Flame-Tree in a Quarry
"Flame-Tree in a Quarry" is a poem by Australian poet Judith Wright.
It was originally published in The Bulletin on 3 December 1947, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.
Synopsis
The poet sees a Queensland flame-tree growing out of a quarry and sees it as "the world's desire", becoming "filled with fire" in the process.Critical reception
In her 1995 critical discussion of the work of Judith Wright for Oxford University Press Jennifer Strauss called the poem an "exultant celebration of rebirth confidently symbolises a correspondence between poetic and natural creativity. " Strauss also described it as "perhaps Wright's most striking celebration of the tree as providing, through its embodiment of the natural power of the life-force, a formula for poetry."Writing about the experiences of Australian authors in the natural world in "Hugging the Shore: The Green Mountains of South-East Queensland", a chapter of The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers, Ruth Blair comments that Judith Wright doesn't just write about what she sees she "does the further work of the poet which is to record the interactions between the individual and the world outside the self and to draw meaning from experience." When Wright writes about the flame-tree she finds it "the very stuff of life, protesting the human desecration of the landscape."