One of the most famous lines of American poetry

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

-- James Wright

Why do I love this line so much?

It's so simple and heartfelt and ambiguous and unexpected. To me it has the same shocking and memorable conclusion as Rilke's Sonnet on an Archaic Torso of Apollo, which ends with the conclusion

"You must change your life".

You must, and still you might have wasted it. Who knows? And is that bad? Who knows even less? But it's soreal poetry to me, because it catches the contradictions and emotions of living, breathing, thinking, and those magical moments when - for better or worse - you see the world in a different way.

What others thought

Back in 1964, the poet and critic Thom Gunn criticised those who went on about the newness of the poem, complained

 The final line is perhaps exciting because we are surprised to encounter something so different from the rest of the poem, but it is certainly meaningless. The more one searches for an explicit meaning in it, the vaguer it becomes. Other general statements of different import could well be substituted for it and the poem would neither gain nor lose strength.

from Thom Gunn, "Modes of Control," a review of The Branch Will Not Break in The Yale Review (1964), rep. in Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano, eds. James Wright: The Heart of the Light (Ann Arbor, U Michigan P, 1990), p. 160

But another contemporary poet, Robert Bly, writing under the pseudonym of Clunk, argued back 

It is clear Gunn does not understand the poem, or rather, it is not the poem he doesn’t understand but the emotion. He can’t bring himself to understand how an intelligent man would have such an emotion. After all, too, Gunn is an educated man; he has trained his intelligence; other people, chaotic ones, may have wasted their lives, but not he. What prevents Gunn from understanding is his habit of discursive reasoning, his rationalism. … In poems the deepest thoughts are often the most painful thoughts, and they come to consciousness only despite the rationalist road-blocks, by slipping past the defenses of the ego. In most men, the inner thoughts are never able to slip by these defenses of the ego. The ordinary mind has pickets everywhere, who make an impregnable ring.

From Crunk [pseudonym of Robert Bly], "The Work of James Wright," originally published in The Sixties no, 8 (1966), rep. in Dave Smith, ed. The Pure Clear Word (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1982), pp. 90-91.

I really sympathise with Bly on this - that's the emotion 'I have Wasted My Life" elicits in me.  That unguarded spontaneous thought that lands in your lap like a hailstone on a clear day. However, Wright himself had his own explanation for the last line.

I think that I didn’t realize it at the moment, but looking back on that poem I think that final line – "I have wasted my life" – is a religious statement, that is to say, here I am and I’m not straining myself and yet I’m happy at this moment, and perhaps I’ve been wastefully unhappy in the past because through my arrogance or whatever, and in my blindness, I haven’t allowed myself to pay true attention to what was around me. 

from Bruce Henricksen, "Poetry Must Think" (an interview with James Wright published in 1978), rep. in Annie Wright, ed. James Wright: Collected Prose (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1983), p. 184

So who's right? And actually, in this instance, who's wright? We all invent that poem as we read it, and bring our own meaning to the end. That meaning will still surprise and shock us, precisely because it is forceful and simple yet completely ambiguous. The line is not striving to be wilfully obscure. Quire the opposite. It is striving to be emotionally honest and clear, and yet leaving us guessing. That's why this is SOREAL POETRY. Wright himself confesses as much in another interview

It is not surrealistic. I said, at the end of that poem, "I have wasted my life" because it was what I happened to feel at that moment and as part of the mood I had while lying in the hammock. This poem made English critics angry. I have never understood what would have so infuriated them. They could say the poem was limp or that it did not have enough intellectual content. I can see that. But I hope that it did not pretend to. It just said, I am lying here in this hammock and this and that is happening. 

from Dave Smith, "James Wright: The Pure, Clear Word, an Interview" rep. from American Poetry Review (1980) in Dave Smith, ed. The Pure Clear Word (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1982), p. 29.

More on James Wright and his unusual background....

BIOGRAPHY of James Wright

  James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on December 13,
  1927. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother
  left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school
  beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a
  nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946,
  a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the
  American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and
  studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa
  in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The
  two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied
  the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He
  returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the
  University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley
  Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester
  College, and New York City's Hunter College.

  The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly
  influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his
  political and social concerns. He modeled his work after Thomas Hardy and
  Robert Frost, whose engagement with profound human issues and emotions he
  admired. The subjects of Wright's earlier books, The Green Wall (winner of
  the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, 1957) and Saint Judas (1959),
  include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from
  society for such reasons as poverty and sexual orientation, and they
  invite the reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation.
  Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving
  easily from stage to stage. His earlier work adheres to conventional
  systems of meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open,
  looser forms, as with The Branch Will Not Break (1963). James Wright was
  elected a fellow of The Academy of American Poets in 1971, and the
  following year his Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
  He died in New York City in 1980.

-- http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=74