Legend - Analysis

A bush-hero story that quietly argues with itself

Judith Wright’s central claim feels like a dare: bravery that begins as swagger can become something truer, but only after the old props of courage fail. The poem starts as a folk tale about a boy with a rifle and a black dog, marching out as if the world is there to be beaten. Yet the poem keeps slipping in darker omens—thorn branches that want to blind him, a sky that turns into an unlucky opal, a crow predicting death—until the boy’s confidence looks less like mastery and more like a spell he repeats to keep fear away.

The landscape as an enemy that knows his weak points

In the first two sections, the country itself behaves like a conscious opponent. Cobwebs snatched at his feet; rivers hindered him; mountains jumped in his way; rocks rolled down. These aren’t neutral obstacles. They act with intention, and their intention is oddly specific: to trip, slow, and finally blind. Against this, the boy answers with a string of boastful I-statements—I can break branches, I can swim rivers, I can climb mountains. The tone here is half ballad, half playground bravado: he talks to his dog and his rifle as if courage is something you can load, aim, and discharge on command.

The boy’s chant: courage as control

What he calls courage is mostly control. He imagines every threat as something he can outmuscle or outshoot: even the crow’s prophecy becomes target practice—I can shoot an old crow. That detail matters because it shows his reflex: to answer anxiety with aggression. Wright makes the rain fall like mattocks, turning weather into blunt tools, and still he only said his lines. The contradiction is already present: the boy claims he didn’t mind, but the poem keeps inventing more elaborate dangers, as if the mindlessness has to be continuously defended.

The hinge: night “swallows” the props of bravery

The poem’s turn comes when the day ends and the boy meets something he can’t simply fight. Night rises to swallow him, and Wright links it to the very objects that once defined his toughness: like the barrel of a gun, like an old black hat, like a black dog. It’s a chilling reversal—his gear and companion become models for the darkness, as if his earlier confidence contained its own threat. Then the loss arrives in a clean stripping-away: His rifle broke, his hat blew away, his dog was gone. The tone shifts from jaunty defiance to sudden vulnerability, and the wailing of the pigeon, the magpie and the dove makes the world sound like a funeral chorus.

Rainbow as a different kind of power: cold, weight, promise

When the rainbow appears, it isn’t mere decoration after danger; it stands in front of the night like a boundary, just as his heart foretold. That phrasing moves bravery inward: not willpower performed for an audience, but a private intuition that persists after the tools are gone. The boy runs and climbs with animal speed—like a hare, like a fox—and when he catches the rainbow, it has surprising physicality: a bar of ice, the column of a fountain, a ring of gold. Cold, water, and wealth all at once: the rainbow becomes something felt and carried, not merely seen. The grass that had lain down to pillow him now stood up again, as if the land that opposed him can also renew him once his courage changes shape.

The final paradox: the world praises what it can’t name

In the last section, he replaces the broken gun with the rainbow, hung on his shoulder. The image is pointed: he bears beauty where violence used to sit. Nature responds differently now—Lizards ran out, snakes made way—not as enemies to conquer but as witnesses to something newly luminous. Yet the ending keeps a tension alive. All the world said nobody is braver, but the poem has shown that what he did wasn’t simply an act of force. He goes home as easy as could be, and that ease is the real transformation: the boy no longer has to chant his strength. He carries a radiance that doesn’t threaten the world, and the world, oddly, can only call that bold because it lacks a better word.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If night resembles the barrel of a gun and the black dog hungry, is Wright implying that the boy’s earlier version of bravery helped create the darkness he feared? The rainbow doesn’t destroy night; it stands before it. Maybe the legend isn’t that he beat the world, but that he learned how not to answer every omen with a weapon.