This Summary Sheet for At Mornington by Gwen Harwood provides a base for your own notes. Title:
At Mornington
Subject Matter:
This piece is a philosophical and academic reflection on the nature of being, life and death.
Analysis:
Key Quotes
Techniques and Impact on Reader
“Rolled/like a doll among rattling shells”
Loss of power, overcome by the superiority of nature. Onomatopoeia creates auditory imagery synecdoche of the sea.
“As a child I could walk on water-/ the next wave, the next wave-“
Superhuman capabilities of innocence, biblical allusion. Repetition highlight the naivety of belief, aposiopesis to show the interrupted and ultimately futile nature of this enterprise.
“On what flood are they borne/these memories of early childhood/iridescent, fugitive”
Continues motif of water, juxtaposition of splendour and hidden, secretive nature of memories.
“With their cadence of trees/marble and granite parting/the quick of autumn grasses”
The break in the natural world by something unnatural is shown as bad through the link to death. Life and death as one long continuum (“cadence”). The grasses refers to the time in life which the persona is experiencing, where she can see what has been and what is yet to come and reflect upon the two.
“in airy defiance of nature/a parable of myself”
Refers to opening in which she though she could cheat nature.
“And stayed for a whole day/talking, and drinking the water”
The indentation refers to the fact that this is a dream and thus not necessarily part of real life, yet the replenishing power of water (a metaphor for the memories of childhood?) remains.
“we have one day, only one/but more than enough to refresh us”
Inclusive pronouns indicates a strong bond and the repetition of “one” highlights the importance of this to the persona. The transience of time is shown through the “only”.
“the peace of this day will shine/like light on the face of the
The future tense shows the cleansing nature of death, in that it returns one to a state of innocence (see:
waters/that bear me away for ever.”
Father and Child). The Romantic power of water is not diminished even here as it is linked to such a return. The acceptance of death is show through the tense shift from past to future to present through the piece and in this final stanza.
Themes: Harwood’s message: philosophy, moral, premise, motif, argument or insight What does Harwood teach us?
The role of middle age as a place for reflection and contemplation of both the childhood that was and the death that is to come. The transience of life (as with the pitcher of water) and the importance of embracing nature (“fine pumpkins growing on a trellis”) in order to accept the “waters that bear me away for ever”.
Distinctive Qualities / Textual Integrity of Poem: What aspect/s leave a lasting impression on the responder? What is the most notable aspect of this poem?
There is no rhyme scheme in this piece, which shows the train-of-thought nature of the piece as a reflective journey for the persona. The use of an indented dream passage keeps the reader aware of the constructed nature of the piece and the fallibility of the persona, which is distinctly postmodern, despite the Romantic tone which pervades this, as all Harwood’s writing. The motif of the water is indicative of this, as well as the symbol of the pumpkins as rejuvenated
How is this poem reflective of Harwood’s poetry in general? Critics’ Commentary: What have others said about this poem: style and content?
“Her poetry repeatedly asserts the value of friendship and durable human relationships as defences against… the destructive nature of time” (Huddinott and Kratzmann, 2003)
This Summary Sheet for The Violets by Gwen Harwood provides a base for your own notes. Title:
The Violets
Subject Matter:
The subject is a past childhood memory linked to a present adult reflection through the motif of a violet. The poem is set in Harwood’s childhood home, and as a result it is most likely predominantly autobiographical.
Analysis:
Key Quotes
Techniques and Impact on Reader
“Frail melancholy flowers among/Ashes and loam.”
Transience of childhood, innocence and life. Ash as a symbol of death and fragility, loam as a juxtaposing symbol of life and growth.
“Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky/towards nightfall waking”
Transience, movement between adulthood (present) and childhood (past). Epistrophe to highlight this. Enjambment of stanza to show the movement between the two.
“Where’s morning gone?”
Rhetorical question, direct speech, questioning the passage of time.
“the thing I could not grasp or name”
Monosyllabic to show the simplicity of childhood and thus ignorance, also the inpermeability of life.
“Years cannot move/nor death’s disorientating scale/distort those lamplit presences”
The powers of memory in salvation from the transience – are our memories all that truly matter? Use of light as a motif for growth and enlightenment.
Themes:Harwood’s message: philosophy, moral, premise, motif, argument or insightWhat does Harwood teach us?
Existential questioning of life, childhood and memory. It shows the passage from innocence to enlightenment through the sensory imagery of the violets and the motif of light to show enlightenment and growth of the persona. The importance of memories is highlighted in the poem due to their retained power of rejuvenation and reflection.
Distinctive Qualities / Textual Integrity of Poem:What aspect/s leave a lasting impression on the responder?What is the most notable aspect of this poem?How is this poem reflective of Harwood’s poetry in general?
