ll. 8–9). First published in 1952, this is one of the few earlier poems incorporated into Birds, while most of the poems were written for the collection itself. ‘Black-Shouldered Kite’ aside, force essentially disappears as an impetus from Birds. Hunger, on the other hand, remains, driving the predatory impulses of butcher-birds, raptors, terns and so on, and vividly realised in the gapes of the three newly hatched chicks in ‘Eggs and Nestlings’, characterised as ‘the triple greed / of one incessant angry need’ (ll. 11–12). This greed is driven, like that of the parrots for the loquats, by the impulse to satisfy a never-ending appetite, a rage to survive.

‘Eggs and Nestlings’ ends on a note of disquiet as Wright wonders how ‘the shapeless furies come to be / from shape’s most pure serenity’ (ll. 15–16). The hatching of the furious chicks from their eggs repeats in microcosm the emergence of chaotic biology from the geometric regularity of physics. But in calling the chicks themselves ‘furies’, the poem hints too at the way in which the question of the origin of life and the problem of suffering have tormented the human imagination. The poem that addresses this sense of horror at nature most directly is ‘Pelicans’. Like Robert Frost in ‘Design’, Wright warns against the attempt to find a profound meaning in the viciousness of nature. In the first stanza, she lists a number of disquieting predatory organisms, from funnel-web spiders to pitcher-plants and vampire-bats. She characterises them as ‘cold water on an easy faith’ (l. 3), counselling:

Look at them, but don’t linger.

If we stare too long, something looks back at us;

something gazes through from underneath;

something crooks a very dreadful finger

down there in an unforgotten dark.

(ll. 4–8)

The danger, she suggests, is that nature will come to seem intrinsically malign. In Frost’s words, it will appear to embody a ‘design of darkness to appall’ (‘Design’, l. 13). Wright’s menacing ‘something’ is less a revelation of a malevolence within nature than a projection of this malevolence onto nature by the human mind. At the same time, nature is indeed bloody and violent. In an ironic turn, Wright urges us to look away from the catalogue of grotesque and seemingly vicious creatures she has set before us and to turn instead to look at a pelican. She goes on to liken this bird to a Noah’s ark, a kind ambulance driver and a clown. But these benign characterisations are themselves projections onto nature. Like the characterisation of the élan vital as love, or alternatively as a Nietzschean impulse towards the emergence of the superman, they are at best selective. As Wright concludes in the last line of the poem, ‘this world holds every sort of weather’ (l. 16). Moreover, even selective impressions may be false. ‘Pelicans’ is followed by ‘Silver Terns’. The ‘slaughter, / with white birds diving, obstinate with hunger’ (ll. 18–19) in this next poem reminds us that pelicans too are predatory seabirds. As Wright remarks at the end of ‘Silver Terns’, ‘you would not guess the blood, unless you saw it’ (l. 23).

The struggle for survival in Darwin’s vision of nature implies the extinction of some species. The last poem in the original edition of Birds is ‘Extinct Birds’. As A. D. Hope observes, this poem retrospectively casts ‘its prophetic light over all the rest’ (1975, 17). Here Wright records with sad irony how the nineteenth-century Australian poet Charles Harpur wrote in his journal of his love for the birds around him, only to play his part in their extinction by helping to fell the forests in which they lived. This poem stresses most directly the dependency of wildlife on its environment that Wright insists on in her essay ‘Wildlife Conservation and the Teacher’, drafted in the mid-1960s, where she notes:

‘Wildlife’, in fact, is something that cannot be thought of as a lot of isolated species just happening to live in the same place, for all those species are intricately interdependent on each other, so that an interference in one place can cause an alteration in the whole system. (1975, 214)

Conservation, if it is to work at all, must be ‘the conservation of ecosystems’ (213). Like ‘Extinct Birds’, Birds as a whole is underwritten by the scientific understanding of ecology Wright articulates in this essay. At the same time, the poems provide vivid instances of nature in action which serve both as Darwinian parables and as unsettling, memorable and so potentially transformative experiences in their own right.

Wright returns to the issue of manmade extinction in her famous poem ‘Lament for Passenger Pigeons’, from her late collection Alive (1973). This poem, which takes as its epigraph a phrase from Wittgenstein – ‘Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use’ – is one of Wright’s most direct challenges to the instrumentalist worldview. It opens:

The voice of water as it flows and falls,

the noise air makes against earth-surfaces

have changed; are changing to the tunes we choose.

