Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright

First published: 1963, in The Branch Will Not Break

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” is a short poem in free verse, its one-dozen lines divided into three unequal stanzas, forming an argument with two premises and an inescapable conclusion. The title of the poem both identifies the poem’s locale and suggests the cyclical, seasonal, almost ritual quality of the football game which is the poem’s central focus. In the bleak industrial Midwest of James Wright’s poetry, the stylized violence of the gridiron takes the place of the traditional harvest festival celebrated by more peaceful, agrarian folk.

Wright wrote “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” in the first person, and it is typical of many poems that he wrote, not behind the mask of a fictional persona, but in his own passionate voice. Wright was an advocate for both the confessional style and the poetry of personality, which were in vogue in the 1960’s. It is quite logical, therefore, to identify the speaker of this poem with Wright himself, especially since Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, and grew up in that working-class community watching his father and others being brutalized by grueling factory work.

The first stanza of “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” takes place in the Shreve High football stadium, where the first game of the season teases Wright “out of thought,” much as John Keats is put into a reverie by his famous Grecian urn. As he sits in the stadium and observes the men around him, he cannot help but think of their lives outside the event, and he presents the reader with a grim picture of men whose work is physically and emotionally draining as well as ultimately unsatisfying. It is these broken men, these “Polacks” and “Negroes,” who sit in the stadium “Dreaming of heroes.” The poem strongly suggests that these men are both reminiscing about their own former greatness and reveling in the present victories of their sons.

In stanza 2, Wright extends his imagination to encompass the women of the community who, equally affected by the squalor of their lives, are “Dying for love.” In a very short stanza of only eighteen words, Wright is able to characterize the family life of the spectators and the players of the game. These thwarted, needy women are one of the reasons “All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.”

Stanza 3 is a direct result of what the reader now understands was the argument of the first two stanzas. Men such as these, with wives such as these, mired in a situation such as this, are responsible for the spectacle of football, where all the combined frustrations of the parents are acted out in the beautiful and terrifying bodies of their sons, who are doomed to repeat the cycle of flowering and death as surely as the seasons perennially repeat themselves.

Forms and Devices

In his first two books, The Green Wall (1957) and Saint Judas (1959), Wright was composing clearly under the influence of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson. In The Branch Will Not Break, where “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” first appeared, Wright was turning away from the traditional verse forms represented by these mentors and embracing the poetic doctrines of Robert Bly and such foreign poets as Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Georg Trakl, all of whom Wright had been reading and translating. What he borrowed from these widely varied sources, as well as from a number of Chinese poets, was a more spontaneous and visionary approach to poetry and a firm commitment to William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum, “No ideas but in things.”

It is not surprising, then, that the two most important poetic strategies in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” are diction and imagery. The brevity of the poem is only possible because of the haiku-like precision of the language and details. While the poem is not without figurative language—for example, the moving simile, “Their women cluck like starved pullets”—it relies more heavily on the freshness of its simple, powerful, and precise diction. This spare language becomes nearly apocalyptic in the last stanza of the poem, where the sons “grow suicidally beautiful” and “gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.” The choice of a word such as “gallop,” more usually attributed to horses than men, helps the reader to see these young athletes as the powerful, graceful animals that they are, and makes the reader even more sensible of the degrading forces against which they must ultimately struggle. Wright is also addicted to the plain words of traditional Romantic poetry, and the word “beautiful” and “terrible” appear in this poem as well as throughout his work, as a kind of touchstone for his thoughts.

There is a strong pattern of animal imagery in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” which emphasizes the dehumanizing influence of the mines and the steel mills in these people’s lives—it is no accident that the women are seen as chickens and the young boys as horses. While Wright’s images are always strongly visual, they also appeal to the reader’s other senses, as in the “gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood.” Here the reader can not only see the ashen workers but can also feel the heat of the smoldering furnace.

Wright’s great skill is his ability to turn three short images into an indictment of a whole way of life. If the game of poetry is one of compression, of saying the most about a subject in the least number of words, then Wright shows himself a consummate player in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.”

Bibliography

Dougherty, David. James Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Dougherty, David. The Poetry of James Wright. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991.

Roberson, William. James Wright: An Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995.

Smith, Dave. The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Stein, Kevin. James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989.