The Poetry of Gwen Harwood

The prescribed selection of Gwen Harwood's poetry gathers poems including the two-part "Father and Child", "In the Park", "Suburban Sonnet", "At Mornington", "The Violets" and "Mother Who Gave Me Life". Written by one of Australia's major poets, the selection is set for the HSC English Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

The prescribed selection of Gwen Harwood's poetry ranges across her central concerns: memory, time, mortality, parenthood, the domestic life of women, and the consolations of art and love. The two-part "Father and Child" spans a lifetime, from a child shooting a barn owl at daybreak and being initiated at a stroke into what death actually is, to the grown daughter walking her ageing father through his last evening forty years later. "In the Park" holds a single sonnet's worth of domestic despair, a worn mother performing sweetness for a former lover and confessing the truth only once he has gone. "Suburban Sonnet" compresses a musician's thwarted day into fourteen lines, a fugue practised beside a boiling pot for no audience at all.

"At Mornington" is Harwood's most sustained meditation on mortality, carrying a child who believed she "could walk on water" forward to a graveside reconciliation with her own death, while "The Violets" answers time's damage by looking backward, a dusk picking of flowers reopening a childhood afternoon and the cry "Where's morning gone?". "Mother Who Gave Me Life" widens one death into the whole female line of "women bearing / women", and "The Sharpness of Death" argues with a personified, seducer Death directly. "Prize-Giving" completes the selection with the comic humbling of the vain Professor Eisenbart, undone at a school speech night by a titian-haired girl's Mozart. Across the selection, individual experience keeps opening onto collective experience without ever leaving the particular.

Memory, for Harwood, is not nostalgia but a method - the structure by which a life becomes legible. "The Violets" refuses to fix past or present as more real than the other, and turns the remembered dead into steady lamps: "Years cannot move / nor death's disorienting scale / distort those lamplit presences". "At Mornington" lets one image-field of light and water carry both a child's fearlessness and an adult's acceptance, earning its consolation among the graves.

Mortality arrives first as initiation. In "Barn Owl" the child who imagined herself "master of life and death" watches the grand idea of death collapse into "not this obscene / bundle of stuff that dropped", and ends "owl blind in early sun / for what I had begun", killer and killed fused in a single phrase. In "Nightfall" the roles reverse: father and daughter walk on together, the daughter's composure chosen, not felt.

The sonnet pair turns the form built for courtly love into a measure of women's erasure. In "In the Park" the performed sentiment "It's so sweet / to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive" is withheld from correction until the audience departs - "They have eaten me alive." released only to the wind. In "Suburban Sonnet" a former artistic life surfaces just long enough to be punctured - "Once she played / for Rubinstein, who yawned" - while "Zest and love / drain out with soapy water" across a line-break that performs the very drain it describes.

Parenthood is figured as inheritance of knowledge, and elegy as the folding-small of a life. "Mother Who Gave Me Life" measures a mother against Halley's Comet and loses her in a sister's report that "she was folding a little towel", a whole existence become "a fabric of marvels folded / down to a little space". And in "Prize-Giving", art does what argument cannot: the girl's Mozart unsettles Eisenbart's composure, leaving him "a sage fool trapped / by music in a copper net of hair".