Robert Gray - Speech

Robert Gray most definitely provokes thought and stirs emotion through an effective use of language and techniques used in his poems. One of his major messages are those connected with mans effect on the environment and our constant need to create something new and yet, forget about what we already have and where that ends up. Also the sense of our society almost becoming, un-Australian and very international. In his poem, Flames and Dangling Wire, the first line immediately sets the scene allowing us to have a sense of where we are. The use of a simile in “The smoke of different fires in a row, like fingers spread and dragged to smudge” implies the filthiness of the tip and the smoke rising from the fires. This also causes the air to “wobble”, implying that the horrid stench of the area is visibly seen forming clouds of polluted air to block the sun. He also uses the simile “The city, driven like stakes into the ground”. This shows the unnatural nature of the city with giant buildings artificially implanted into the ground, left there to stand and become eyesores to land that was once full of nature’s beauty.
Gray takes us on the journey with him, “We turn off down a gravel road”, this allow us, the audience to experience his thoughts and feelings towards the amount of rubbish dumped and the fact that a lot of it can be recycled. He uses the metaphor “Rolling in its sand dune shapes” to emphasise the large amount of rubbish surrounding him. He comments on the workers as “shadowy figures who seem engaged in identifying the dead”, this suggests that they are hiding in the shadows, not wanting to be seen by those from the outside. Gray refers to the workers as, “attendants”. This is an undermining title to give to those workers because it suggests that man had become a slave to its own rubbish and mess as it has become dominant over society and we now serve materialistic items.
He sees a worker hoisting a type of mulch on his fork and into the fire. He sees