SOURCE: “Wright's ‘At the Slackening of the Tide,’” in The Explicator, Vol. XXII, No. 4, December, 1963, p. 29.

In the following essay, Toole discusses the conflict between scientific knowledge and spiritual meaning awakened in the poet after he has seen a drowning.

At first reading, one immediately realizes that James Wright's “At the Slackening of the Tide” is a poem of disillusionment. The narrator, apparently a poet, came to the beach to enjoy the beauty of nature and to compose; but the accidental drowning which he witnessed brought to his mind the lurking horror which is at the center of things and robbed him of the ability to take pleasure in the beauty which may be found at the surface of life. Though he has been aware of the implications of his dark suspicion that life is a result of a blind collocation of atoms, he had allowed them to...