Year 11 Oz Poetry unit: First Practice Comparison Exercise
Due 2 August 2000
So far you have been analysing individual poems. This task requires you to identify the historical and social contexts for poems of different eras as well. Now that you have analysed two poems last week, this week put that same material to good use in a short essay comparing and critiqueing them.
Use this planning grid to plan your response:
Characteristic "The Sliprails and the Spur" "Bullocky" poet Henry Lawson Judith Wright setting . .. diction length . . emotion . . point of view . . turning point/argument . . issue/ theme/ purpose . . genre . . key character . . success/ rating . .
©
G. Smith 2000
A sample response
Celebrating Australian Rural Icons
This discussion will show how two Australian poets, writing nearly a century apart, create icons from Australian rural life to evoke patriotic feelings. Lawson in his agenda for Federation writes a ballad, "The Sliprails and the Spur", to show the joy and pain of pioneering workers in the 1890s and Judith Wright in her search for an Australian spirituality in the 1970s creates a legendary figure in a typical but anonymous bullocky in "Bullocky" These two major poets could be said to be representative of their respective eras. . . . .
. . . Of course Wright's genius here is to ape a superceded genre again and to rework the Australian icon of the drover/bullocky, now almost a cliche, so very well. Her modernised ballad resembles Lawson's contemporary form, so popular and expected in his time. But hers is a modern poem nonetheless. While Lawson sought to raise patriotic feelings to effect Federation, Wright re-ignites them to make a patriotic clarion call in the midst of the disintegration of the 1970s. Reading it in the now globalised Australia of the early 21st century, it has even more relevance, if somewhat less punch.
Webster: G. Smith 2/8/00.