Preview

What Is The Theme Of Change In Gwen Harwood's Poetry

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
275 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Is The Theme Of Change In Gwen Harwood's Poetry
Gwen Harwood Essay
‘The richness of Gwen Harwood’s poetry lies in their ability to lend themselves to particular interpretations, reflecting different concerns and values’. Discuss
INTRODUCTION
The poetry of Gwen Harwood can be viewed in different interpretations reflecting different values and concern, but all types of variant interpretations deal with theme of change, where the persona in all the poems goes through a process of changing, being influence by different factors including time, trauma, memory and discovery. This is clearly evident in the poems “The Glass Jar”, “Prize Giving” “Father and Child”, “Alter Ego”, “The Violets”, and “At Mornington” Even though all variant interpretations all deal with the change the persona goes through

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Home of Mercy

    • 642 Words
    • 3 Pages

    I think Gwen Harwood wrote her poem to not only outline the problem of unplanned pregnancy, but for the “onlooker” to have a different perception on this topic. Most people would look at them as “the ruined girls”, but I think Harwood is trying to make the reader feel compassion and sympathy for these underappreciated girls. She implies that they live very harsh lives, and touches on the notion that they aren’t mature physically (or mentally) when she refers to them as having “ripening bodies.” In my opinion, Gwen is blatantly telling the reader that they should see both sides of this argument and not to jump to conclusions about them.…

    • 642 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poem takes the form of a sonnet, most typically known as a gesture of love. However, in the poem Harwood mocks this love-theme. The woman is loved for her “softness”, “mane” and her “smell” by the beast that personifies a man. These are purely physical qualities. Insight into who the woman is beyond her body is intentionally omitted from the beat’s reminiscing. The attraction felt for woman is only skin deep and is misguided by the beast’s “rank longing”. The sexualisation in the first stanza is developed by the image of an evocative “thigh”. A carnal motif that is hidden behind the idealised ‘true love’ that is divulged shamelessly by Harwood. Subsequently the beast’s ‘love’ is only the lustful thoughts of her body. By unveiling the undertones of the couple’s erotic relationship, Harwood is being critical of the false notions of innocent attraction - replacing them with the “love feast” that is sexual desire. It is Harwood’s challenge against the orthodox expectation ‘purity’…

    • 891 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    While I perceive the poem to be one that reflects on her youth and reminisces on the wonderful memories she shared with her family and the feeling of protection and safety gained from them, others may read it differently. For example a colleague of mine proposed the idea that Harwood was now an older women, depressed and trying to find or remember a time in her life when she was in fact happy, that she is trying to escape the inevitability of death by escaping to her youth. Either way her poems offer the responder a variety of readings, which, I think, offer her work an integrity that is not eroded by…

    • 1313 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Gwen Harwood's poems Prize-Giving and The Glass Jar, the prescribed text Sky-High, and the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith, the composer have used many varying ideas and techniques to investigate and illustrate concepts of Changing Self effectively. The ideas looked at in Gwen Harwood's poetry include imagery, retrospect, metaphor, and inversion of the connotation of adjectives. Ideas conveyed in Sky-High include imagery, retrospect, and comparison. The techniques and ideas in White Teeth, to name the most important, are long and erratic chronology, removing characters for a period and the exposing of the least important change are evident in the texts that are compared.…

    • 935 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The ability of a text to be universally accepted in a range of contexts ultimately determines its textual integrity and appreciation. Gwen Harwood’s work draws from the inspiration of her context, her lifelong influences, primarily music, her childhood and religious beliefs. This can be identified through study of Gwen Harwood's poem, "Father and Child" that is able to be appreciated in a multitude of different contexts due to its universality and textual integrity.…

