The Violets by Gwen Harwood Summary Essay
5. Violets
It is dusk, and cold. I kneel to pick frail melancholy flowers among ashes and loam. The melting west is striped like ice-cream. While I try whistling a trill, close by his nest our blackbird frets and strops his beak indifferent to Scarlatti’s song.
Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky
Towards nightfall waking from the fearful half-sleep of a hot afternoon at our first house, in Mitchelton,
I ran to find my mother, calling for breakfast. Laughing, “It will soon be night, you goose,” her long hair falling down to her waist, she dried my tearful face as I sobbed, “Where’s morning gone?”
and carried me downstairs to see spring violets in their loamy bed.
Hungry and cross, I would not hold their sweetness, or be comforted, even when my father, whistling, came from work, but used my tears to scold the thing I could not grasp or name that, while I slept, had stolen from me
those hours of unreturning light.
Into my father’s house we went, young parents and their restless child, to light the lamp and the wood stove while dusk surrendered pink and white to blurring darkness. Reconciled,
I took my supper and was sent to innocent sleep. Years cannot move
nor death’s disorienting scale distort those lamplit presences: a child with milk and story-book; my father, bending to inhale the gathered flowers, with tenderness stroking my mother’s goldbrown hair. Stone-curlews call from Kedron Brook.
Faint scent of violets drifts in the air
How has Gwen Harwood used her poem ‘The Violets’ in metaphorical terms? Explain.
‘The Violets’ by Gwen Harwood, illustrates a number of metaphors outlined between the differences of childhood and becoming an adult. Such metaphors counted are used within the context of the Violet flower, this being placed for beginning the further made metaphors about a child’s loss as they
It is dusk, and cold. I kneel to pick frail melancholy flowers among ashes and loam. The melting west is striped like ice-cream. While I try whistling a trill, close by his nest our blackbird frets and strops his beak indifferent to Scarlatti’s song.
Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky
Towards nightfall waking from the fearful half-sleep of a hot afternoon at our first house, in Mitchelton,
I ran to find my mother, calling for breakfast. Laughing, “It will soon be night, you goose,” her long hair falling down to her waist, she dried my tearful face as I sobbed, “Where’s morning gone?”
and carried me downstairs to see spring violets in their loamy bed.
Hungry and cross, I would not hold their sweetness, or be comforted, even when my father, whistling, came from work, but used my tears to scold the thing I could not grasp or name that, while I slept, had stolen from me
those hours of unreturning light.
Into my father’s house we went, young parents and their restless child, to light the lamp and the wood stove while dusk surrendered pink and white to blurring darkness. Reconciled,
I took my supper and was sent to innocent sleep. Years cannot move
nor death’s disorienting scale distort those lamplit presences: a child with milk and story-book; my father, bending to inhale the gathered flowers, with tenderness stroking my mother’s goldbrown hair. Stone-curlews call from Kedron Brook.
Faint scent of violets drifts in the air
How has Gwen Harwood used her poem ‘The Violets’ in metaphorical terms? Explain.
‘The Violets’ by Gwen Harwood, illustrates a number of metaphors outlined between the differences of childhood and becoming an adult. Such metaphors counted are used within the context of the Violet flower, this being placed for beginning the further made metaphors about a child’s loss as they