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Analysis Of At Mornington By Gwen Harwood

722 Words3 Pages

As can be seen in the image, humanity and human individuals attempts to search for comfort and fulfillment in different landscapes. In Gwen Harwood’s At Mornington, the author represents the place that nature and landscapes have within humanity’s search for satisfaction and the perpetual nature of the environment around us. Harwood employs form, structure, the perspective shifts and her choice of language within her representation to augment this relationship, with the consistent interweaving of past and present creating juxtapositions between the constant of the environment and the ever-changing nature of human life, Humanity seeks to find meaning in the transience of life, and Harwood illustrates this concept through examining the persistence …show more content…

In the first stanza’s, the narrator’s voice and perspective is more collective and unreliable, as in “they told me”, but nonetheless the references to the “sea’s edge” and “sea-wet shell” remain constant. Later on the poem, this voice matures, as the “cadence of the trees” and the “quick of autumn grasses” symbolize the continuum of life and death, highlighting to the reader the inevitable cycle of time. The relationship that Harwood has between the landscape and her memories allows for her to delve deeper into her own life and access these thoughts, describing the singular moments of human activity and our cultural values that imbue themselves into landscapes. In the poem’s final stanza, the link back to the narrator lying “secure in her father’s arms” similar to the initial memory gives the poem a similar cyclical structure, as Harwood in her moment of death finds comfort in these memories of nature. The water motif reemerges in the poem’s final lines, as “peace of this day will shine/like light on the face of the waters.” as in her final moments the narrator recalls her earliest connection to the landscape. A key theme throughout the poem is the importance of embracing nature, emphasized by the metaphor of the “fine pumpkins grown on a trellis” which rise in towards the “fastness of light”, which symbolizes the narrators own growth, flourishing as a fruit of the earth. Through her metaphors and complex conflagration of shifting perspectives, Harwood illustrates the relationship that people can develop with landscapes, seeing both present and past in

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