Compare And Contrast Federation And Freedom On The Wallaby

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"Freedom on the Wallaby" is a ballad written by Australian poet Henry Lawson in 1891 after the Australian Shearers’ Strike in 1891, while "Federation" is a poem written by Eileen, a woman in Australia in 1900 (a year before the Australian Federation), who published this poem in The Sydney Morning Herald. Both poems portray the beauty of freedom from a first-person perspective. Nonetheless, "Freedom on the Wallaby" is a ballad about fighting for freedom, whereas "Federation" is an ode about the freedom that will come. The two poems, "Federation" and "Freedom on the Wallaby", are structurally different. "Federation" uses an iambic pattern of rhythm, while "Freedom on the Wallaby" does not, as it attempts to break through from the traditional rhythmic patterns of poetry and fulfils its form of being rebellious and free. Nonetheless, both poems distribute lines according to stanzas, where “Federation” is distributed into 8 stanzas with each stanza consisting of 4 lines per stanza, while “Freedom on the Wallaby” is distributed into 5 stanzas consisting of 8 lines per stanza. Both poems also have certain rhyming schemes such as ABCB in “Federation” and ABCBDEFE for most stanzas in “Freedom on the Wallaby”, as they were written to effectively deliver the writers' …show more content…

"Freedom on the Wallaby" uses colloquialism, which is the use of informal language as seen in lines such as “An’ Freedom’s humping bluey” (line 2) to deliver a sense of Australian pride by using a typical Australian vernacular instead of formal British English. In opposition, "Federation" uses archaic vocabulary such as "thee" as "you" (line 5), "thy" as "your” (line 17), and "thine" as "our" (line 15) to relate to the delicate Shakespearean poems as a representation of highly educated literature. These poetic devices target the main audience and consistently deliver the writer’s idea throughout the

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