Theme Of Childhood In Barn Owl And Violets

Gwen Harwood’s poems ‘Barn Owl’ and ‘Violets’ both have overruling themes of childhood that are expressed in different ways for each poem. ‘Barn Owl’ is about the discovering the reality of death from a child’s perspective, and ‘Violets’ captures how Harwood remembers one hot day in her childhood home. The following quotes show childhood in similar but subtle ways:

The melting west
Is striped like ice-cream.

I stood, holding my breath,
In urine scented hay,
Master of life and death,
A wisp-haired judge whose law
Would punish beak and claw.

The first, from ‘Violets’, shows perfectly how a child uses their imagination to picture things as something they’re not. In the second, from ‘Barn Owl’, is a more obvious form of childish imagination;