Gwen Harwood Father And Child Poem

Empowering poetry allows a poet to relate to their audience through universal ideas of death and loss and the consolation brought by childhood memories. Gwen Harwood’s Father and Child and focuses on a recollection of childhood memories that deeply impacted her perspective on mortality and her relationship with her father. The mirroring structure of the Father and Child depicts a complete role reversal between the persona and her father, showing a switch in comforting each other in the face of death. Part two, Nightfall, opens with a general atmosphere of nostalgia, as the persona, not longer a child, reflects on her fathers approaching death. These notions evoke empathy which allows Harwood to connect with her audience by teaching them how …show more content…
Part one of Father and Child, ‘Barn Owl’, explores the impact of life-changing experiences, such as the loss of innocence due to the deliberate killing of a bird, and how it can be an important memory later on in life as it provides insight into dealing with negative experiences. The poem opens with ‘daybreak’, foreshadowing an awakening to come, and ‘blessed by the sun’ symbolises the dawning of new knowledge. The persona, a young child, uses an arrogant tone by referring to herself as a ‘wisp-haired judge’ and ‘master of life and death’. Here, the use of binary opposites is symbolic of light and dark and the cyclical nature of death. This godlike and authoritative position is quickly contrasted with the desolate tone of ‘afraid….. lonely child’. The persona experiences a change in demeanour triggered by death’s ugliness. Her realisation of an ‘obscene death’, is re-enforced by the gruesome imagery of ‘bundle of stuff that dropped and dribbled’. The personas inability to refer to …show more content…
Father and Child uses a structure that mirrors the dualities of life, and this is seen in Nightfall by the personas reflection on her fathers approaching death. The poem explores ideas of time and memory through the recollection of childhood experiences, allowing the audience to gain insight into difficult notions of old age and mortality. This is empowering to an audience as it allows them to gain a new perspective by connecting with personal experiences of the poet. There is a noticeable shift in personal pronouns from ‘I’ to ‘we’, this suggests the persona and her father are have a connection and are acting as a unit. The allusion to King Lear in ‘ripeness is plainly all’ suggests parallels between Lear and Cordelia, and the persona and her father. This motif of Lear is repeated later on with ‘be your tears wet’, referring to literal and metaphorical blindness. The rhetorical question of ‘who can be what you were?’ symbolises her fathers irreplaceability in her life and the importance he holds to her. Harwood uses frail imagery when referring to her father as her ‘stick-thin comforter’, reinforcing the strong role her father held in her life, while simultaneously strengthening the notion of fragility in old age. She emphasises the idea of oncoming death by symbolising heaven or the afterlife ‘shine’. There is a subtle presence of