18 pages • 36 minutes read
James WrightSpeak
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Jenny the Muse
The speaker devotes the entirety of the third stanza to a mysterious figure named Jenny. Readers of other poems by Wright may recognize Jenny as Wright’s muse, the symbol for his inspiration. In this poem, something bad has happened to Jenny, who has sunk about as low in the world as a woman could do—given the perspective of 1960s America—becoming a sex worker, abandoning her baby in a trash can at the bus station, and prancing off to ostensibly have a good time somewhere else. This is all metaphor for the muse’s desertion: She is now inspiring other men with her desirability or sexuality, the child that is her poetic creation with Wright has been discarded, and she does not look back at the author she no longer cares for.
The speaker emphasizes how much he loves her by repeating her name, the second time with an endearment (“oh my Jenny” [Line 17]), and yet she has let him down in the most devastating way. Inspiration has vanished, sunk into the sordidness of the world from which he cannot extract it. The one he loved, who symbolically embodied the impulse to create and was the source of the possibility of transcendence, is gone.
Loneliness
Loneliness is a recurring motif. There is really only one character in “Speak,” the speaker himself, as he meditates on his loneliness and isolation. Although he uses the word to describe others in the final stanza, he is not out to fool anyone—the speaker is one of the lonely too; he longs for connection, but there is no one there to provide it.
Jenny, the speaker’s mythical muse who might have inspired him, is departed, dancing her way through Jacksontown to an unknown destination. An even mightier figure, God, remains silent and hidden, no matter how earnestly the speaker invokes him. The police officer who arrested the speaker is a figure from memory, Liston and Ali are celebrity fighters who exist a way outside the speaker’s personal orbit, and Ernie Doty the murderer is long dead. There is only the speaker, who treads a lonely path, trying to help the “few lonely some” (Line 34); he is a lost soul hoping for guidance and illumination but finding none.
