Summary Of James Wright's Lying In A Hammock

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
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