Now the reader is ready for the poem’s climax. Amongst the beauty and mystery of nature appears the slender woman “Between trees.” The world is all of shadows, like the forms in Plato’s cave. Yet this woman has found a way to remove the shroud from her face, and escape the constraints of this world: “she steps into the air, now she is gone / Wholly, into the air.” To disappear into thin air is one form of magic; to wholly exist, as this woman apparently does, while uniting fully with the air, is another matter entirely. What this woman has learned by chance or by years of meditation is to transcend the limitations of the physical and the logical.

The narrator, watching this whole time “alone by an elder tree,” now cannot breathe the air which was involved in such magic. Instead, having been transformed by the event, having been given such precious and rare knowledge, he leans in his darkness, a shadow different from his former shadow, and a shadow distinct from all other shades in the world. The end of this poem marks the beginning (hence the title) of his new understanding of the world: he is aware of his position as a shade in a world of shadow and magic. Now, he might embark upon his journey to be reunited with all those who transcended this world, like the slender woman.

Let us then examine symmetry couplings to see what more insight can be garnered in this poem. First, we can see clear similarities between lines 1-4 and the last four lines of the poem. Lines 2-4, specifically, read “The dark wheat listens. / Be still. / Now.” Lines 11-13 of the 14 line poem read “Or move. / I listen. / The wheat leans back toward its own darkness.” There is immediate repetition of the wheat listening compared to the narrator listening. There is an echoing, both in line length and in action, of being still and not moving. The darkness which describes the wheat initially becomes by the end its own entity towards which the wheat can lean. Thus, to solve the mystery of how the moon can drop its feathers, Wright reflects in his form the final line, that the narrator can lean towards his own understanding of the shadows which surround him.

Similarly, the middle six lines of the poem are symmetrical. While the narrator is watching the young moons take flight, by symmetry, he dares not to breathe. The form lets Wright get a lot more energy out of the line “I do not dare breathe,” because it now refers not only to the slender woman, but also to the fledgling young taking flight. Interestingly, the phrase “their wings” is paired with the line “wholly, into the air.” The image of the wings of stars is given new life when seen as a direct parallel of the woman who disappears into the air which uplifts the very wings themselves. Appropriately enough, the ending of the symmetry is a meeting at the middle, where the woman lifts the shadow off her face, and the shadow off the eyes of the narrator, and then disappears so that the narrator can reflect on what just happened.

The echoes of imagery and substance in the poem are reinforced by the symmetrical form of the poem. The magic which we and the narrator face is served nicely by the freedom of the poem to reach beyond the standard method of reading. The constraints of the history of poem become shadows through which the reader can pass. As we the readers end at the beginning of our now unencumbered journey through life, there is a sense that, somewhere, there is a book which James Wright once owned, where the bookmark is a soft white moon feather.

Click here to read “Symmetry and Form in Free Verse, as Seen in Wright’s Beginning – Part 1”

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1. Symmetry and Form in Free Verse, as Seen in Wright’s Beginning – Part 1