Woman To Man - Analysis

A pregnancy imagined as a force, not a picture

Judith Wright’s poem refuses the usual sentimental portrait of pregnancy and replaces it with something stranger and truer to bodily experience: creation as an impersonal, half-blind power that uses the lovers while also binding them. From the start, the speaker doesn’t present a baby-to-be as a tiny person with a ready-made identity. Instead she names it an eyeless labourer and a shapeless seed, something at work inside her that is both intimate and alien. The tone is reverent but unsettled—full of awe at what is being made, and anxiety about how little control anyone has over it.

The eyeless labourer: agency in the dark

The opening image makes the fetus feel like a worker operating in secrecy: it builds silent and swift and deep from sight, as if pregnancy is a nocturnal construction site. Calling it selfless is tender, but also unsettling: this life doesn’t choose, doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t sympathize—it simply grows. The phrase resurrection day pushes birth into the language of revelation and upheaval, as though what’s coming will be more than a new person; it will be a transformation of the parents’ world. Even the future is imagined from inside the dark: the seed foresees the unimagined light, giving the unborn an uncanny purpose that doesn’t depend on adult intentions.

No child with a child’s face: love without a name

The poem’s next move is a refusal: This is no child, has no name. The speaker insists that what she carries cannot be reduced to a recognizable face or a familiar label. Yet the stanza turns and admits the opposite kind of knowledge: you and I have known it well. The tension here is crucial. The lovers don’t know it as a person, but they know it as an event—something already present in their shared past, because it began in their intimacy. That’s why the poem can claim, with startling directness, the third who lay in their embrace. The unborn is portrayed as a presence that was there from the beginning, not as an afterthought.

The hunter and the chase: desire becomes consequence

When Wright calls it the hunter and our chase, she turns conception into a pursuit in which the pursuers are also pursued. Sex is not described romantically or morally; it’s described as a force that has its own momentum and outcome. The couple is both agent and prey: they acted, but now something acts through them. That contradiction—human choice meeting biological inevitability—gives the poem its restless energy. The speaker’s tone here is knowing, almost austere, as if she’s determined to tell the truth even when the truth doesn’t flatter anyone’s sense of control.

Shared body, shared traits: the child as an equation of two people

The third stanza shifts into a more recognizably human register by tracing the child through the parents’ bodies. The unborn is the strength the man’s arm knows and also the arc of flesh of the woman’s breast; it is made from both of them, not just carried by one. Then the poem suddenly becomes almost microscopic and precise: the precise crystals of their eyes. That phrase makes heredity feel like mineral geometry—beautiful, exact, impersonal. Even the most intimate features are framed as patterns and materials, as if love has been translated into anatomy.

The blood’s wild tree and the folded rose: beauty that is also danger

The central metaphor of growth—the blood’s wild tree—is both celebratory and ominous. A tree suggests branching, inevitability, and a life that exceeds the single moment that began it. Calling it wild keeps the earlier sense of uncontrollable force: blood is not polite; it surges, it multiplies. Yet the outcome is the intricate and folded rose, a figure of beauty and complexity. The rose is not a simple blossom; it is folded, layered, almost secretive—like the fetus hidden in the body. The poem holds both truths at once: what is forming is exquisitely made, and it is made by a process that can hurt, frighten, or overwhelm.

The final turn: from metaphysical wonder to fear

The last stanza takes the poem’s earlier paradoxes and makes them philosophical: the maker and the made, the question and reply. Pregnancy becomes a riddle that answers itself by existing. But the poem doesn’t end in triumph. It returns to blindness and impact: the blind head butting at the dark, then a sudden sharpness—the blaze of light along the blade. That blade image cuts through any purely tender reading. Birth (or the approach of birth) is not only illumination; it is incision, risk, and pain. The closing line—Oh hold me, I am afraid—is the human voice finally breaking through the grand metaphors. After naming the unborn as hunter, tree, rose, and blade, the speaker asks for something simple: bodily comfort and companionship in the face of a power she cannot fully command.

If the child is maker and made, what does that make the parents?

The poem keeps implying that the unborn is not merely an addition to the couple but a force that redefines them. If the third was already present in their embrace, then their intimacy was never only theirs. And if the coming light is also along a blade, then creation is inseparable from a kind of wounding. The final fear doesn’t contradict the earlier awe; it completes it, insisting that to bring life into the world is to stand before something holy and hazardous at the same time.