Speak

The speaker devotes the entirety of the third stanza to a mysterious figure named Jenny. Readers of other poems by Wright may recognize Jenny as Wright’s muse, the symbol for his inspiration. In this poem, something bad has happened to Jenny, who has sunk about as low in the world as a woman could do—given the perspective of 1960s America—becoming a sex worker, abandoning her baby in a trash can at the bus station, and prancing off to ostensibly have a good time somewhere else. This is all metaphor for the muse’s desertion: She is now inspiring other men with her desirability or sexuality, the child that is her poetic creation with Wright has been discarded, and she does not look back at the author she no longer cares for.

The speaker emphasizes how much he loves her by repeating her name, the second time with an endearment (“oh my Jenny” [Line 17]), and yet she has let him down in the most devastating way. Inspiration has vanished, sunk into the sordidness of the world from which he cannot extract it. The one he loved, who symbolically embodied the impulse to create and was the source of the possibility of transcendence, is gone.