Lyrebirds - Analysis

Wanting the lyrebird, refusing the encounter

Judith Wright’s central claim is that some wonders are most truthfully kept at a distance: the speaker’s reverence for the lyrebirds depends on not turning them into a personal possession or a checklist experience. The poem begins with easy possibility—I could go down there, in the early morning—and ends with a deliberate veto—I’ll never go. What looks, on the surface, like simple hesitation becomes an ethic of attention: an insistence that the rare and vulnerable should be allowed to remain partly unknown, left secret, alone, rather than consumed.

Ten years of delay as a kind of loyalty

The blunt accounting—Ten years, and still no visit—sets a tone of quiet self-indictment, but it also suggests devotion. The speaker doesn’t say she was too busy; she says she has never gone, as if the not-going has become its own commitment. That tension—between longing and renunciation—sharpens when the birds are named as the few, the shy, the fabulous. The adjectives move from scarcity to temperament to almost mythic glow, and then the poem lands hard on the dying poets. In that phrase, the lyrebirds become more than wildlife: they stand for an art on the edge of silence, something exquisite and endangered. The speaker’s refusal to go is therefore not only personal; it reads like a fear of witnessing disappearance up close, of having the fabulous become merely mortal and finite.

The imagined sight: reverence built from tiny movements

Instead of going, the speaker builds an encounter in the mind, and it is remarkably patient and exact. She imagines lying in the dew, watching for a single movement like a waterdrop falling, then stillness, then the gradual emergence of a brown head and brown eyes. The detail is almost austere—nothing flamboyant at first—until the bird becomes splendid, crowned by the symbol of his art: the perfect lyre. The sequence suggests that true reverence begins with near-nothing: a droplet, a pause, a plain brown gaze. The poem’s tenderness lies in how it refuses spectacle until the bird offers it on its own terms.

The lyrebird as artist, and the speaker’s uneasy awe

When the lyrebird is called that master, the poem leans into an analogy between bird and poet. The bird is not just beautiful; he is a practitioner who is practising his art. This is admiration, but it carries an uneasy edge: to witness the master at work might require becoming an audience member who takes, who benefits. The speaker’s language of artistry—crest, symbol, perfect—also hints at how quickly a living animal can be turned into emblem. The poem holds a contradiction here: it wants to honor the lyrebird’s art, yet it suspects that turning the lyrebird into a symbol is already a kind of appropriation.

The turn: choosing secrecy over proof

The poem pivots on the stark return: No, I have never gone. After the vivid imagined scene, the refusal feels newly charged—not laziness but principle. The speaker decides that Some things ought to be left secret, and she places the lyrebird among those things, birds like walking fables. That phrase admits the temptation to mythologize while also defending it: a fable is not a specimen; it is a creature that lives in meaning as much as in landscape. The final claim—these birds should inhabit nowhere but the reverence of the heart—is both beautiful and troubling. Beautiful, because it protects the lyrebird from the speaker’s ownership; troubling, because it risks making reverence a substitute for responsibility, turning a real habitat—lyrebird country—into an interior shrine.

A harder question the poem won’t let go of

If the lyrebirds are dying poets, is refusing to see them an act of humility—or a way to avoid the grief and obligation that comes with witnessing? The poem’s devotion is sincere, but its final comfort—keeping them in the heart—presses on the reader: what happens to the west side of the mountain when reverence stays private?