Gwen Harwood (1920 – 1995)
Revision 2012
Gwen Harwood is a most intelligent, sensitive, well-read and deliberate practitioner of
the art of poetry.
Although an Australian poet, she writes from within a long tradition which is both
Classical and English.
Harwood shares many of the themes and concerns of these writers, yet develops a
voice which is distinctly hers.
In this sense, our task as Year 12 students of Literature is to identify and describe that
voice.
A: Some Themes/Issues/Concerns/Recurring ideas:
1. Motherhood
2. Marriage
3. Family
4. Love
5. Education
6. Childhood
7. Mortality
8. Time
9. Gender
10. Life cycle
11. Innocence
12. Nature
B: Verse forms:
1. The sonnet
The lion’s bride
2. Quatrain + couplet (sestet)
Father and Child
3. Rhyming couplets/quatrains
Class of 1927
A Kitchen Poem
An Impromptu for Ann Jennings
4. Iambic pentameter
Night and dreams II
5. Non-rhymed ballad metre
Mother who gave me life
Night and Dreams IV
6. Free verse
Violets
The secret life of frogs
7. Blank Verse
Estuary
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Within these forms, however, Harwood employs a tone and rhythm which is
remarkably ‘natural’, unforced, almost conversational. In fact, whenever ‘form’
dominates, a point is being made.
C: ‘Flashback’ technique: recollections and reflections:
Violets
Night and dreams
The secret life of frogs
Father and child
Class of 1927
Estuary
Harwood exploits this technique in order both to understand the past in terms of the
present, and to explain the present in terms of the past. Father and child is an
example of this two-way process.
D: Key lines:
1.”,and dying summer’s led/to fruitfulness, your beauty lies.”
A Kitchen poem
2. “Grandmother, holding a smoked glass,
says to me, ‘Look. Remember this’ “
Estuary
3.“Forty years, lived or dreamed:/what memories pack them home.”
Father and child
4. ‘Things truly named can never/vanish from earth”
Ibid.
5. “ here nothing smiles; pity’s unknown.”
Iris
6. “… my morbid, chronic/nostalgia”
Class of 1927
7. “… in childhood’s earshot”
The secret life of frogs
8. “Years cannot move
nor death’s disorienting scale
distort those lamplit presences”
Violets
9. “Such light, restoring, recomposing/those who dined”
Night and Dreams
10. “More and more of the great questions”
ibid
11. “ Why should I care / how long ago my death began? ibid
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