The Sisters - Analysis

A porch where time keeps sliding

Judith Wright’s The Sisters sets old age in a very particular light: not as a grand summing-up, but as a slow, shifting patch of sun across a veranda. The poem’s central claim feels quietly radical: even after courtship, marriage, and motherhood have given these women their official life-story, something in them remains unclaimed—an inward self that is still wide and wild. The veranda becomes a threshold space where memory can be handled like an object, and where the sisters can sit together while their deepest truths remain stubbornly solitary.

The dwindled music of old voices

The opening image is all filtered light and reduced motion: vine-shadows, yellow leaves, a cooling sun. Their voices do not rise; they run / like little winter creeks, thinned by frost and wind. That comparison matters because it frames speech as something once fuller—water that used to rush—now diminished, yet still persistent. Even the light is restless rather than the women: the square of sunlight moves. Age, in this poem, is not dramatized with pain; it is rendered as a gentle scarcity, where sound and warmth keep receding.

What they can share: horses, leather, firelight

The sisters’ shared remembering is sensuous and social. They recall gay young men on tall horses, and Wright gives the past a bodily vividness: the smells of leather / and wine. The scene widens into girlhood intimacy—girls whispering by the fire together—and then further back to dolls and ponies. These details are not abstract nostalgia; they’re specific textures of a world that once pressed in close. Yet the refrain-like return to the veranda—those things move in the yellow shadows—suggests that the past is now only movement in shade, animated but unreachable.

The hinge: from public lives to private reckoning

The poem turns when memory stops being communal spectacle and becomes inward accounting: Thinking of their lives apart and the men they married. The repetition of thinking slows the lines into deliberation, and the images tighten to the intimate and irreversible: the marriage-bed, the birth of their first / child. It’s striking that Wright places these huge events alongside the quiet gesture they look down smiling. The smile reads as practiced composure, the social face women are expected to wear even when reviewing the most vulnerable parts of their lives.

“Wide and wild”: the self that won’t be domesticated

Then the poem breaks open into speech, and the voice becomes suddenly uncontrollable in a way the earlier creek-image wasn’t: My life was wide and wild. This isn’t merely a fond recollection; it’s a refusal to be neatly known: who can know my heart? The veranda, with its measured square of sunlight, is answered by a different landscape entirely: that golden jungle. The jungle feels like desire, memory, imagination, maybe even regret—something lush and lawless compared to the cultivated domestic setting. And the final claim sharpens the poem’s key tension: though there are two sisters sitting together, the self that speaks ends in solitude—I walk alone. Companionship remains real, but it cannot cancel the private distance inside a life.

The poem’s hardest question: is aloneness a loss or a last freedom?

When the speaker says I walk alone, it can sound mournful—but it can also sound like a last territory the world cannot enter. After the men they married and the duties implied by birth, aloneness might be the only remaining form of ownership. Wright leaves us in that unresolved space: the sisters’ voices have dwindled, yet the inner landscape is still a golden jungle, bright and untamed.

Yellow shadows, golden jungle

The closing effect is a double exposure: the women are fixed on the veranda, while the mind slips into a wilderness of meaning. The repetition of on the veranda doesn’t feel like simple scene-setting; it feels like a boundary being touched again and again, as if to prove it’s there. Against that boundary, the poem insists on something fierce: that a woman’s life cannot be reduced to the sequence of courtship, marriage-bed, and child, because somewhere inside those yellow shadows an older, wilder self still walks—alone, and still lit from within.