Wright said himself in Quarter Notes:
Improvisations and Interviews(1995) that his sub-
jects are ‘‘language, landscape, and the idea of
God.’’ Wright is not religious, but he does have a
spiritual response to landscape. While he does
not deny that there is a God, his spiritual search
does not rely on a particular religious doctrine.
Whatever theological doubts he may have,
Wright knows that the earth is real, so while he
intuits that the physical world is not all there is,
it is the medium through which he reaches for
spiritual essence. Many of his poems are spiritual
meditations based on landscape, in which
Wright tries to understand what he cannot see.
In an article forContemporary Literature, Bon-
nie Costello states that language ‘‘creates a dif-
ference from the seen world, which allows us
to view it in a symbolic aspect, and it is in
this difference that [Wright’s] ‘idea of God’
takes shape.’’
‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’
is an excellent example of Wright’s use of land-
scape as a metaphor for his own experience. He
compares the passage of time as shown through
the seasons to the passing of time in his life.
Typically, he also sets the poem in a particular
scene, in a specific time and place. For this poem,
the speaker in the poem (a persona much like the
poet) is imagined in Wright’s backyard on a
December afternoon as the day wears into eve-
ning. The speaker remarks on the turkey buz-
zards in the sky, the passing clouds, the Blue
Ridge Mountains in the distance, and the leaves
on his driveway. This seasonal metaphor seems
to be more about letting go than about renewing.
That is certainly the case in ‘‘Words Are the
Diminution of All Things,’’ where the subject is
letting go of the words of the poetic craft because
there is too little time left in life to handle them.
In a sense the speaker cannot take up his words,
cannot embrace them with intention.
Spiegelman, in his critical analysis ‘‘Land-
scape and Identity: Charles Wright’s Backyard
Metaphysics’’ notes that in Wright’s poems ‘‘it is
always landscape that occupies the central posi-
tion, because landscape alone allows the poet to
move from present to past, from here to there,
and from the visible to the invisible.’’ That is
exactly what happens in ‘‘Words Are the Dimin-
ution of All Things.’’ The speaker is nudged to
remember the past, but he shakes it off. As he
considers his present situation, he realizes the
words that remain unspoken. He intertwines
the description of these unused words with the
description of what he sees in the visible scene. It
is a narrative, broken into pieces, interrupted
with manipulations of language and present,
temporal experience.
As Spiegelman explains: ‘‘Wright searches
for the visible form of the landscape (which he
then translates for our benefit into the visible
form of the printed page.)’’ Spiegelman adds
that Wright depicts space and time as a synthe-
sized unit, as ‘‘merely two facets of a single per-
ceptual phenomenon.’’ After all, nature is always
changing. Sand dunes do not stand still so they
are ‘‘as much an event in time as an organization
of space.’’ Within the blink of an eye, Wright can
transform a meditation on place into one on time.
That is what he does in ‘‘Words Are the Dimin-
ution of All Things’’: He goes back and forth
between the imaginary and the real, between
the December of his life and the December
landscape.
In an interview forUVA Today, a University
of Virginia publication, Wright is quoted as say-
ing: ‘‘I’m always looking at and thinking about
how the exterior landscape reflects the interior
and vice versa.’’ Wright indicated that his poems
do not start out as ideas but develop from some-
thing he has seen. He considers his backyard
his ‘‘largest canvas,’’ but also a place where he
has ‘‘conversations’’ with the landscape. He
explained that although his poems are not per-
sonal, he places himself in them and is defined by
his poems. He is quoted as saying that he looks
for ‘‘what’s behind or might be behind what you
see’’ and then projects himself into that view. The
reader can imagine that for ‘‘Words Are the
Diminution of All Things.’’ Wright might have
been sitting in his yard observing the winter sky,
the clouds, and the buzzards, and these views
caused him to think about end-of-life issues.
Perhaps it was a quiet day with the only soundMANY OF HIS POEMS ARE SPIRITUAL
MEDITATIONS BASED ON LANDSCAPE, IN WHICH
WRIGHT TRIES TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HE CANNOT
SEE.’’Words Are the Diminution of All Things