Speak

With its focus on loneliness, the desire for connection, and empathy with marginalized people, “Speak” has much in common with many other poems by Wright in the collection Shall We Gather at the River, in which it appeared. The speakers in these poems are, for the most part, socially isolated; they express their insecurities and describe the grim realities of their lives.

Several poems feature people on the farthest margins of society. “The Poor Washed up by Chicago Winter” features a transient or unhoused speaker, who is “Alone without / Any company,” and wonders about how he can get out of the city; his choices are to pretend religious faith that he doesn’t have, or to accept arrest and imprisonment: “I can either move into the McCormick Theological Seminary / And get a good night's sleep, / Or else get hauled back to Minneapolis.” He also sketches the sad, unknown fates of the Chicago poor: “Do they die? / Where are they buried?”—questions that seem to be about others but also indirectly address his own circumstance. Similarly, the first stanza of “In Terror of Hospital Bills” is as bleak as it gets:

I still have some money

To eat with, alone

And frightened, knowing how soon 

I will waken a poor man.

Other poems center illness and loss. In “The Life,” a murdered man speaks; if he were to come back, reentering “[his] only country,” it would only be to “the old loneliness.” Grief and the unremitting approach of death are the themes of “Listening to the Mourners,” in which the speaker crouches “by a roadside windbreak / At the edge of the prairie”—literally at the edge of an emblem of human civilization; to him, the field is a “place of skull where [he hears himself] weeping.”

For a different perspective, the reader must turn to Wright's earlier collection, This Branch Will Not Break, in which human suffering and despair are often assuaged by a meaningful connection with the natural world. Nature offers solace, communion, and a kind of peace. In "Two Hangovers," for example, the speaker, awaking after a night of drinking, offers two radically different approaches to one’s inner being. The first is entirely negative; as he looks through the window, he sees nothing pleasant or good. Then he decides to adopt a different attitude, and suddenly, all is changed. He looks out at a pine tree, on which a blue jay is jumping. The speaker laughs with pleasure as he watches the bird “abandon himself / To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do / That the branch will not break.” The last line has a wider meaning and can be applied to the speaker and his world: the structures of his life, the supports on which it rests, are not going to break; he can take reassurance from his observation of nature. Similarly, in “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me,” the speaker is at first unhappy, but then he listens attentively to the sounds of the grasshoppers, and the poem concludes serenely: “Then, lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins / In the maple trees.”

“Speak,” on the other hand, contains no nature imagery and offers no such consolation; a god who refuses to respond seems like a poor substitute for the living, breathing presence of nature in the earlier collection. “Speak,” which is cast in the form of a prayer, can specifically be contrast to “Trying to Pray,” from The Branch Will Not Break. In the latter poem, the intended recipient of the prayer is not God but nature. The speaker may be distressed, like the speaker in “Speak,” but “Still, / There are good things in the world”—particularly those things drawn from nature. The last line, “I close my eyes, and think of water,” offers a calm, nourishing end to the poem, utterly different from the despairing cry in “Speak.” These two poems suggest the two poles of Wright’s thought, which in its search for meaning alternates between isolation of the individual self and communion and harmony with nature.