Five Senses

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Five Senses - meaning Summary

Senses as Inner Weaver

Judith Wright's Five Senses presents the speaker's sensory life as a single creative activity. Sounds, silences, shapes and colours are gathered like elements into an inner weaving, producing a rhythm and design. The poem emphasizes that this pattern emerges mysteriously from apparent nothingness and feels both intimate and partly autonomous — a meaning formed by the senses that the speaker experiences but does not fully own.

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Now my five senses gather into a meaning all acts, all presences; and as a lily gathers the elements together, in me this dark and shining, that stillness and that moving, these shapes that spring from nothing, become a rhythm that dances, a pure design. While I'm in my five senses they send me spinning all sounds and silences, all shape and colour as thread for that weaver, whose web within me growing follows beyond my knowing some pattern sprung from nothing- a rhythm that dances and is not mine.