Summary
In the first stanza, the narrator says that "now" all of her senses are coming together.
She compares this gathering to a lily gathering the elements together, and paints an image of opposites, such as "stillness" and "moving."
The shapes that come from nothing are now a "rhythm that dances" and a "pure design."
In the second stanza, she writes again of opposites like "sounds" and "silences" coming together and sending her spinning.
She uses the image of a weaver, who brings together thread to keep the web growing.
The experience is beyond her knowledge and her understanding.
She concludes by returning to the "rhythm" and noting that it "is not mine."
Analysis
“Five Senses” is more abstract than Wright’s other famous poems, not telling a story or evoking a concrete place or moment in time but rather exploring the nebulous feelings of what it means to be totally porous to the world around oneself.
Everyone knows the five senses—touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste—and it is probably most common to consider them individually. A person might solely dedicate themselves to sound if they attend a symphony, or focus on taste as they relish a good meal, or delight in the softness of a baby’s skin. But Wright’s poem is about the complete and utter abandonment to all senses at once, and what an overwhelming sensation can result from that confluence of the five.
She begins the poem with the word “Now,” as if she is just about to embark on a new experience that will marshal her senses. She repeats the word “all” twice to show that the senses are coming together, and then joins together binaries like “stillness” and “moving” and “dark” and “shining” to show how former divisions no longer stand. Her openness to the world is abundantly clear, for she says that what she experiences “spring[s] from nothing,” meaning she did not come to this experience with preconceived notions, and “becomes” something else—a “rhythm that dances, / a pure design.”
Words and images like “rhythm,” “dance,” “design,” “pattern,” and the weaver metaphor seem to situate Wright’s experience in the arts. The meaning may be twofold: 1) the five senses entwine to create something new, just like a work of art arises from the physical and mental tools of the artist and 2) the “Now” moment that begins the poem could be Wright engaging with a work of art, which prompts her to use art-related language to describe how she feels.
A more likely possible meaning is that Wright is in nature and letting all of her senses take over. The reader can imagine her hearing the sounds of birds, feeling the ground beneath her feet, tasting salt in the air or a berry from a bush, smelling the plants and the dust, and seeing everything, wide-eyed, around her. And given Wright’s passion for the natural world, as well as her ardent activism on its behalf, this interpretation may be as close as the reader gets to the meaning of the poem.
It is not an easy thing to use language to describe what is, as with the senses, essentially ineffable, but Wright knows that poetry can be a conduit to understanding the truth of something in a way other written forms cannot. Robert Zeller lauds the poet’s use of language, commenting that Wright “seems to have concluded that it is language, along with the desire to name and understand, that makes true knowing possessable.”
Wright felt that poetry was as important, and perhaps as imperiled, as the natural world (in her 1992 collection Going on Talking she wrote of her "interest in those questions of environmental loss and deterioration... and... parallel interest in poetry and in its... increasing neglect and unpopularity. I think the two facts are connected, far more than we suspect," so it is unsurprising that her work, such as “Five Senses,” yoked the two. Wright’s biographer Shirley Walker (quoted in Zeller) explained, "Poetry can heal the break between man and nature, for the value which has been abstracted from the natural world by the analytic and objective world view can be recaptured by the poet.” In “Five Senses,” then, we have Wright-as-subject using her senses in the natural world to appreciate it, and then Wright-as-poet writing about it, which in turn prompts the reader to ruminate on the gloriousness of being fully present and allowing one’s senses to open themselves up to the world around them—especially as parts of it are disappearing.
