Published in the TLS in 1976, "Architects" by the Australian poet Judith Wright (1915–2000) – perhaps better known for writing poems about flora and fauna – is a Möbius strip of a poem. Its starting point seems straightforwardly metaphorical: buildings, like bodies, have skeletal infrastructures, have "corridors of nerve and vein", and must withstand the twin threats of "time and gravity". The third stanza, however, with its echo of W. H. Auden's "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love", abruptly throws the poem offcourse. An early Audenesque neatness gives way to a shifting metre and unravelling less-than-half-rhyme. "Simple", says the poem, as it goes on to describe not "buildings" in terms of the human skeleton but states of mind as the built environment reflects them. How did the poem get so complicated?

Architects

All buildings type the skeleton
vertical structures braced and strong
with pelvic floor and shoulderbone
the rooms within like organs strung
on muscle, rib and artery,
with corridors of nerve and vein;
threatened by time and gravity.
Buildings depict the shapes of work.

But when the architect must make
the shapes of Parliament and Crown,
of wisdom, art or government,
gallery, temple, library,
he takes the curve, the arch, the dome,
and chooses marble's clarity
to flesh the hard-pressed membrane out.
Skull's swell of thought and memory
houses time past and time to come.

Your head lay heavy on my arm,
so massive, though so delicate,
that love could scarcely bear the weight.

On great Ur-slabs of concrete terraces
or rust-red bones of girder and cross-member
they sit, eating their sandwiches
at noon. They look at home there
among the stylised trunks of metal forests,
the unfinished work.
Maybe the half-built is our proper habitat
manhandling raw material
in basic contact, manipulation, direction
of various substances. Simple . . .

Later, the place changes.
Dressed in plastic wallboards, fitted
with doors and windows, connected
by cables, wires and pipes to the feed-in world
it becomes part of a circuit.

Coming in later to consult officials,
sign papers, buy, sell, argue over contracts,
they observe the fake marble, the carpets
covering those bare encounters of concrete and steel,
the corridors scurrying with unfamiliar errands –
wondering. Wondering about building,
How whatever we construct gets complicated,
gets out of order and beyond control.

JUDITH WRIGHT (1976)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "The Winnowing Dream" by Walter de la Mare, click here.

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