being dead leaves scuttling across the driveway,
and he began to think of the silence that on such
an occasion descends upon a poet.
Of course, ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of
All Things,’’ is not all about landscape. In fact,
only eight of the twenty-four lines contain refer-
ences to the outdoors. Langdon Hammer, writ-
ing forAmerican Scholarattributes the impact of
those minority lines to ‘‘Wright’s knack for the
word sketch, for making landscape pictures with
only a few phrases—as if nonchalantly, with a
flick of the writst.’’ The rest of the poem is about
words and time, the words that will be left unsaid
when the poet no longer writes. Wright is just as
adept at translating feelings and ideas into
images and building a poem upon those images
as he is at translating landscape into imagery. In
this poem, the images are the personified words
wanting attention. They still wear a ‘‘glittering
garb’’ but the poet calls them ‘‘unattractive
angels’’ nonetheless, perhaps because he is tired
of them, perhaps because they have already
become mute. The silence he feels creeping up
on him has also engulfed the words.
David Garrison, in ‘‘From Feeling to Form:
Image as Translation in the Poetry of Charles
Wright,’’ states that the challenge for a poet is to
‘‘translate visceral and emotional knowledge, felt
thought, into language, and how to make the
unseen, that ordinarily invisible backdrop of
eternity, seen.’’ Garrison thinks that for Wright
‘‘The landscape is the hieroglyph of the self
inscribed on that backdrop of eternity.’’ Garri-
son concludes that Wright’s ‘‘images...com-
pose a code by which to read the hieroglyphs of
the heart.’’ That is to say, Wright translates the
language of the natural world into a language his
readers can understand and appreciate emotion-
ally. To perform this amazing feat requires tak-
ing these hard-to-plumb truths, molding them
into image and syntax, and shaping them into
carefully constructed and placed lines. American
poetry is fortunate that Wright has the talent
and technique to execute this difficult task for
his audience.
Source:Lois Kerschen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Words Are the
Diminution of All Things,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale,
Cengage Learning, 2010.Leaves on cobblestone pavement(Image copyright KrisN, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Words Are the Diminution of All Things