Understanding Place and Language in Olive Senior's "Gardening in the Tropics"
Understanding Place and Language in Olive Senior's "Gardening in the Tropics" "On a hilltop, at that, you find yourself drowning, a movement of ebbing and flowing. You recognize early (or too late) that you failed to detach From that mooring. Always, cruelty of choice. Here's the knife. Yourself: Executioner Midwife" - Olive Senior, "Leaving Home", Over the Roofs of the World Gardening in the Tropics exploded onto the literary scene from the pen of Jamaican novelist and poet Olive Senior in 1994. A collection of poems, paralleling the Tropical Garden and landscape with European tropes of an Edenic garden, Gardening in the Tropics covers a wide range of themes, inclusive of which are displacement, loss of personal, national and cultural identity, and a response to colonial and imperial oppression. Her exploration of these themes is however layered and multi-dimensional. In addition to being filled of threads of post-colonialism, her literature also surrounds a fixation on migration and the African diaspora- the historical movement of Africans and their descendants throughout the world. This is consequent of Senior's migration to Canada during the 1970's where much of her works were written. From this remote location, she was able to garner a different perspective on Caribbean life and society, and in essence reconcile a Caribbean past with a North American present
Journeying in Hardy's "At Castle Boterel"
After Emma's death Hardy embarked on a journey to some of their old haunts in Cornwall to rediscover their old love. Considering in detail one poem, discuss ways in which Hardy uses the symbol of journeying in his poetry. "At Castle Boterel", one of the greatest of Hardy's Poems of 1912-13, is an intensely personal poem, yet expresses universal truths on the subjects of loss, reclamation and time. An example of Hardy at his most emotionally evocative and philosophically profound, it chronicles his spiritual, intellectual and emotional journey following the death of his wife. The background to the composition of "At Castle Boterel" is that of a physical journey itself - Hardy's pilgrimage to Cornwall. In the poem this journey is juxtaposed with a past journey, separated by time but not space, taken in a parallel March many years before. The comparative weather conditions belie Hardy's nostalgia for the past: the bleakness of the present "drizzle" and "fading byway" draws a sharp contrast with the "dry March weather" of the former journey. The use of the vivid present in "We climb the road" emphasises the clarity of the memory, blurring, as in many of the Poems of 1912-13, the boundaries between past and present, memory and reality. Hardy's pilgrimage was not just a literal journey, for it was a quest to overcome the boundaries of Time and death through his poetry, an
