Gwen Harwood Essay

As we get older we tend to reflect more on our life and get our priorities together. We tend to realize who and what is important, the people who mean the most to us and the ones we can’t live without. Who would those significant individuals be for us? For most people it would be their parents. In the poems “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz, and “My Mother” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, both writers express their emotion towards a parent. The poems are similar in many ways simply because they share a parent child relationship, they are also vastly different. “My Fathers Song” is a poem about a son who lost his father and is grieving and referring back to old memories, reflecting on their past and the wonderful time he had with his father. “My Mother” on the other hand is a poem about a daughter who lost her mother and is having a difficult time coping as she reflects on the decisions she made as a child and how that affected her relationship with her mother. Despite their differences, the two poems share a true connection of love towards their parent. Most notably “My Fathers Song” and “My Mother” differ in the relationship with their parent, the settings in which the memories they hold of their parents take place, and who they are mourning over, yet the two have a strong emphasis on love.

The father does not like “the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors [that] sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving.” He always talks about how “there were no years” and how everything was so constant. However, he is getting to the point where he is starting to know that his future is near. He starts to realize that when a thunderstorm comes. This brought the father “the revival of an old melodrama that [he] had seen long ago with childish awe.”He is no longer confused about who he is anymore, and he knows that he is getting old. As he starts to accept this, the lake which he saw was “infinitely precious and worth saving [is now] a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick.” Although he realizes that it is what it is, he knows that this is something he will have to accept, and his son is the new generations who is going to hold the future. His son, whom he always got confused as himself, now sees his son for his child. When the son goes swimming, the father “languidly, and with no thought of [swimming]. . .saw [his son] winch slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment.” Seeing how his son is strong and independent gives him the “chill of death.” He finally realizes that he is no longer a child, he is an adult who is going to die. A new generation will take his place, and

Everyone has a father. No matter if the father is present in a child’s life or not, he still exists and takes that role. A father has a major impact on his child whether he knows it or not, and that impact and example shapes the child’s perspective on life, and on love. The authors, Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton, share the impact of their fathers through poetry, each with their own take on how their fathers treated them. The poems “Forgiving My Father” and “Those Winter Sundays” have significant differences in the speaker’s childhood experiences, the tone of the works, and the imagery presented, which all relate to the different themes of each poem.

The tone of the poem changes as the poem progresses. The poem begins with energetic language like “full of heroic tales” and “by a mere swing to his shoulder”. The composer also uses hyperboles like “My father began as a god” and “lifted me to heaven”. The use of this positive language indicates to the responder that the composer is longing for those days – he is nostalgic. It also highlights the perspective of a typical child. The language used in the middle of the poem is highly critical of his father: “A foolish small old man”. This highlights the perspective of a typical teenager and signifies that they have generally conflicting views. The language used in the last section of the poem is more loving and emotional than the rest: “...revealing virtues such as honesty, generosity, integrity”. This draws attention to a mature adult’s perspective.

Poetry is a voice for addressing complex ideas that humanity has contemplated for thousands of years. Poets use a variety of literary techniques and stylistic features to convey these desired ideas. A prevalent theme deliberated in many poems across genres and throughout history is death. Death is unknown, therefore exploring it through poetry attempts to alleviate some of this uncertainty. This is done in a variety of literal and figurative contexts, including hope, freedom, literal death and beauty. Illuminating death in this way helps humanity to come to terms with something often feared.

Robert Frost and William Shakespeare have been celebrated by many people because of their ability to express themselves through the written word. Here we are years after their deaths analyzing these fascinating poems about life and death. It’s clear they had similar thoughts about this subject at the time of these writings, even though their characters could not have been more opposite. For both poets, life is too

Throughout ‘At Mornington’, Harwood uses descriptions, “night fell”, and similes, “the piece of this day will shine like light” when referring to the power of memory. During ‘The Violets’, Harwood uses imagery such as “ambiguous light” and metaphors such as “unreturning light” and “blurring darkness” to portray time’s ability to pass, and the way that you cannot regain time that is lost. During ‘The Violets’, Harwood also uses the metaphor of the “melting west” to represent a closing day, capturing the vivid colours of the natural phenomenon through the use of evocative imagery. Indeed, the second poem of the diptych of ‘Father and Child’ is ‘Nightfall’. These references to darkness, light and the closing of days can all be seen as symbolic of life, death and the transience of time, as when one day ends and night falls, the transience of that moment will be held in one’s memory regardless of the moment never being able to be relived.

