one, but the line is also ironic. Those who would tell the speaker that he has wasted his life are people who are unable to see the true value in the speaker 's way of life and because they do not see the meaning, they say there is none. Because they are incapable of seeing meaning and value where there surely is much of both, their whole being is blind and deaf to so much of life and they truly do waste their lives by not living and thinking fully; absolutely. As the speaker reclines in the hammock, they are able to do what would prove to be a difficult task for some--they strip away most everything that fogs our lives and basks in the knowledge that it is others who waste their lives in not taking a step outside of themselves and viewing
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The tour of images colored by the view of the speaker comes to an end with a revelation so direct and in such plain language that its simplicity can only serve to make the reader come to the conclusion that they are only allowed knowledge of one part of a greater mass of introspection. The final line undoubtedly sprung from a wealth of interconnected reflections grown in subtle musings and arrived to by way of a life 's worth of charting a highly aware and richly intricate innerself--quite the opposite of a wasted life. James Wright, and his speaker, do not “waste” their afternoons, they waste their lives. The poet lives a life of reflection on seemingly insignificant things. Those who would consider time spent in such a manner to be a waste would not be able to live the life of a poet--or if they did, it would be forced, unnatural, unsatisfying, and surely the work that their “wasted” lives would produce would be tainted by the feeling of forced appreciation. The person not inclined as Wright would not see meaningless waste material so imaginatively. A detailed picture is created within the mind with language, put to paper, presented, and conjured within the mind’s eye of the reader only because the poet’s mind first saw significance in the seemingly
The tour of images colored by the view of the speaker comes to an end with a revelation so direct and in such plain language that its simplicity can only serve to make the reader come to the conclusion that they are only allowed knowledge of one part of a greater mass of introspection. The final line undoubtedly sprung from a wealth of interconnected reflections grown in subtle musings and arrived to by way of a life 's worth of charting a highly aware and richly intricate innerself--quite the opposite of a wasted life. James Wright, and his speaker, do not “waste” their afternoons, they waste their lives. The poet lives a life of reflection on seemingly insignificant things. Those who would consider time spent in such a manner to be a waste would not be able to live the life of a poet--or if they did, it would be forced, unnatural, unsatisfying, and surely the work that their “wasted” lives would produce would be tainted by the feeling of forced appreciation. The person not inclined as Wright would not see meaningless waste material so imaginatively. A detailed picture is created within the mind with language, put to paper, presented, and conjured within the mind’s eye of the reader only because the poet’s mind first saw significance in the seemingly