The Old Prison

“The Old Prison - Poem by Judith Wright

The rows of cells are unroofed, a flute for the wind's mouth, who comes with a breath of ice from the blue caves of the south.

O dark and fierce day: the wind like an angry bee hunts for the black honey in the pits of the hollow sea.

Waves of shadow wash the empty shell bone-bare, and like a bone it sings a bitter song of air.

Who built and laboured here?

The wind and the sea say

-Their cold nest is broken and they are blown away-

They did not breed nor love, each in his cell alone cried as the wind now cries through this flute of stone.”

One of the most prevalent themes in poetry is that of alienation and despair. The two feelings are ones many poets delve into exploring and expressing

Jennifer Strauss was born in Victoria in 1933 and still lives there today. She began writing poetry in university and most of her poetry centres on Australian woman and politics. Other people in the poem are shown as faceless voices, described by their arms and their legs with no direct speech or individuality, blurring together. The poem is three stanzas long with a much more varied rhythm and line length ranging from eight words to a single one. There is no distinct examples of rhyme in the poem and the first and third stanza use minimal punctuation similarly to ‘The Old Prison’ The second stanza however enclosed in brackets uses punctuation more frequently as a technique to slow the reader down and have them pay more attention to the what the second stanza is

While ‘The Old Prison’ uses personification of the wind and sea throughout the majority of the poem devoting a lot of time to describing the barren surroundings as alive, this poem only has two examples. The street names have been given movement, letters scattering and colliding in order to emphasise how foreign the language appears to her. The confusing streets of Melbourne are personified as a “blind beast” swallowing men whole in the business, the crowds a radical difference from where she grew