Response to the Wattle Tree

Judith Wright in this poem is using personification to express her insight into the formation of life from its beginning. The Wattle Tree becomes an image of her search for understanding of life, as it develops from small beginnings. Then flourishes by understanding various stages of development through lived experience of life.

In the first stanza Judith uses the expression, “The tree knows four truths”. Writing with these words Judith is giving the tree a human essence. Personification conveys a meaning beyond an object of admiration, but an understood personal life as a tree. The four truths, root, limb and seed are a metaphor for human life. The stages of human life from infancy to development of life by stages is similar to the growth of the tree from seed to maturity. Birth, then growth through infancy and childhood to teenage years, then young adult and full maturity is similar to the growth of the tree from seed, to root, limb and leaf to a mature tree.

The reader is able to visualise both forms of life from the choice of words in the poem. The tree “dreaming it has a voice”, intensifies the metaphor and deepens the visual image of the personification of the tree.

The second stanza shows the tree crying out for understanding just as humanity yearns to understand the stages of life through lived experience. Just a seed is planted and takes root, nourished by wind, rain and sunshine, then develops to maturity so a human life grows through birth, growth, nutrition and a loving environment to a mature human being. This stanza emphasises that growth. The visual image is made more intense through the way the stanza is set out.

The last stanza bringing the four fruits into focus as the means of fruitful development presents a more intense visual image of the tree. Its growth from seed to maturity in a burst of golden blooms, likened to the Sun, becomes to Judith a revelation of immortal life and the writing of the poem then becomes a jubilant recognition of the connection between human life and creation.

It seems to me that Judith has come to an indigenous understanding of life and creation as one entity or truth.