Gwen Harwood's Poetry

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Australian poet Gwen Harwood is renowned for her many poems depicting different aspects of a person's life or experiences. Two of these poems are “Mother Who Gave Me Life” and “The Spelling Prize”. The “Mother Who Gave Me Life” explores how someone reminisces on past memories with and about her dying mother, in comparison to “The Spelling Prize” which tells how someone is remembering an experience and decision that they regret from their childhood. Both of these poems play into the idea of regret and guilt over a past decision or experience. This idea was likely explored by Harwood in order to examine how regret and hence imperfection are so prominent in society. Harwood’s “Mother Who Gave Me Life” uses the persona as a representation of mankind’s …show more content…

Through representational or direct language, this is particularly clear from the way they both convey the same idea that it is common to have to live with regret as you cannot change the past. The last words or intellectual conclusion of each poem serve as the most prominent example for readers to see how both poems convey this. Firstly, “Mother Who Gave Me Life’s” intellectual conclusion is “As darkness falls on my father’s house”. This passage exemplifies how the mother moves on to heaven at the poem's the end. The poem's final line, which depicts the mother's passing, illustrates how, in addition to acknowledging the loss of their mother, the persona now has to acknowledge their regrets, accepting that they will always have to live with some form of regret as they are unable to change what has occurred. In similarity, the intellectual conclusion in “The Spelling Prize” is “My coveted, worthless prize”, which is said in regards to after the persona remembers how he won the competition. By describing the word firstly as coveted, it exemplifies how much the persona desired the prize of the competition, much like how they likely felt at the time of winning. This is then almost immediately juxtaposed with stating that the prize is worthless. This was likely done in order to show the comparison of how the prize is no longer desired but instead deemed unnecessary and unwanted, to demonstrate how as time has changed

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