Failure Of Communion - Analysis

The poem’s central claim: intimacy is real, but the gap is realer

Judith Wright’s central claim is that human closeness can create a powerful sense of shared being, yet it cannot erase the fundamental separateness of each person. The opening question asks after the space between that paradoxically both enclosing us in one and dividing each alone. That double action is the poem’s engine: communion is not dismissed as fake, but it is shown to be incomplete by nature. Even at our most connected, something remains unshared, unreachable, private.

The first paradox: one united person versus each alone

The poem begins in a tone of quiet, almost philosophical puzzlement, as if the speaker is holding a lived experience up to the light and finding it hard to name. The phrase one united person suggests the way love, sex, conversation, or mutual attention can make two people feel like a single unit. Yet Wright immediately counters it with dividing each alone, which snaps the reverie. The contradiction is not merely emotional; it’s spatial. The poem treats separateness as a kind of architecture, a literal interval that persists even while we are “enclosed” in connection.

Frail bridges: the risky work of trying to cross

Wright then turns from abstract space to concrete attempts at crossing it: Frail bridges that run from eye to eye, from flesh to flesh, and from word to word. The sequence matters because it moves through three major human routes to communion: seeing, touching, speaking. But calling these bridges frail is a sober admission that every method of connection can fail. Eyes misread; flesh can be present without being known; words can land wrongly or not land at all. The tone here is tender but unsentimental, as if the speaker respects the effort without believing in its final success.

The net that cannot hold: connection as a fabric full of holes

The most devastating image is the net: the net is gapped at every mesh. A net is designed to catch and hold, to make a dependable pattern out of many crossing threads. By imagining it gapped everywhere, the poem suggests that even when relationship feels like a woven unity, its very weave contains absence. This image sharpens the poem’s tension: it isn’t simply that some people fail to connect, or that language is sometimes inadequate. It’s that the human design for closeness has missingness built into it. The speaker isn’t blaming either person; the gaps are structural.

The turn into certainty: what each human knows

Midway, the poem’s questioning voice tightens into certainty: and this each human knows. That line is a turn from private wondering to common knowledge, as if the speaker is naming a fact nobody can really argue with, only resist. What follows doubles down on closeness—however close our touch, or intimate our speech—only to insist that silences, spaces reach most deep. The deepest layer of the relationship is not the spoken vow or the physical contact but the unbridgeable interior. The final phrase will not close refuses consolation; the poem ends on a closed door, not an open one.

A hard question the poem forces: is communion defined by what it can’t share?

If silences are what reach most deep, then the poem implies something unsettling: the truest part of a person may be precisely what cannot be translated from word to word. Are we closest not when we fully understand, but when we accept the other person’s irreducible distance without trying to patch every mesh?

Closing insight: failure as the condition of being human together

The title, Failure of Communion, can sound bleak, but the poem’s emotional honesty makes it less a verdict than a clear-eyed description. Wright doesn’t mock intimacy; she carefully lists its pathways—eyes, flesh, words—and honors the human impulse to build bridges. Still, she insists that the space between is not an accident we can fix but a reality we must live beside. Communion, in this poem, is moving precisely because it happens across a distance that never fully disappears.