(ll. 1–3)

The passenger pigeon is emblematic of this choice, as its extinction transformed dramatically the sounds and views of North America. As late as the 1870s, these birds still flew across North America in immense flocks reminiscent of the spectacular migrations of literally billions of birds recorded by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century naturalists. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century the passenger pigeon had become all but extinct, largely because of systematic and unrestrained hunting for food and sport. The last attested wild passenger pigeon was shot in Ohio in March 1900; the last captive bird was found dead in her cage in Cincinnati Zoo at one o’clock in the afternoon on 1 September 1914 (see Fuller, 1987, 112–17). Allan W. Eckert’s powerful and carefully researched novelisation of these last birds’ lives, The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, was published in 1965, contributing to public awareness of their extinction in the years before Wright wrote her poem. The almost incredible rapidity of the passenger pigeon’s extinction, the voracity with which it was hunted, the vitality and sheer spectacle of the immense flocks when they were alive – ‘its million wings and hues’, ‘the sheen of life on flashing long migrations’ (ll. 6, 8) – the recentness of its end, placing these huge migrating flocks just beyond the reach of living memory, combine to make this bird a particularly fitting emblem for the problem that Wright addresses in this poem.

The theme of Wright’s poem is not the bird itself but humanity’s ever-increasing encroachment on and destruction of nature, so that even ‘Ice at the polar axis smells of me’ (l. 15). Remembering ‘Dust’ and ‘Pain’, Wright reminds us once again that we face a collective choice. The consequences of that choice are now final. We can continue within ‘the cycle we impose’ (l. 17), fouling our nests (l. 10) and thickening ‘like a stain’ (l. 14) on the earth in pursuit of the ‘use’ (ll. 16, 27–30) of nature. In doing so, however, ‘we choose to die’ (l. 36), as we are ourselves dependent on our environment for our survival. The alternative is ‘to reinvent that passenger’ (l. 38):

To sing of Being, its escaping wing,

to utter absence in a human chord

and recreate the meaning as we sing.

(ll. 41–43)

Ashok Bery notes that ‘the recreation of the pigeon’s meaning and Being by our own song is some kind of compensation – however inadequate – for the physical absence of the pigeon […] and for the absence of its sound’ (2007, 34). This is surely true. But more important than this imaginary revival of the pigeon itself is the engendering of a state of mind in which the memory of the bird spurs us on to make the right choice over our future treatment of what remains of the natural world. The ‘meaning’ of the bird now is thus both the meaning that it once had, which has been lost through its extinction – its place in the ecology of North America, and in the memories and imagination of those who saw it – and the significance of that extinction itself. The first of these we can hope to recover only through and in our own imaginations. The second – the pigeon’s ‘absence’ which we ‘utter’, its ‘utter absence’, indeed – we must keep in mind as a loss and a warning.

‘Lament for Passenger Pigeons’ is at once the lament it claims to be and a call to action. In both regards, it is grounded in a Darwinian understanding of ecology incompatible with a Bergsonian theory of evolution in which the élan vital works out its destiny through humanity. Human destiny, it transpires, is neither unique nor foreordained, but intimately bound up with and dependent on the fate of the natural world. Human progress is not an expression of nature’s will, but the agent of its destruction. Bergson’s vitalism appealed to Wright, as it did to many earlier twentieth-century writers, because it offered a justification for human hopes and values that claimed to be borne out by science. Wright’s rejection of vitalism began with her perception of its inadequacy as a political philosophy, but it proved to be not only politically vacuous but also scientifically incorrect. The hope that vitalism could serve as a corrective to the instrumentalism that Wright so feared and detested turned out to be forlorn. Instead, it would be Darwin’s frankly non-purposive biology – attacked as intolerably materialist by leading vitalists such as Butler, Shaw and Koestler – that would provide the foundation for Wright’s mature understanding of the natural world and the moral and political imperative to preserve it. In Birds and ‘Lament for Passenger Pigeons’, she turns the bare ‘fact’ of Darwinian natural history into ‘imaginative knowledge’ – knowledge which, in its turn, provides the basis for a call to arms against the ‘servants of the machine’.