The poem uses frequent enjambment in order to continue the train-of-thought style of the piece, which waxes lyrical in a slow pace, showing the growth and movement of the persona’s journey through the indentation. This enjambment also allows Harwood’s existential questioning to work as the whole piece flows without interruption, allowing the reader to follow this and thus transfer the philosophical questioning to their own lives. Fleeting moments of rhyme interrupt this in order to “jolt” the reader from one state to another, intentionally grating in contrast to the smoothness of the rest of the piece.A key feature of Harwood’s poetry is her focus on the philosophical and rejuvenating powers of nature in a Romantic style. As a post-modern author, this makes her work unique and adds to its textual integrity.
Critics’ Commentary:What have others said about this poem: style and content?
“The enemy is, of course, time”, “Violets… link past and present” (Hoddinott, 1991)
The Violets
- The poem represents the passing of time and a memory of childhood - The violets are flowers with a fleeting beauty and just like youth, childhood and time they fade. Dualism of death and the beautiful - Violets represent both change and permanence, they remain the soma but somehow they have been changed - Conversational/dreamlike tone created by enjambment and irregular pattern of the lines - Concerned with the movement of time/time in fleeting, change - It speaks of stolen time and past events - Tries to make tangible something that is intangible through the metaphor of music - A memory of family, things she remembers the most about her parents - Uses nature to understand the past - God was seen as an integral part of the natural world - Time passes – death approaches - Dualism, past / present – passing of time - The infinity of life, its passing, is explained by the infinity of death - Even though black birds and curlews are harbingers of death and the beauty of the violets fade, nature is idealised - The dynamics of ‘The Violets’ are marked by indenting the stanzas. The present in stanza 1 is at the margin, stanza 3 to 4 move back into the past and are indented, the final stanza , a mixture of present and past, is staggered - There is a bleak imagery in stanza 1 and a growing warmth in the past, ‘It is dusk and cold……frail melancholy flowers……our blackbird frets and strops’ - Innocence and simplicity of youth. The simplistic beauty of ‘black and white’ understanding - Recaptures memory of her parents - Prevailing image throughout poem is fecundity (fertility and growth)
In the violets psychoanalytical criticism can be applied, for it is a poem about personal reflection through the subconscious mind. This dreamlike quality is created through the rhythm of one line flowing into the next. The persona relives memories, of her childhood experiences, which are triggered by the scent of violets. Gwen Harwood uses violets as the main symbol, for like childhood and time, they are flowers which only posses a fleeting beauty and in time, they, like our lives, will reach their end. The violets are also a symbol of nature which is very common theme among romanticists. The mood of the poem is portrayed in the first stanza, “I kneel to pick frail melancholy flowers among ashes and loam”, these words create and atmosphere of thoughtfulness for she is reflecting on the past. Harwood uses music as a means to transcend time by “whistling a trill”. Throughout the poem Harwood uses taste, referred to by “ice cream” and touch referred to by “loam, ashes, stroking and hair” to enhance the adult personas experience of the memories as well as the readers. To show when the adult persona is drifting into memory Hardwood uses repetition, “Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky.” The poem also contains a contrast between light and dark; for the child wakes up to the setting of the sun and is upset that time has been stolen from her. Psychoanalytical theory can be used for the child’s feelings of loss due to, “the thing I could not grasp or name that, while I slept, had stolen from me those hours of unreturning light.” It can also be suggested by the “hours of unreturning light” that the adult persona has not yet fully come to terms with death. However the memories of stolen time help her to overcome her fears. The poem also contains memories of a carefree time with her parents and the innocence of a child. This aspect is enhanced through the use of metaphors, imagery and the symbolism created by nature. “Years cannot move nor death’s disorienting scale distort those lamplit presences”, this shows that through the memories the adult persona has come to terms with aging and the inevitability of death. For she now realises that even death cannot erase her memories. A spiritual aspect is created through the “lamplit presences” which could symbolize the waiting of death. In the last line Harwood once again uses the symbol of violets to bind the poem together and make the emotions more tangible, “Faint scent of violet drifts through the air”. The Violets In this poem of reminiscence of her childhood, Harwood concentrates on violets, both as frail melancholy flowers and as symbolic of our fragile early memories, which we cherish and love to recall: Faint scent of violets drifts in the air This positive teaching of the poem, however, is delayed by the negative anecdote which opens it. This is in the adult present and the setting, at dusk, is cold. Once again, Harwood introduces her theme of the dissatisfaction of adult life, which is to be developed here in comparison with a celebration of childhood. Yet in the midst of her despair in the present, she finds the violets, struggling to emerge and survive: signs of new life and beauty rising from the ashes. To try to establish a connection with nature in order to revive her spirit, she whistles a bird-like trill but, Our blackbird frets and strops his beak indifferent to Scarlattis song. As before, Harwood is regretting the dissociation of humanity and nature‟s creatures, and (like Keats) even sets her beloved music at a disadvantage in comparison with the unpremeditated art of birdsong. So the setting is at best “ambiguous” with elements both of hope (the presence of the violets for example) and of despair. The violets have set her memory in motion and she recalls a similar late afternoon in her early childhood. Confused by an afternoon nap, she had woken up looking for breakfast. Sobbing, when she realised her mistake, she asked “Where‟s morning gone?” The child‟s plaintive question addressed to her mother, is also the poet‟s disturbing address to the reader: our childhood and its innocence and beauty will quickly pass, like a morning gone. Yet, we may retain its lovely moments
