Poetry analysis and interpretation

James Wright's "A Blessing" is a poem that celebrates the wonders of nature, particularly the animal world, and expresses the poet's strong desire to become one with that world - to the extent of, at least momentarily, leaving the human world behind.

The poem begins with a fairly straightforward description of a car ride: "Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, / Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass." Right away, it becomes apparent that the poet has left the world of human civilization behind, as his immediate observations are taken up with nature; he is clearly more interested in the twilight on the grass than he is in the highway, and the rest of the poem will be taken up with evocations of nature, the "here and now," rather than the place from which the poem just came. This effectively gives the poem a feeling of placelessness, of being situated somewhere outside of time, where the only thing that truly matters is what happens in each line of the short poem.

Upon arriving at this isolated stretch, a place that is never explicitly named, as the arrival immediately gives rise to description, the poet and his friend are met by two Indian ponies:

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

Upon stepping "over the barbed wire" and into the pasture, the poet and his friend are effectively leaving the human world behind - symbolized by the barbed wire, an industrially produced product - and into the wilds of nature - the pasture where the two Indian ponies graze.

The poet goes on to describe the ponies' happiness upon making contact with their human visitors: "They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs."

This last line is particularly curious. for, if the ponies have one another for company, and clearly love one another, as the poet asserts, then why are they simultaneously lonely?

It seems that this question finds its answer in the following line: "At home once more..." As the ponies certainly have not gone anywhere, the only reason why they are now "at home," whereas before they were not, is because their two human friends have come to visit them. The implication, then, is that the ponies, despite having one another, will always be lonely without human companionship. This is why "there is no loneliness like theirs," to quote Wright - theirs, in other words, is a peculiar kind of loneliness that exceeds the human definition of loneliness.

The second half of the poem is dedicated to the poet's desire to make physical contact with one of the ponies:

would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me

And nuzzled my left hand.

In many ways, the second half of the poem solves the mystery of the first half. Nature has traditionally been associated with the figure of the Mother (i.e. The idea of there being a "Mother Nature" who reigns over the natural world.) Philosophers from Rousseau to Derrida and beyond have traditionally associated the Mother figure with the workings of nature. The poet's desire to make contact with, become one with the pony, belies a desire to be close to his mother once again, ultimately returning to the protected realm of childhood.

The poet's description of his contact with the pony is nearly erotic in its implications:

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.

At the same time, the encounter is more sensual than sexual. It leads the poet to a catharsis that is something like a rebirth, in the final lines of the poem:

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break