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Gwen Harwood, An Australian poet who, seems to develop an imaginative, rich form of poetry through the use of recurring themes, complex language techniques and even further through the use of sophisticated structures only seen in the most prestigious of poems in the modern era. Gwen Harwood has a tendency to write poetry that is significant in all eras, cultures and/or societies of the world as she captures, and develops them into a strong universal theme that recurs strongly. These themes seem to endure, and portray the human experience by relating these in forms that resonate through a range of various environments; these poems have an immense structural integrity. These themes are depicted powerfully in poems such as; Father and Child, Violets the 2 poems that I have chosen to discuss in this speech. In the Father and child, it has a unique structure of 2 parts; the 1st (Barn Owl) discusses her loss of innocence in the daughter’s perspective in the past, the second part (Nightfall) Being the downfall to her father, how he is put in an degenerative state, slowly falling to his demise. This is to do with Gwen accepting the inevitability of her father’s death. These 2 poems can be read symbiotically in a dual nature to provide further insight into both their poems, or separately as a poem. The language in the first poem is quite unique. It highlights the use of very simple words, with little complexity, this can be interpreted to show the innocence that the child still possesses, as children (better yet an innocent child) are meant to speak with less complexity than a full grown adult. These sentences also tend to be monosyllabic. ‘I knew my prize, who swooped home at this hour’ are all monosyllabic. As the poem continues, especially after the owl is shot, the child’s vocabulary seems to improve in complexity, losing its monosyllabic nature. This can symbolize the loss of innocence that the child had experienced by killing the owl senselessly. Gwen also uses many…

    • 974 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Judith Beveridge Speech

    • 1085 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Judith Beveridge is a poet of great detail. Her poems are written with strong use of language. Strong imagery of her observations and contrasts of her views help create her poems meaning and effect on the reader. Beveridge’s texts are valuable to the understanding of human and nature’s precious life, and her appreciation for life in all. Through her two poems ‘the domesticity of Giraffes’ and ‘the streets of Chippendale’ these both communicate her ideas and values the strongest.…

    • 1085 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Margaret not only writes novels but also expresses her feelings and views through poems. Most of her poems reflect a lot of dismay and loss, which is connected to the death of her father and “the realization of her mortality” ("Margaret Atwood," Poetry Foundation).…

    • 1190 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 903 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    postwar

    • 1033 Words
    • 5 Pages

    In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks, who lived most of her life in Chicago, Illinois, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in part because of her social concerns. Brooks herself said that she attempted to "feature people and their concerns--their troubles as well as their joys." It is interesting how Ms. Brooks employs various forms for her poems. While her sonnets have a tightly controlled structure and rhyme scheme, other poems are in free verse, which allows for variations in line length and rhythm, a form more appropriate for the subjects of these poems. Likewise, her rhyming is at times exact, at times partial in order to convey meaning.…

    • 1033 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Intertextuality is more than recognising similarities between texts, it is a reading strategy employed by readers to enhance their understanding of a text. Intertextuality involves recognising similarities between texts and then using your understanding developed from the previous text to develop a reading for sequential texts. “Burning Sappho” and “Prize Giving” by Gwen Harwood, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Macbeth by William Shakespeare, have all been constructed to explore gender roles within society. It is this similarity between these texts that allowed me to apply intertextuality as a reading strategy to enhance my understanding of the characters within these texts.…

    • 1655 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In making this book a Poetry Book Society recommendation, its selector commented: 'Marcia Douglas has the kind of intent but relaxed concentration which ushers the reader into the life of a poem and makes the event - a wedding, a hot afternoon, an aeroplane journey - seem for a while like the centre of things. This is a rich and very welcome book.'…

    • 2289 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Write a close analysis of 40 lines of poetry by Carol Ann Duffy and discuss how far these lines reflect her view on love as presented in “The Worlds Wife”…

    • 1603 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    the tiny bundle of innocence, And so she becomes His nurturer, His protector, His mother, She is his Messiah!…

    • 1143 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Janet Frame

    • 1992 Words
    • 8 Pages

    What features of Janet Frame’s poetry contribute to the distinctive character and voice of her poems? Discuss.…

    • 1992 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays