This poem tells the story of the poet's great-great-grandmother, a devotee of the arts who had little time to paint due to having eight children. It describes a moment when she was forced to sketch a scene from a distance of her son drifting toward a waterfall while her daughter tried to save him with a walking stick. Though unable to help, she captured the moment with her artistic eye. The poet requests that the coming year bring her the strength and composure of her great-great-grandmother as depicted in this family anecdote and sketch that has been passed down through generations.

1. REQUEST
TO A YEAR
ANALYSIS
BY DR.
KOSHY AV
A P O E M B Y
J U D I T H W R I G H T

2. LET’S READ
THE POEM
FIRST.
Request To A Year
If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts, (4)
who having eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland (8)
and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below, (12)
while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way). (16)
Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist’s isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by. (20)
Year, if you have no Mother’s day present planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

3. YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE POEM
HERE.
• https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/request-to-a-year/

4. JUDITH WRIGHT(1915-2000)
“JUDITH WRIGHT WAS A PROLIFIC
AUSTRALIAN POET, CRITIC, AND
SHORT-STORY WRITER, WHO
PUBLISHED MORE THAN 50 BOOKS.”

5. “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.”

6. THE TITLE: REQUEST TO A YEAR!
• The poet is making a request to a year, as if it is a person. What figure
of speech is that?

7. PERSONIFICATION:
• “Personification is a figure of speech in which an idea or thing is given
human attributes and/or feelings or is spoken of as if it were human.
Personification is a common form of metaphor”. A year is an idea.
• (https://literarydevices.net/personification/#Definition_of_Personificatio
n)

8. WHAT SORT OF POEM IS THIS?
• A. Epic
• B. Lyric
• C. Ode
• D. Elegy

9. THE ANSWER IS “B. LYRIC”
• A lyric is a poem “expressing direct, usually intense, personal
emotion; especially in a manner suggestive of song - lyric poetry”
• (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lyric)
• Another example is “I wandered lonely as a cloud” by William
Wordsworth.

10. THE BEGINNING STANZA
“If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,” (4)
The narrator seems to be the poet herself, an “I”, whose great-great-
grandmother, according to her, was a legendary devotee of the arts,
and whose attitude of mind she admired. If so, the poem is
autobiographical. The Year seems to be a bit like Santa Claus who
gives us gifts if we ask, after thinking about what would be good or ideal
gifts to give us. Vocabulary: Meditating, attitude, legendary, devotee.

11. THEMES SO FAR.
• The future (Time)
• The past (Time)
• Memory, remembering, reminiscence, reflection
• Family history (Going five generations back)
• Art

12. MINI-STORY, CHARACTERS,
SETTING, IN QUATRAINS
“who having eight children (the who here is the poet’s great-great-grandmother, which I am stating for you to get
the continuity)
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland (8)
and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below, (12)
while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).” (16)

13. A THEME, AND A POETIC DEVICE
“[She] having eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures”
“Painting pictures” is consonantal alliteration, a poetic sound
device or musical device to make Wright’s plain conversational
style here more poetic or into poetry.
Can you point out another example of consonantal alliteration in
the next two lines of the poem?

14. A THEME, AND A POETIC DEVICE
• “Difficult distance.” This is another example of consonantal
alliteration.

15. A THEME AND A POETIC DEVICE
“[She] having eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures”
What does her tone about her great-great-grandmother having
eight children juxtaposed or contrasted with the line that she had
little opportunity for painting imply?
It is matter of fact or sarcastic of the men/husbands of her great-
great-grandmother’s time for not letting women have their own
time to develop their talents as they were too busy giving birth and
rearing children?

16. THE THEME IS FEMINISM
• “At its core, feminism is the belief in full personal, financial, social,
economic, and political equality for women.” It is against
patriarchy.
• Can you spot another moment of feminism in the poem, regarding the
description/beautiful detail of the dress of the second daughter?

17. ANOTHER MOMENT OF IMPLICIT
FEMINISM
…her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,…

18. VOCABULARY &
INVERSION/TRUNCATION/COMPOUNDING/N
EOLOGISM
• Vocabulary and inversion/truncation/compounding/neologism: “last-
hope alpenstock.”
The poet would say in prose “the (second) daughter threw in a
walking stick (alpenstock) as a last hope”, but as in poetry language
is compressed and charged to its uttermost with meaning (as Ezra
Pound says) the poet uses the phrase “last-hope alpenstock” to
convey the tension of the moment.

19. THE CLIMAX OF THE POEM.
“Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist’s isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by. (20)
Year, if you have no Mother’s day present planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.” (22)

20. MORE THEMES
• Imagination (implicit) – we are asked to imagine the sketch and the firmness of the great-great-
grandmother’s hand
• Art as a way to process painful moments to help us survive them.
• Stoicism.
Who is a stoic? “A person who accepts what happens without complaining or showing
emotion.”
Who is the stoic here? Who hopes to be her successor? Who is the heroine in the poem according
to you?
• The importance of family heirlooms and family history/narratives as a way of learning life
skills and exploring our skills, artistic talents and gifts is latent in the poem, isn’t it?
Along with that of keeping alive key memories of the past.

21. POINT(S) OF VIEW
• The whole poem is from the point of view of the poet, but contains
in it also the points of view of the great-great-grandmother and her
second son and second daughter. The points of view weave in and
out of each other.

22. FRAMING
• The central or main incident is ‘framed’ by the poet’s beginning and
ending.

23. TONE
• The poem is impressive because its tone is mostly simple, direct
and conversational, but leaves an impact on us, especially on girls
and women.

24. STRUCTURE
• The poem has a structure of five quatrains (four line stanzas) with a
clinching couplet (a two line stanza) of two lines that works also as a
moral.

25. TO SUM UP
• Last but not least, in its detailing and its descriptiveness and use of
free verse (not in metre or rhyme) the poem is modern/modernist
and approachable to any reader who knows English, and so is
enjoyable.
• All this and the lovely use of visual ( appealing to the inner eye)
and kinaesthetic (images of movement) imagery in describing the
setting and incident that is central to the poem makes it a beautiful
and very teachable and learnable poem.

26. THANK YOU! THE END.