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Drifters Poem

Decent Essays

This text response will be looking the comparison of the two poems, ‘Drifters’ by Bruce Dawe, And ‘In the park’ by Gwen Harwood under the name of Walter Lehmann. Drifters is about a seemingly constantly moving family, it describes the process the family will go through leaving their newest home. In the park is about a seemingly single mother raising her children, it describes the mother sitting in the park with her children when a previous lover comes by and talks about the children. With in each poem, the form and structure, language techniques and the tone and message will be analysed and compared with the other to gather a grater understanding of the Australian voice. In both ‘In the park’ and ‘Drifters’, The poets use form and structure to create mood. Harwood makes use of Stanzas while Dawe makes use of Free Verse. Harwood’s Stanzas each contain a different mood whilst Dawe uses Free Verse to emphasis the poems story of constant movement. The use of …show more content…

This is achieved in both poems through the use of a third person narrator. Again in both poems the narrator again is in the position of observing events. Bothe Dawe and Harwood use words like ‘his’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ this places the reader at a distance to the characters which creates the feeling that you have a greater knowledge overall than if it would forwardly just depict a single scene. Harwood uses present tense ‘ allowing the audience to make inferences on the past and future of the mother and her children. Dawe takes a different approach to this making the poem future tense implying that what is going on in the poem happens constantly and can now be predicted. Harwood also makes use of past tense ‘she loved once’ but reverts back to present tense ‘too late’ adding melancholy to the poem. Both poets effectively convey emotions experienced by people living on Australian land through the use of narrative

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