Janet Frame Poetry Analysis

There can be no doubt that the primary purpose of much poetry is to present significant ideas in a condensed form. While any such statement is inherently limited, due to the wide range of texts and ideas that poetry covers, which means almost by definition that some will not be defined as “significant ideas” (for instance, Lear’s limericks come to mind – a bit too informal?), we can say that a large majority strives to reach this goal. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the poetry of renowned New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose poetry is notable mainly for the extremely contracted and image-rich poems, which highlight this idea well. Conceptually, we can see that she expresses ideas in a compressed form throughout her works, notably in

In Frame’s poetry, we see this demonstrated as well – given that poetry communicates not through direct linguistic mediums but through more complex mediated symbols – for instance, Frame employs symbols like “Pebbles of diseased bone” which invokes the idea of childhood, as pebbles are associated with such ideas why? How?, in order to more effectively make her point about the child who does not wish to participate in life. Poetry differs from literature primarily in this respect, and it is arguable that this is the definition of poetry. Frame uses symbols constantly in her poetry, and serves as a superb comparison when we look at her longer works – while her short stories are notable in that they use more symbolism than is normal in that medium eg?, they nonetheless differ strongly from her poems in that she takes the time to express her ideas at length there, eliminating the ambiguity that is inherent in her poems despite the fact that oftentimes the shortest of those stories are in fact shorter than some of her longer poems. Thus, we can confidently say from this example that poetry, by its very definition, must incorporate this vagueness and ambiguity into their structures, and their use of mediated, symbolic language means that this is always the

However, it is somewhat more complicated to conclude that the ideas must always be significant. In answering this question, then, we must remain aware that we are only speaking about a sub-class of poems define and explain, and within that sub-class we can only say that poems strive to reach this goal. Despite our heuristic desire to assign absolute meaning, it is accepted that it is entirely a personal value judgement as to which ideas are significant – it is commonly believed that Frame’s ideas are significant if not remarkably original, but this essay does not argue they have some form of objective value any more than any other poem. Despite this, these ideas, in the poems discussed here – the human response to grief, the death as a positive outcome, and the relationship between humanity and nature – are perhaps universally agreed to be significant ideas, due to their all-pervasive nature. Frame conveys these ideas with use of her characteristic voice, and indeed due to this characteristic in her poetry she is a superb example of the inherent symbolic nature of poetry – she uses metaphor constantly, for instance when she discusses the “grey pleated walls” of the chrysalids, to invoke ideas of inner value and cultivation. Her ideas are always entirely central to her poems, for instance in “Yet Another Poem About a Dying Child” where she drives constantly at the idea that the child would prefer to die – “He