Bruce Dawes Homecoming
Through their voice, a poet has the power to present their perceptions of the human experience. Two key themes that have occurred throughout poetry are death and mentality. Death is a key theme in Gwen Harwood’s Barn owl, and Bruce Dawes Homecoming. Another theme present in Homecoming is mentality, which is also a major idea expressed in Gerald Stern’s I Remember Galileo. These themes are vital parts of the human experience, as mentality is how we think or see things, while death is the final chapter of the human experience. Each poets’ context impacts what themes they address, and how they address them.
Barn Owls representation of death is that it is ugly and twisted, unlike how the poem’s voice sees it originally, were they believed death clean.
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Generally speaking, mentality is is seen as the your mental capacity for intelligent or rational thought, however it can also mean how a particular person, people or peoples perceive their environment. Homecoming addresses the mentality of returning veterans from the Vietnam war, as they no longer fit in with society, because their thoughts and ideas are affected by what they have experienced in the war. This is a common issue of when soldiers return home, as post traumatic stress disorder s common among returning veterans. The context of the poem affects our interpretation of its ideals. When homecoming addresses experiences of returned veterans, it addresses PTSD, as the study of Psychology was developed enough to determine a cause for underlying stress in veterans, at the time of the poem being written. Another take on Mentality is I Remember Galileo, by Gerald Stern, which focuses heavily on thought process, and how the mind acts. I remember Galileo addresses how we see the mind. It compares Galileo’s idea that the mind is like a piece of paper, flowing freely, to the author’s idea that the mind is panicked and instinctive, and has to react rather than
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