Leap Into the Light
A close look at a poem by James Wright
Driving home in the dark on the first warm-wet night of spring, we could hear a cacophony of chanting peeper frogs even through the closed car windows and hum of tires on pavement. Then, on a smaller road, nearing home, there they were, small flashes in the headlights, “taking strange wing,” “leaping into the light,” and I cringed wondering how many I was crushing beneath my wheels. This favorite poem came quickly to mind, as it does every spring.
Small Frogs Killed On The Highway
James Wright
Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
If I had the chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know.
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Of the moon. They can't see,
Not yet.
The poem is short, a flash, not unlike the flashes of leaping frogs seen in your headlights driving along on wet spring nights, and it quickly leaps into the metaphysical, the metaphoric, positing right away a dynamic connection between driver and small frog.
Those first lines “Still, / I would leap too / into the light, / If I had the chance…” immediately transfers the driver from behind the wheel, out of their safe space, into the imagined space of something much smaller, much frailer, yearning to “leap into the light” with abandon, oblivious to their imminent danger and likely destruction. Here “leap into the light” suggests a deep, primitive yearning to throw oneself into the unknown, the mystical, the transcendent—and in that next line this is emphasized more emphatically still—“It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field / On the other side of the road.”
The syntax here makes the “it is everything” both refer back to the light the frog (and poet/speaker/driver) would leap into and “the wet green stalk of field / On the other side of the road.” The simple comma after “everything” invites us to consider the other side of the road as a kind of “everything,” too. The “wet green stalk of the field” the frogs have been moving toward before the sudden intrusion of light appears, something bigger and more mysterious still, was perhaps the first “everything” to them, the first thing they felt compelled to move toward—that banal desire to attain a place of comfort interrupted with something more urgent (and fulfilling?) The lines become still more intertwined and multifaceted when we then find, “They crouch there, too, faltering in terror / And take strange wing…” If you were to begin the poem with the previous line, “On the other side of the road,” these lines would only have one way of reading them—that they are also crouching on the other side of the road, terrified, before leaping into view.
But Wright, instead, has found a way to interweave perceptions and motivations and points of view through the carefully wrought syntax of these lines—so that the leaping into the light the frogs are doing becomes—all at once—something the driver/poet also yearns to do even as the frog’s first leaping was more simply toward the green stalks on the other side of the road, where now other frogs are seen, terrified by the sudden explosion of light in the darkness they too feel compelled to leap into (“take strange wing”).
….Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know.
These shifting vantage points begin to take on much deeper meaning here. The first two lines are clearly from the drivers’ perspectives, noting the unmoving dead frogs and then the paradoxically “alive forever” dead frogs who have been seen leaping into the headlights (and are now assumed dead?). The last two lines shift to the frog’s perspective, letting us see the lights as a frog might; it is not the driver’s steady beam, but a sudden rush/intrusion on the darkness. And “alive forever” here certainly bears richly suggestive meaning, especially coming after the phrase, “it is everything.” In what sense do they live forever by having leapt? Is this suggestive of religious belief/a kind of salvation? The whole of the poem does almost feel like a biblical verse, and I can’t help but think of the famous John 3:16, “Whosoever believes in me shall not perish but have everlasting life.” And might the point of view even begin to shift with the words “alive forever”?
Is Wright suggesting that ending one’s life with a tremendous leap into the unknown brings a kind of eternality, somehow making you less “dead”? Thinking of light as a classical symbol of knowledge also suggests that leaping toward knowledge of things that transcend the more mundane (the wet stalk of the field) is a deeply worthy action. Or do the frogs become eternal only through the observation of the driver-poet who sees them as somehow concurrently dead and “alive forever,” acknowledging the complexities of the moment, using them as a tool to know more deeply—the whole of the situation a kind of blinding light Wright is leaping into with his poem? And as with the shifting perspectives throughout, are both somehow concurrently the case and the ability to see from multiple perspectives itself an essential leap?
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.
The last lines of the stanza merges perspectives still more emphatically, likening the drivers’ responses to the scene in now wholly frog-like terms, where their emotional reactions become frogs “burrow[ing] backward into dank pools.” Driving home last night, and on many other spring nights for the many years now that I have known this poem, I again faced the dilemma Wright must have as he conceived of the poem—of needing to get home and not being able to do that without avoiding the consequence of killing small frogs. For Wright, this disturbing moment could, for some, potentially only be a situation where “nothing begets nothing”—a kind of answer to the “everything” of the light in the first lines of the poem. Is he equating the guilt and unease of the driver to the opposite of the alive-forever (though dead or soon to be dead) frogs? Is this nothingness, opposed to their everything-ness, a result of not “leaping,” but instead “burrowing”? Do “leaping” and “burrowing” have other correlations in our lives—acts of passivity and reactiveness versus acts of bold, daring action? Is the poem itself Wright’s attempt to not burrow backwards but to leap toward the thing that makes him uncomfortable, recasting it as art that is “alive forever”?
Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Of the moon. They can't see,
Not yet.
Wright gives us a new stanza to end the poem, a final shift away from the richly integrated perspectives of frogs and drivers, where we find the blind, not yet fully formed frogs, unable to leap, but only to dance—still powerfully drawn to and reacting in celebration (“dancing”) to light, now just the mere “quarter thumbnail / Of the moon.” The lines certainly suggest a kind of intuitive, primitive urge that will later be pursued when they become full-fledged frogs and see with their eyes the “sudden” rush of auto headlights, and leap. And given that since the speaker of the poem would “leap too, if I had the chance” and that the frog and human perspectives slip so easily from one to the other, I get the sense that Wright is singing the praises of following primitive urges, of leaping toward the unknown with abandon, of not just burrowing backward into the nothingness of inaction, overwhelmed by the realities of life/death playing out all around you. Light as a classical symbol for knowledge may well also invite us to consider that Wright is expressing his desire as a poet to leap toward the philosophical unknown with his poetry as opposed to what other, perhaps more “confessional” poets may do when they “burrow back” into themselves (and into a kind of solipsistic dark pool of nothingness).
The existential philosopher in me thinks of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Heidegger’s claim of doing “cartwheels in Nietzsche’s void,” and how in the words of Heidegger, you should “comport yourself authentically toward death”—let your finiteness and imperfectability (your frog-like smallness and vulnerability) heighten your understanding of what really matters in this life, these “cartwheels” we make toward deeper understanding not unlike the “strange wing” of a leaping frog or the nuanced dance of the perfect poetic line.
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