The poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” by James Wright, expresses the value of a person’s life. The poem is a free-verse of only thirteen lines and it moves with the sparse intensity of a haiku through a subtle but limited accumulation of imagery. Wright using metaphors to creates a reflection of his life and how he feels about it. The poem expresses only in one day, and it thoroughly represent Wright’s entire life. The transition from morning to night represents his life from beginning to end.
He reviews his life through pictures, by lying back and observing his surrounding and lives of other around him. Wright begins his life journey with an image of a bronze butterfly, which represented purity and strength, and end with an image of a chicken hawk. The first three line of the poem, Wright introduces reader into his world of mind. He leads the reader to think that he is observing his life through thought rather than recollecting his life through action.
In the first three lines of the poem, “Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, asleep on the black trunk, blowing like a leaf in green shadow,” he compare himself to a bronze butterfly to simply draw the beginning of his life. The bronze butterfly represents a boy who have strong-willed and ready to embark on life. However, the next action of this little butterfly asleep, implies that there are no forward action and no accomplishment. It also implies that he was in the dark, staying out of action and letting other taking charge.
Moreover, last sentence of the first three lines symbolizes the motion of his life that never rest. He always seeks for opportunity but in the end he chose never to take charge. In the line, “In a field of sunlight between two pines, the dropping of last year’s horses blaze up into golden stones,” Wright expressing his countless opportunities that have passed him by and he never try to grasped on to. The dropping last year’s horses reflect the chances that he missed, and now he sits back and observed his dreams and aspiration pass by, blaze up into golden stones.
The golden stones represent all the chances that he would have accomplished in his life. On the other hand, the golden stone also represents what he has now, passed opportunities that never come again. The image of animals, which he view as himself, is shift from a beautiful butterfly into an old lazy cowbell. The great transition from a butterfly into a cowbell represents a huge amount of time has passed through his life, and shows that there has been no progression in achieving any accomplishment.
The final transition from a cowbell into a chicken hawk shoes that Wright had not change himself or his life into something more importance. His purpose of choosing chicken hawk because a hawk is a powerful dominant bird and a chicken is a view of a weak cowardly animal, represent himself in front of all the opportunities that he had let it passed by without even try to achieve. As the poem comes nearly to the end, so does the life of James Wright. As the evening darkens, his path had comes to an end.
The darkness symbolized his unhappiness with his life journey, which he had nothing to show in the end. He was afraid to cease an opportunity but at the same time, he had many chances. However, Wright was somehow searching for a meaning to his life but he could not find any because he never had experienced anything for himself. By looking back to his whole life of not experiencing anything through action, he finds himself an enormous obstacle in the end. The last words expressed in the poem, “I have wasted my life,” are perfect conclusion to ending this poem.
The path that Wright chose, he did not experience anything real for himself. Nothing that he done were importance or value for him. His whole life summed up into thirteen lines of poem, it beginning with sunrise and ending with sunset. He looks back his life and seen that nothing were importance or value for him to keep holding on. He feels that he had no great accomplishments, therefore, he sees his life a waste. He has lost out on life for the fact that he not really lived at all.