in our adult memory. To comfort her daughter, her mother: carried me downstairs to see spring violets in the loamy bed. That her father arrives with a whistle (onomatopoeia giving his arrival an aural immediacy) connects the experience with her adult whistling of t he first stanza. On one of its levels, this poem is a celebration of her love for and indebtedness to her parents and the family life they created, the examples of behaviour which she has perpetuated. Nonetheless, although surrounded by this care and affection, she bitterly laments the lost morning that cannot be recovered. However, the teaching of the poem – soon to be disclosed – is that domain of purity and hope is always recoverable, by the imagination and the memory. Nothing that her subsequent life has know, not even death itself of her parents, for example – can “distort those lamplit presences!” They have an eternal quality. And Harwood‟s language and imagery is of a religious and spiritual kind in these closing lines, as she refers (for example) to entering “my father‟s house” (a biblical phrase), to “the lamp” and develops the symbolism of light to its beautiful climax in the sheen of her mother‟s “goldbrown hair”. Kedron Brook flowed near Harwood‟s childhood home in the outer suburbs of Brisbane. The violets in the present have served the purpose of stirring these memories from the past and, in their fragility and beauty, the flowers are emblems of those memories. “The violets” is also a social document and commentary, revealing a kind of family life antique by today‟s standards. The lamplight and the wood stove, the “child with milk and story book”, the parents with time for their child and for each other, the mother at home to attend to her child‟s needs and the appreciation of the beauty of nature close at hand. My father, bending to inhale the gathered flowers, with tenderness stroking my mother’s goldbrown hair Could be dismissed as an idealistic romantisation of the past. Or, it could simply be an insight into a better world. At Mornington - Nature is presented as a cleansing process, a way to find truth and wisdom - Repetition of waves and water is very important, symbolizing time and the flow of memories. They link past and present. Waves are always continuous and coming in life. Waves, tides, floods, water.
- Comfortable with the approaching of death. - Information from another, ‘they told me that when I was taken’, passive voice - Breaking from constraint of father and almost drowns - ‘rolled’, in the first and last stanza: ‘ I was caught by a wave and rolled’ ‘and rolled in one grinding race.’ - Passive voice, loss of control, vulnerable. However in contrast the second use of rolled is more excepted she has come to terms with life and the inevitable- age death - First young and innocent - Second age and knowledge - Pumpkin symbolizes fecundity, fertility/growth, maturity - Two images of the pumpkin. One is hollowed (mocking?). the other is more ‘real’ and humble. Perhaps a celebration to
be part of life. - ‘I would walk on water’, invincible, sums up this sense of being indestructible- contrasts to the poem as she has excepted death by the end - innocence and experience - ‘the next wave, the next wave’, repetition, overwhelming. Like the flood of memories and the experiences of life. - ‘Flood’, memories, fleeting - beauty-autumn, metaphor- reminder of death - ‘Fine pumpkin grown on a trellis’, almost defying nature as the child did - ‘Hollowed pumpkin’- death. The child looks at death. A child mocking it, not understanding it - connection, ‘ripeness is plainly all’ from father and child part two - Enjambment creates conversation/plausibility, childhood-graveyard-dream - The water of life – time - She thinks of ‘death no more’ because she has come to realise that she is not inevitable and death will come regardless of her thoughts or worries. Knowledge and experience. Death is just another wave to balance out - Significance of past memories. She has captivated a pivotal moment in her life - Child believes that it can defy nature by walking on water. Determination. - Can certainly be read through religion - Both personal interpretation, romantic and societies interpretation, modern - Encapsulates the human experience, pain, dreams, desire etc. At Mornington This poem was inspired by a visit to a very dear friend, Thomas Riddell. The poet went to his garden first, then to the Mornington Cemetary where his parents are buried. The poem begins with the childhood memory in which the poet recalls her first visit to the sea as a child. Believing she could walk on water, she jumped in and had to be rescued by her father. After saving her he was „half comforting, half angry‟. Just as she thought she could defy gravity and walk on water, so the pumpkins in her friends‟ garden „in airy defiance of nature‟ symbolised for her the way in which she has been nourished by the fruits of the Earth and is moving through life to „the fastness of light‟ and the „ultimate death‟. She is reminded of death as „two friends of middle age‟. She and Thomas Riddell, stand by his parents grave „among avenues of the dead‟. She is aware that these have „come to that time of life‟ when their bones begin to age and form their body into the final shape it will assume in death just as the „drying face of land rose out of earths seamless waters‟. The poet recalls the peace and serenity she enjoyed with her long-time friend in a dream set in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens where they share a pitcher of cool, refreshing water. So their visit to the cemetery, the security she experienced in her fathers arms (when confronted for the first time by a Halloween pumpkin) and the serenity shared in the Botanic Gardens – all these will comfort and shield her at the time of her death, when she is „seized at last‟ and borne away on the face of the waters forever.
