Analysis Of Not Waving But Drowning

Tim Winton’s short story, ‘The Water Was Dark and it Went Forever Down’, depicts a nameless, adolescent girl who is battling the voices inside her head along with the powerful punishments at the hands of her inebriated mother. The key concerns of life and death are portrayed through the girl’s viewpoint as she compares her life with her sad, depressed mother. Anonymous as she is, the girl constantly makes an attempt to escape the outbursts, that come as a result to her mother’s drinking, by submerging herself into the water. An extended metaphor is used when expressing the girl as a machine and her will to continue surviving in her sombre life.

Many songs have deep and emotional messages throughout them, but few can match the aptitude portrayed in “The Dead Heart” This is depicted with the help of the text structure. “The Dead Heart” was made up of 8 stanzas. The rhyme pattern is ABCC, and changes throughout different stanzas this is to show the displeasure of the Indigenous people, when white men came and took their land. Indigenous people felt many things during this time period, happy and satisfied weren’t what they felt, instead they felt: hopeless, depressed, unfortunate and miserable. There are constant slant rhymes in the song, an example includes: Know your custom don't speak your tongue, white man came took everyone” The pure reason why “Midnight Oil” made these two sentences slant rhyme opposed to normal rhyme is to show the discomfort and distress when the British took their land, their most prized possession and their home. The structure used throughout “The Dead Heart” is phenomenal and truly captivates the true emotion the artist’s intended. Not only is the structure used extraordinary, but the poetic devices used truly entice the audience and elicit an emotional response.

The poem, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” written by Margaret Atwood was awfully sad and tragic as it described the death of her son and its lasting effect on her. The speaker begins the poem by describing how her son was brave, adventurous and led with success. However, the mood of the poem quickly changes as the young boy slipped off the bank and into the water. From there, the boy struggles in the water before eventually drowning. As he is pulled out of the water the mother realizes that all the plans that she had for the future are over and that a part of her has died alongside her son. Atwood uses multiple types of figurative language that gives this poem a sense of realism and really shows the reader the devastation and heartache that occurs after the loss of a child.

The young man in the poem loses his identity as he develops into the ruthless world of adulthood with its dehumanizing competition of ‘money-hungry, back-stabbing’ and ‘so-and-so.’ These exaggerated words and clichés

Evocative and visceral, Irving Layton’s “The Swimmer” follows the impassioned swim of a man as a metaphor for man’s relation to nature. The poem begins with the titular swimmer breaking away from his vessel and into the sea. Layton elaborates upon the swimmer’s journey underwater, as a mystical intercourse between man and Earth. In the final stanza, the man is expelled by the sea and returned to land. In “The Swimmer”, through the description of an incestuous relationship communicated through erotic imagery, Layton expounds on the theme of the connected, yet ultimately detached, relationship between man and nature.

The issues that Lassell discusses in this poem are those that take place every day in our world. The pain of losing a brother

The last line in the poem “and since they were not the ones dead, turned to their own affairs” lacks the emotions the reader would expect a person to feel after a death of a close family member. But instead, it carries a neutral tone which implies that death doesn’t even matter anymore because it happened too often that the value of life became really low, these people are too poor so in order to survive, they must move on so that their lives can continue. A horrible sensory image was presented in the poem when the “saw leaped out at the boy’s hand” and is continued throughout the poem when “the boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh…the hand was gone already…and that ended it”, this shows emphasis to the numbness the child felt. The poem continues with the same cold tone without any expression of emotion or feelings included except for pain, which emphasizes the lack of sympathy given. Not only did the death of this child placed no effect on anyone in the society but he was also immediately forgotten as he has left nothing special enough behind for people to remember him, so “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This proves that life still carries on the same way whether he is present or not, as he is insignificant and that his death

Mourning and mortality is a constant concern that transcends time. Slessor’s poetic treatment of these ideas continue to engage readers as it evokes a sense of awareness. This is evident in Kenneth Slessor 's poem Five Bells as the persona 's grief for his deceased friend, Joe Lynch causes him to realise the significance of time and the strength of spiritual attachments. This further leads him to question the purpose of human life.

Once I was able to associate these words to emotions and issues present in everyday life, the poem started to make me feel sad. I began thinking about all of the emotions and feelings that everyone hides as they go about life. For example, how the waitress I see once a week may have an eating disorder, or how the singer I look up to just lost her son, or the businessman who got laid off today. Everyone has their own personal battle that they carry everywhere, at any given moment. This explains why the setting is so plain, since the internal struggles people face affect them even at a bus stop. While each person waits, the waitress may be thinking about how much skinnier the person next to her is. The singer could be remembering when she held her baby. And the business man could be planning how to break the news to his wife. No matter how small, everyone experiences a type of trauma or bad experience, and this poem seemed to show what happens when these emotions become bottled up. No one can help each other because they are so stuck within their own issues. The difficulty helping others reminded me of the idea of having to take care of yourself before being able to take care of others.

This poem talks about nature and death. William Cullen Bryant shares that nature can make death less painful. He says that when we start to think about death, we should go outside, and look around and listen to the natural earth sounds. This is supposed to remind us that when we die, we will mix back into the earth. The poem tells us that when we die, we will not be alone. We will be with every other person that has ever been buried, In the ground, which in this poem is called the “great tomb of man”. It also tells us that even those that are still living will soon die and join in the great tomb of man. This poem is meant to comfort those that are afraid of dying and death in general. At the end of the poem, we are told to think of death as

This theme is brought through the song by showing multiple literary devices. Such as “I'm the one at sail, I’m the master of my sea”. This metaphor shows the realization and empowerment that oneself can give in a depressing situation. This simile “Falling like ashes to the ground, Hoping my feelings they would drown” compares his feeling of sadness and depression to ashes, and wanting them to drown and vanish, from his life. This line, “All the hate that you’ve heard has turned your spirit to a dove” explains how all of the hate that he has experienced and gone through has turned his feelings around, and decided to look on the bright side of things. Personally I think this is a great

In my thoughts, Harwood’s poetry engages readers through its poetic treatment of loss and consolation throughout relationships as well as its exploration of universal themes about human existence and processes of life. Harwood’s poetry validates the consoling influence of childhood experiences upon adult development evident in both At Mornington and A Valediction where they both explore one sense of loss and consolidation. Harwood cleverly includes personas with their own feelings and anxieties to outlook on the present and future and the power of memories held with past relationships. Relationships link within Harwood’s poetry as throughout life she experiences suffering and includes her personal voice and life within the story of her poem.

Someone will always die and they will have a funeral, but can you imagine losing someone close to you? How about you brother? In the short story “The Scarlet Ibis” there are many situations when death is among Doodle and his body. James Hurt wrote the story the “Scarlet Ibis” about a boy that was suppose to be a miscarriage and even the doctor said that he would not survive. He lives on with his brother to help him through his adventurous life. The brother is very ashamed that his young brother came to be disabled and he teaches his to walk. All of this James Hurt creates through his writing. Throughout essay there will be multiple ways the author is expression the tone. Through the use of figurative language, imagery, and symbolism, James Hurst creates a Mournful tone in his short story, “The Scarlet Ibis”.

These two seemingly opposite tones and moods existing in one poem simultaneously resemble the ambiguity in the speaker that he reveals when he describes his condition very ambiguously. For instance, in the first line, he portrays himself as a “dead man”(1), but in the line immediately after, the dead man is moaning, which is biologically impossible. The unclear subject raises the issue of who the speaker is, if he should not be able to comment on himself because he is already dead. When the speaker uses the same pronouns, “he” and “him” from both the first person and the third person perspectives to refer to himself, this becomes even more puzzling; the readers are no longer sure of who the speaker is and who the subject of the poem is. One possible cause of these uncertainties is the discrepancy between the speaker’s real self and his public self; one that resembles who he

The author uses several types of poetic terms in this poem to develop the theme of a person accepting grief in their life. One poetic term she used was a metaphor. The metaphor is “Ah, grief, I should not treat you like a homeless dog.” Although grief is not a type of dog, the author wants us to think of grief in the same way that we would think about a homeless dog. The same phrase can also be considered a simile. The author intends for us to think of grief as being like a homeless dog. Another way that the author expressed her theme was by using a specific kind of repetition like anaphora. Several words are repeated at the beginning of two or more lines and sentences in the poem. These words are “you,” “your,” “my,” and “and.” There are also several phrases that are repeated throughout the poem. These phrases are “your own,” “I should,” and “you need.” She uses these repetitive words and phrases in the poem to describe a conversation that a person is having with grief.