In his sardonic poem (many of them are) ‘The Only Animal’, from his Pulitzer prize winning collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Wright’s narrator tells us,

The character described determines to no longer answer the ringing downstairs. Instead, he chooses to abstain from the interactions of life and embraces isolation. When we consider this isolation in light of the first line, that this is the ‘The only animal that commits suicide’, the situation quickly becomes dark.

After four stanzas of third person narration, the narrator interrupts and begins to show open empathy with the main character. The poem begins to take on more of a directly confessional feel:

The strength of the empathy found in this reflection leads us to wonder if the earlier third person narration simply masks the narrator’s own self-reflection. In other words, in telling the earlier story of the man choosing isolation and shunning the world, is the narrator speaking of himself?

The stanza in which the narrator makes a direct self-disclosure of his own temptation to despair ends with a disjunctive ‘and yet’, which leads us into a stanza of affirmations of life that jar the narrator from the ‘hour of [his] death’. The narrator describes ‘this world’ as,

…the garden ark and vacant
tomb of what I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities…

These affirmations of life, Biblical in nature, answer his despair, but even they are mingled with loss and violence. The garden, like Eden in the Hebrew Scriptures and Gethsemane in the Christian New Testament, recalls both a paradise that humans are exiled from as well as a place of temptation and despair. The ‘ark’ recalls Noah’s ark, bringing to mind the violence and destruction of the wrathful flood as well as safety inside the ark’s walls. And finally, the ‘vacant tomb’ serves as an echo of the story of Christ’s resurrection. Even an affirmation of resurrection does not bring Wright’s narrator to proclaim triumph over life’s despair. He queries, ‘…vacant/ tomb of what/ I can’t imagine’. Here mystery, faith, and confusion intertwine.

Toward the end of this stanza, we learn that the narrator is no longer speaking in soliloquy but apparently in conversation. His conversation appears to even be prayer, an address to God. He asserts,

Through the experience of this prayer, the narrator affirms and proclaims, ‘You gave us each in secret something to perceive.’

The poem ends in a way that amplifies the complete honesty and mutuality of this prayer. In the final two stanzas, each only one line long, Wright’s narrator alludes to the New Testament story of Christ’s pardoning the woman caught in adultery, an event wherein Christ saves the woman’s life from an angry mob who is about to stone her to death. Christ insists that if anyone is without sin, then they should throw the first stone at the woman. No one throws a stone. Then in a moment that highlights human sinfulness and divine grace, Christ proclaims that if no one else condemns her, then neither does he, the point being that he is the only worthy judge, and he does not condemn her. He then instructs her to ‘go and sin no more.’ In the final stanzas of this poem we read,

Here we see that the narrator’s accuser is not an angry, self-righteous mob but rather the narrator himself. He is his own accuser, his own potential murderer. Also, the division between these lines inverts our expectations. We anticipate that the narrator will finish off what appears to be reported speech in the first of the two stanzas. By separating the lines, Wright allows the speaker of the last line to be ambiguous. Who says, ‘I do not condemn you’—a divine voice or the narrator of the poem? If God speaks this, then the poem ends on a note of divine acquittal. If the narrator speaks it, then we understand that the narrator does not condemn God for the pain and isolation in his life. If, as I believe to be the case, both pardon one another, then the prayer becomes a true conversation with direct engagement of both parties involved. Additionally, if this is the case, then the poem acknowledges the painful aspect of existence that can lead us to despair, as well as the grace of existence itself.

Throughout his poetry Wright constantly affirms these truths: being alive entails pain and joy; life is difficult and also a gift of divine grace. Ultimately, herein lies the power of Wright’s poetry: his vision of the transience and precarious nature of human existence and a deep sense of strange gratitude for life. Wright’s vocation as a poet reminds him of these truths. In his poem ‘The Maker’, we read,

And the way, always, being
a maker
reminds:
you were made.