Summary of Judith Wright's Woman to Man

          Judith Wright was a prolific Australian poet, critic, and short-story writer, who published more than 50 books. Wright was also an uncompromising environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. She died at the age of 85.  The poem Woman to Man is about the fear of a woman in giving birth to a child.  It clearly exhibits the psyche or the fear of a pregnant woman. 

            The poem opens with the description of the child, a foetus.  The woman, the mother, is anxious about the child.  She describes the child as an eyeless labourer that grows inside the darkness of her womb.  She holds the child in her womb.  The foetus is said to be shapeless and selfless.  Childbirth is compared with the resurrection day. The child is safe, silent and swift inside her womb.  It is enthusiastically expecting to see the world or the light outside its mother’s womb.

            The, according to the mother, “is no child with a child’s face”.  This might refer to the identity crisis of aborigines in Australia or could plainly mean that the mother is unaware of the gender of the foetus.  They, the woman and her husband, has not yet named the child.  They both exist with the hope that the child would bring into their lives.  They call the child as their and hunter and their chase.  The child, to be born, would become the third member of their family.

            The child is the product of the strength of the man and the flesh of her breast.  The child is said to be the crystal of their eyes, meaning their hope and faith of their posterity or future.  The child is compared with an intricate rose.  The child gives them paradoxical notions of their life in future.  The child is considered as the question and answer and as the maker and the made.

            Being optimistic about the child’s future the poem culminates or concludes with a note of fear.  The mother shudders at the thought of the child’s head butting out of her womb, to see the light reflected by the blade.  This threat metaphorically informs us about the mother’s fear as an aborigine, who suffers the worldly life once been experienced to reality.