Comparing The Loss Of Innocence In Homecoming And Barn Owl

Request to a year and Woman to child composed by Judith Wright, explores the intimate relationships that evolve around family, personal development, and childhood. Bruce Dawe’s Homecoming and Gwen Harwood’s Barn Owl both encapsulates the consequences and emotions that encompass the loss of innocence. Wright, Dawe and Harwood have used particular and concise textual features to express to the reader their individual ideas and relationships with their subjects and its symbolic links with their own life and personal experiences.

Request to a year and Woman to child both analyse the intimate relationships that develop and progress around childhood, family and personal growth. Similar to Request to a year, Wright adapts a similar “story-telling”

Both Dawe and Harwood have expressed personal opinion and experiences to force controversial and particular viewpoints towards the reader. The use of repetition and the inclusion of repetitious actions of anonymous figures are “All day, day after day, they’re bringing them home,” emphasising the loss of innocence due to the desensitizing actions conducted ‘day after day’. The repetition of ‘home’ and ‘them’, emphasise the emotional ties between the soldiers and their homeland, as well as exaggerate the separation between the deceased and the present personnel. A war’s enormity is demonstrated to the reader due to its repetitive nature. Similarly, Wright’s use of repetition and her particular emphasis on the use of ‘gun’s’, reflects how the story of a young child in Barn Owl develops from “innocent”, to “a horny fiend” and finally to an “afraid” figure. The particular sequence portrays Wright’s viewpoint of young child losing their personal innocence. As the father instructs the young, innocent child to ‘”end what you have begun”, this symbolises the authority and power the adult figure has, as well as the imperative and direct speech conveys wisdom and knowledge. Additionally, as the child “wept / Owl blind” symbolically conveys that the loss of innocence is a bitter and unpleasant experience. Metaphorically speaking, as the “spider grief swings in his bitter geometry”, this unveils the coldness and ‘bitterness’ of death and the spreading of grief throughout the communities involved. Similarly in Barn Owl, the young child is deemed and looked upon as the “master of life and death, / A wisp-haired judge,” metaphorically results in authoritative powers, and the eventual loss of the child’s