Gwen Harwood’s poetry is very powerful for its ability to question the social conventions of its time, positioning the reader to see things in new ways. During the 1960’s, a wave of feminism swept across Australian society, challenging the dominant patriarchal ideologies of the time. Gwen Harwood’s poems ‘Burning Sappho’ and ‘Suburban Sonnet’ are two texts that challenge the dominant image of the happy, gentle, but ultimately subservient housewife. Instead, ‘Burning Sappho’ is powerful in constructing the mother as violent to reject the restraints placed on her by society, whilst Suburban Sonnet addresses the mental impact of the female gender’s confinement to the maternal and domestic sphere. Harwood employs a range of language and

Gwen Harwood’s poetry endures to engage readers through its poetic treatment of loss and consolation. Gwen Harwood’s seemingly ironic simultaneous examination of the personal and the universal is regarded as holding sufficient textual integrity that it has come to resonate with a broad audience and a number of critical perspectives. This is clearly evident within her poems ‘At Mornington’ and ‘A Valediction’, these specific texts have a main focus on motif that once innocence is lost it cannot be reclaimed, and it is only through appreciating the value of what we have lost that we can experience comfort and achieve growth.

A father-child relationship can be a good thing for some people, and problematic for others. There are different types of fathers. There are fathers who are always around their children, who give unconditional love and guidance. Then there are hard-to-please fathers who drain their children with extremely high expectations, leading to a strained relationship. Moreover, there are fathers who cannot handle the responsibilities that come with fatherhood, this type of fathers walk out on the family when the situation gets tough. Many people see their fathers in one way as a child and grow to see them in a whole different light as adults. The richness and complexity of the child and father relationship are the reason many poets write about fatherhood and fathers.

Atwood’s “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” perfectly grasps the life-altering heartbreak that occurs after the loss of a child by utilizing literary devices such as imagery, personification, simile, and metaphor. In the poem, an image of a voyage is used to characterize a child’s journey from life to death. “The dangerous river”, is used as a metaphor to describe the birth canal which the child victoriously navigates, but after embarking upon the outside world, the child goes into a “voyage of discovery” (4) that results in his death in the river. “On a landscape stranger than Uranus” (14) emphasizes the estrangement felt by the mother without having any knowledge of the environment. Comparing it to Uranus she describes it to be just as strange as a another planet. In the ninth stanza, the mother reminisces the death of her child as she says, “My foot hit rock” (26) which is a representation that she has hit rock bottom and her life will now never be the same. The final simile of the poem, “I planted him in his country / like a flag” (28-29) identifies the relationship between the dead child and the land. It ties the mother to the land in a way that had not been thought of, a way that is fraught with grief. An extended metaphor is developed throughout the poem, comparing the experience of giving birth that the character had, to a river and its contents. It helps to understand the different stages of birth by expressing the hurricane of emotions, and incidents that occurred with the use of waves expressing times of difficulty and pain.

Edward Taylor was not the only emotionally and spiritually struggling poet living in a grueling society, Anne Bradstreet did as well. “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old”, her first of three dead grandchildren poem, she uses literary devices such as anaphoric repetition, iambic pentameter, and iambic hexameter. Bradstreet uses anaphoric repetition in the first stanza, lines one through lines 3, when repeating “farewell”, thus showing her reluctance to say goodbye to her beloved grandchild, Elizabeth. Bradstreet intentionally uses iambic pentameter to mimic and heartbeat, showing the heartfelt and heartbreaking nature of her loss. She uses iambic hexameter to break the rhythm of the heartbeat she has built into her poetry, giving way to the traumatic and heartbreaking loss.

Emily Dickinson lost her father on June 16, 1874 (Sewall 69). The sudden loss of her father stunned her and she wrote in a letter that she was “wondering where he is. Without any body, I keep thinking. What kind can that be” (Letter, 471). When Dickinson’s mother passed away in November of 1882, Dickinson also wrote in a letter about her “wonder at her fate” and she was “seeking what it means” (Letter, 815). The “wonder” in both letters shows that Emily Dickinson is a person who looks inward for the mystery of death. Many of her poems convey her preoccupation with death, concern with immortality and doubts about fulfillment beyond the grave. I will analyze “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” (591) and “Because I could not stop for Death” (479), both of which deal with the death and eternity. These two poems reflect the conflicting attitudes of Emily Dickinson towards afterlife.

Both poems make allusions to Greek deities as a metaphor for the common perception that the father is the dominant one in a family. The numerous attempts of the speaker’s infatuation with “The Colossus” with restoring the fallen statue and Olds’ comparison of alcoholism to the Greek deity, Saturn both vividly symbolize that a father’s decisions whether its life or in death, has its consequences. In, addition it is for a young girl growing up to have a father figure in their lives and how the absence of a father figure can impact a young woman’s life tremendously.

In her poem “For A Father,” Elise Partridge explores an undeniable strong bond between a father and his children. To start with, the death of the father is being described in this poem. He is the subject as the author noted, “Remember after work you grabbed our skateboard / crouched like a surfer, wingtips over the edge;” (1-2). The word wingtips is a symbol as it is generally a man’s shoes and also, he was just getting home from work. On the other hand, the poem is told by a child who illustrates the father’s enthusiasm and eagerness to make them happy by stating, “Or that August night you swept us to the fair?” (6). That is to say, children find fun and happiness at the fair especially when accompanied by their