Summary
The narrator addresses her poem to a Year. She asks of the Year to be like her great-great-grandmother,a "legendary devotee of the arts." Yet, the woman had eight children and rarely had an opportunity to paint.
One day, she was sitting on a high rock next door to a river in Switzerland when she saw her second son stuck on an ice floe, heading toward a waterfall.
One of her daughters was slow to get to him because of her heavy petticoats, but she stuck out an alpenstock and saved him.
The great-great-grandmother knew she could do nothing to save the boy.
She decided to sketch the scene with "the artist's isolating eye."
This sketch is the proof of the story's veracity.
The narrator concludes that Year ought to give her the older woman's firmness for a Mother's day present.
Analysis
“Request to a Year” is a frequently anthologized work of Wright’s, appreciated for its simple structure, compelling protagonist, and memorable imagery. But it is a more complicated poem than initially meets the eye, offering a subtle commentary on gender and the nature of being an artist.
The poem begins with the poet addressing a personified Year, asking it to give her the gift of her great-great-grandmother’s “attitude” and “firmness of… hand.” The older woman is described as a “legendary devotee of the arts,” but one with “little opportunity for painting pictures” because she has eight children. The scene that the poet uses as her evidence for her ancestor’s admirable traits is one in which one of the sons was stuck on an ice floe in a river in Switzerland, heading toward a perilously tall waterfall (one of the daughters ends up saving him at the last moment). The great-great-grandmother knew that “Nothing, it was evident, could be done,” so, with her “artist’s isolating eye” she “hastily sketched the scene.” The sketch “survives to prove the story by,” and the poet hopes she can have some of this mental fortitude.
As aforementioned, there is a bit to unpack here. Firstly, the poem gives a brief nod to the difficulties women—and women artists—had, stating outright that while the great-great-grandmother loved the arts and saw herself as a painter, her eight(!) children preclude her from having opportunities to practice her art. It is not easy to begrudge her a chance to paint a fantastic scene if such opportunities are so few and far between; after all, a true artist does not let much stand in their way of their passion. Nandini Sahu explains the poem in such a vein: “the mother has let the boy go exploring, to find himself and the world, and when he gets into trouble she’s too far away to do anything except give him ‘life through art,’ so to speak. The essence is, an artist—or anyone else for that matter—cannot give way to self-indulgent helplessness.”
Yet the dispassionate, cool, and perhaps even indifferent tone of the poem is unsettling. Is it really laudable for a person to see their child headed towards imminent death and to not demonstrate any emotion, instead taking up pen and paper? Is this consideration more disturbing to the reader since it is a mother and not a father, defying all traditional notions of motherhood?
On the other hand, it is wise to consider that there are other motivations for the tone beyond the surface-level connotation of motherly indifference. Susan Lever says that the poem “proclaimed the need for the artist to achieve detachment,” and indicated awareness of “the dangers of emotional exaggeration” even as it “used the female predicament to great effect.” This insight adds to the sense that the poem is more about the nature of being an artist than it is about an individual mother (though issues of gender are inextricable).
