The Bull - Analysis

A god made of muscle and season

Judith Wright’s The Bull begins by giving animal life the scale of myth, then abruptly strips that myth away. The poem’s central claim is that the bull’s power is real but temporary: it swells with summer’s abundance and collapses when the season turns, exposing how quickly dominance becomes vulnerability. Wright makes the bull both a literal creature in a paddock and a figure for any authority that feels eternal while conditions favor it.

Summer as worship: a curled god among his women

The first stanza stages a lush, almost religious stillness. In the olive darkness of the sally-trees, the shift from night to day happens silently, as if nature itself is performing a ritual. The pasture is thick with honey daisies, and the bull lies heavy with power among cows described as his women. That possessive phrasing matters: the scene isn’t neutral ecology; it’s a kingdom. Calling him a red Jupiter turns rut and strength into divinity, suggesting not just virility but rule, entitlement, and a kind of thunderous self-belief.

The hinge: when the creek goes quiet

The poem pivots on a change in sound. Summer is described as bubble-sound creek-water, sweet and plentiful, but it dwindles and is silent. With that hush, the whole world roughens: seeding grasses / grow harsh, and wind and frost roughen the landscape. The tone shifts from warm reverence to cold appraisal. Even the trees darken into black sallies, and the bull’s sleek certainty begins to look like something the weather can undo. What had seemed like a god’s permanence is revealed as a summer spell.

Seek him out: the moment divinity becomes a target

At the turn, the poem introduces a human command: Seek him out, then. The line lands like a quiet instruction to violence, and it changes how we read the earlier worship. This god is not being prayed to; he is being managed. The bull is now the angry god betrayed, and Wright’s phrase whose godhead passes is blunt about the limits of his reign. The contradiction tightens: he is both mighty and disposable, a ruler whose authority depends on conditions he can’t control and on humans who can decide when his time is up.

The theft that isn’t theft: rivals, enemies, and fear

Wright frames the bull’s loss as a kind of cosmic injustice: What enemy steals his strength, what rival steals his cows? But the poem immediately implies there may be no enemy except time, season, and the human decision to drive him from his mob. The bull experiences it as betrayal, yet the world presents it as procedure. Even his emblem of divinity fails: His thunders powerless. The magnificent red storm of his body shrinks, not because he is suddenly weak in essence, but because power is shown to be relational. When the herd is taken and the hillside becomes hostile, the bull’s strength has nowhere to land.

The last image: a god running

The ending refuses consolation. Instead of standing his ground, runs the great bull, with the dogs upon his heels. That final pursuit turns the earlier myth inside out: Jupiter is reduced to prey, and the grandeur of red becomes the color of panic as much as dominance. The poem’s bitterness lies in how quickly the world permits the change. Summer’s richness made the bull look ordained; winter and human control reveal that his kingship was always conditional, and that even the most heavy with power body can be made to flee.