Franz Wright's "The Raising of Lazarus"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Franz Wright was born in Vienna, Austria and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and California. He earned a BA from Oberlin College in 1977. His collections of poetry include The Beforelife (2001); God’s Silence (2006); Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004; Wheeling Motel (2009); Kindertotenwald (2011); and F (2013). In his precisely crafted, lyrical poems, Wright addresses the subjects of isolation, illness, spirituality, and gratitude. Of his work, he has commented, “I think ideally, I would like, in a poem, to operate by way of suggestion.”Critic Helen Vendler wrote in the New York Review of Books, “Wright's scale of experience, like Berryman's, runs from the homicidal to the ecstatic ... His best forms of or originality: deftness in patterning, startling metaphors, starkness of speech, compression of both pain and joy, and a stoic self-possession with the agonies and penalties of existence.” Langdon Hammer, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote of God’s Silence: “In his best poems, Wright grasps at the ‘radiantly obvious thing’ in short-lined short lyrics that turn and twist down the page. The urgency and calculated unsteadiness of the utterances, with their abrupt shifts of direction, jump-cuts and quips, mime the wounded openness of a speaker struggling to find faith.”

Wright received a Whiting Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He translated poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and Rene Char; in 2008 he and his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, co-translated a collection by the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears. He taught at Emerson College and other universities, worked in mental health clinics, and volunteered at a center for grieving children. His father was the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet James Wright. He died in 2015.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.4	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, April 11, 2025.
0:13.7	Today's poem is by Franz Wright, and it's called The Raising of Lazarus.
0:19.3	This poem has an epigraph which explains that writes poem in English is adapted from a fragment
0:28.8	found in the notebooks of Raina Maria Rilke in 1913.
0:34.7	And if you know Rilke's poetry, then I'm sure you will be able to discern his voice at moments in this poem.
0:43.9	While the poem touches the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, it focuses, it explores far more the strange and unprecedented phenomenon of the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, standing in the midst of walking, living, acting in the midst of humanity, generally speaking, and humanity localized in his friends who are grieving as he finds them after the death of his friend Lazarus.
1:20.6	But the most remarkable thing, the most striking thing about this poem is the way that it is able to put words to the utter mystery of the reversal of death
1:31.2	and the working backwards of death back into life and all that it means for the people
1:37.1	experiencing it.
1:39.4	Here is the Raising of Lazarus.
1:42.8	Adapted from the original notebook fragment written by Raynor Maria
1:46.4	Rilke in Spain in 1913. Evidently, this was needed because people need to be screamed at
1:55.6	with proof. But he knew his friends. Before they were, he knew them. And they knew that he would never
2:02.5	leave them there desolate. So he let his exhausted eyes close at first glimpse of the village
2:08.8	fringed with tall fig trees. Immediately he found himself in their midst. Here was Martha, sister
2:15.7	of the dead boy. He knew she would not stray, as he knew
2:19.9	which would. He knew that he would always find her at his right hand, and beside her, her sister Mary,
2:26.1	the one a whole world of horrors still stood in a vast circle pointing at. Yes, all were gathered
2:33.0	around him. And once again he began to explain to bewildered,
2:36.9	upturned faces where it was he had to go and why. He called them, my friends. The Logos, God's
2:44.9	creating word, the same voice that said, let there be light. Yet when he opened his eyes, he found himself
	...

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